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Comment by maebert | Hacker News Reader

Here's how to make this news interesting to the mainstream:

"Chinese hackers cost US economy $100,000 / h"

Well, replace random accusations and numbers by facts of course, but that's a valid question: How many employees can currently not to any meaningful work because they don't have access to what they're supposed to work on? This times salaries spent on them anyway is a good lower bound for the damage done to the economy (actual damage should be higher since employees should of course add more value to the economy than their salary).

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Come Monday, here's what you'll get: "GitHub attack shows the dangers of relying on cloud." Or "Government software to protect children from Phil Robertson held hostage to attacks on a popular cloud service. This demonstrates the dangers of cloud. How can we be protected from the cyber criminals and pedophiles in their clouds? Here is are usual panel of people who didn't quite rate their own panel show. None of them know anything about computers, really and at least one uses their iPhone to prop up the short leg of their kitchen table. Panel, what do you think?"

"It's Obama's fault."

"It's the republicans."

"I make pee pee."

> Well, replace random accusations and numbers by facts of course

What mainstream news do you read?

New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, and many others.

I'm sick of this mentality that old-media news is all evil. Fox News and MSNBC are not the industry.

Disclaimer: I do not work in journalism.

They're not evil, well some of them are, but more like lazy when it comes to fact gathering/checking.

I can almost guarantee that most of those outlets have more stringent policies regarding fact-checking and quotation than the "average" internet source.

"Lazy" might not be the right word...all of the tech journalists I have personally interacted with seemed to be pretty good at their craft overall and actually cared about what they wrote. However, this doesn't change the fact that almost all media companies and their journalists are woefully inept at fact-checking or writing stories concerning information security, including DDoS attacks.

That's one specific (and extremely counter-intuitive and complicated) area where reporters probably have weak domain knowledge. It's somewhat unfair to extend that criticism to every other part of human existence that journalists report on.

What are your thoughts on Al Jazeera America? I've been liking them as my replacement lately, but there seems to be some hate floating around for their main(?) brand Al Jazeera

I don't follow Al Jazeera America personally (I think they are mostly focused on TV?) but I know there are a lot of parallels to RT.

It's not blind "hate" for Al Jeezera as much as concerns that the parent organization is owned by the rulers of Qatar.

I've heard that their reporting is fairly good, so long as you don't look to them as a source of truth about matters regarding Qatar.

Due to git's distributed nature, there should be very few people who are not able to work on their code.

Also, it's Sunday, so very few employees are expected to be working today.

> Due to git's distributed nature, there should be very few people who are not able to work on their code.

Oh the irony! Actually I bet many developers are sitting on their hands when they can't access github.

I don't want to dump on github. It has been a great driver of open-source software. But by making itself a single-point-of-... so much, it kind of defeats the purpose of git sometimes.

Ideally we'd be able to download not just the repo but all the meta-info; issues, comments, pull requests, etc.

That would be true if enterprises had their own local git repositories, and if employees pushed against those local git repositories. But this is not what happens, when enterprises use github, employees directly push to github.

Continuous integration tools directly pull from github.

When github is down, all exchange of patches between employes essentially halts, as does continuous integration and testing.

Of course, this is not the fault of git.

This is the fault of people keeping using centralized servers, instead of setting up and using their own local servers.

The same goes for email (gmail anybody? Really???)

The Internet is meant to be a decentralized, peer-to-peer, meshed network. Not a centralized, star network!!!

You can just pull from someone's local copy, a git checkout is just like a remote (bare) repository that happens to have a tree.

If you're an enterprise you're using github's on-premise appliance and aren't affected at all.

In a pinch, you can always pull from a coworker's local repository.

I do all my work via Github and honestly haven't noticed a single burp in the service. Is anyone other than Github employees who have to deal with this even affected?

I had issues pushing with an application key that was not being recognized.

Now I don't know if this was directly related, but the timing raises an eyebrow.

Github pages is pretty sluggish right now. Github's actual Web interface is much slower than, say, pushing and pulling.

I've had troubles with the web interface and with pushing/pulling on and off since Friday

I pushed around 5-6 times and it failed only once.

I could not work for a few hours yesterday. push/pull/rebase was not working for me.

Yes.

I agree that monetary loss is a big motivator, however I am still curious (US citizen) as to the political implications of doing nothing as a nation when companies are quite obviously being attack by foreign governments. Normally these kind of attacks are much less obviously perpetrated by nation-states.

quite obviously being attack by foreign governments

Nothing is "obvious".

For all we know this could be a bored teenager sitting in his basement in New York, Paris, Tokyo or Moscow.

It could also be a false flag operation by the NSA, to massage the western adolescent nerd's mindset into quietly accepting their next round of mass surveillance ("Must protect from the evil chinese!").

The Chinese openly attacking GitHub is the least plausible scenario, unless you think they are stupid.

http://insight-labs.org/?p=1682

Sorry but how would a bored teenager somewhere have control over injecting attacks in traffic passing through the "Great Firewall of China". This really doesn't seem like a typical attack to me but you are right in that I should not be claiming this an obvious attack by a nation-state without the facts.

how would a bored teenager somewhere have control over injecting attacks in traffic passing through the "Great Firewall of China

The same way a 15yr old once took out Yahoo, CNN, eBay, Dell and Amazon: Dedication.

Perhaps it's even a Chinese activist, looking to draw attention to the firewall or to spark a little diplomatic quarrel with the US?

At least they are keeping the attack going...

At least as guilty, imho.

How do you know what "they" do or not do?

And who is "they"? Baidu? The Chinese Government? The great firewall administrator himself?

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