Hacker News Reader

Comment by jewbacca | Hacker News Reader

https://github.com/cn-nytimes/ and https://github.com/greatfire/ host information about and software for circumventing the Chinese government's internet censorship systems -- which, among many other things, blocks access to, eg, Google, and The New York Times.

Apparently they (the Chinese government) are not willing to entirely block Github traffic in the same way (presumably as an important tool for their software industry as well). This DDoS is an attempt to punish Github for not removing this block-circumventing information, and force the inaccessibility of those 2 repos specifically. It is being conducted in such a way that this is readily obvious but plausibly deniable.

View on HN

At the same time I think the censors do not have the political power to block github all together.

"GitHub is the preferred tool for programmers to learn and connect with the rest of the world," he said in his Chinese-language post. He added that the site supported no political ideology, nor contained any reactionary content. "Blocking GitHub is unjustifiable, and will only derail the nation's programmers from the world, while bringing about a loss in competitiveness and insight."

Lee's post was re-tweeted over 80,000 times on Sina Weibo, and featured in news articles on Wednesday. In another post, he later compared the blocking to trying to catch a mouse by burning the entire house down.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2493478/internet/github...

> information about and software for circumventing the Chinese government's internet censorship systems -- which, among many other things, blocks access to, eg, Google, and The New York Times.

The actual impact of the attack was to have thousands of news outlets and discussion forum sites mention and link to the github repos that offer circumvention.

Further, by attacking Github, it's guaranteed that many of the most tech-savvy Chinese internet users will have the existance of the forbidden repos launched into their consciousness.

Of course the Chinese government knows this and was likely not responsible for the attack.

The attack would not be possible to commit by the actual perpetrator if there weren't such a knee-jerk bias against the Chinese government's internet censorship.

Let it also be noted that the US Government censors lots of information too, both through so-called "official secrets" requiring security clearance granted by party members, and via laws that crack down on things deemed morally wrong, as well as illicit drugs.

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted; I think differing opinions are the heart of HN.

> so-called "official secrets" requiring security clearance granted by party members

It appears that you're not from the U.S. or another Western-aligned country, security clearances aren't granted to or by the dominant political parties, but are an artifact of government and military/defense industry bureaucracy.

> Of course the Chinese government knows this and was likely not responsible for the attack.

This is an example of the logical fallacy of "argumentum ad stultum", or "appeal to stupidty".

It goes like this:

- X would be stupid. - No one would ever do anything stupid. : Therefore no one would ever do X.

There are so many counter-examples to this argument that they hardly bear mentioning. People do stupid things every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Organizations multiply stupidity as often as they moderate it.

It may be that this wasn't the Chinese government, but pointing out that it would be stupid for them to do so is not an argument against it at all.

> People do stupid things every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

While you are correct in pointing out the logical fallacy, there have been several examples of highly likely false-flag cyber attacks lately. The Sony hack is another example, the result of which was the exact opposite of what the state actor alleged to have done the attack wanted.

"Cyber attacks" are a great platform for false flag attacks because it's easy to obtain servers or DDOS drones in any country.

I'd say a good indicator of strategy like this going on is when a defacing attack is accompanied by targeted data breach. Chances are the data breach was the goal, and the defacing the smoke screen.

Many HN readers could stage a cyber attack that would be initially linked to North Korea or China with a few hours of reading/research.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com