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Comment by wmt | Hacker News Reader

The technical analysis pinpointing the attack to the Chinese government was definitely not blurry. TTL based tracing is very deterministic and easy to understand, and finding the injection point to be at the same spot with the Great Firewall is pretty much the closest thing to a smoking gun with regards to Interner attacks.

Of course, while the smoking gun was found from Chinese Internet censorship offices and was covered with fingerprints of Chinese Internet censorship officials, it still might be not perpetrated by the Chinese Internet censorship officials. It is only very likely that they were behind the attack.

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The technical analysis pinpointing the attack to the Chinese government was definitely not blurry.

If anything the attack was pinpointed to Chinese infrastructure, not the Chinese government.

TTL based tracing is very deterministic and easy to understand

It's only deterministic if you trust all hops between yourself and the target, as any of them could fake the remaining route.

I don't know about you, but my 'traceroute baidu.com' passes through AT&T, an american company that is mentioned first in about every article and lawsuit about the NSA mass surveillance.

So if you're willing to buy into the theory of China performing this attack just for a demonstration of ability (because there's no other visible benefit), how can we know it isn't exactly the other way round?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(2...

[2] https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

Chinese infrastructure, not the Chinese government

There's no meaningful difference.

Governments can lose control of their infrastructure in the face of a well-equipped hacker.

Demonstration of ability is one way to put it. Limited weapons testing is another. You don't enter a fight with untested weapons.

Limited weapons testing

That's not a very convincing theory.

For a proof of concept they'd only have to mangle a handful of requests without anyone noticing. There's no need to attract everyone's attention and inform your potential opponents about your capabilities.

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