China's .cn Domain Servers Suffer DDoS Attack
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jfruh writes "For years, DDoS attacks on various websites have been routinely launched by hackers within China. Now an attack of this sort has been launched against the foundations of the Chinese Internet — the domain servers for the country's top-level .cn domain. The attack raged over the weekend, disrupting and slowing access to .cn sites."
"Hit me and I hit you" (Score:1, Interesting)
Fragmentation of the "old internet" (Score:5, Interesting)
The internet as we know it today is clearly fragmenting. China's .cn domain is restricted and regulated up the wazoo. You have to have a legitimate registered company to get a .cn domain, and even after you do, you have to register with the government and display an ICP certificate [accesstochina.com] on your front page. The government gives you an encrypted .cert file to place on your site which will be periodically verified by a web crawler bot (bazs.cert). Websites (even non .cn domains) without such authentication will eventually be blocked.
This clearly separates .cn from the rest of the internet. Moreover, most of China has no interest in the foreign-language internet, and most of the rest of the world has no interest in Chinese language content. So it makes sense that eventually the split will become official. Of course China will trumpet this as their own independent innovation (China strong!) and overthrowing the Western oppression capiDUHlism and whatever crap they need to spout to blame the foreigners and distract their population from the daily crimes of the CCP. You already can't go to an internet cafe without showing ID, and this has been used repeatedly along with CCTV footage to identify and imprison the foes of the Party.
I just can't wait for the TVs that watch you to become mandatory...for social stability, of course. Of course, it's hard to argue with the Party as China is a country where the smart people really are in charge. If any of you ever wondered what it would be like if democracy was repealed and scientists and engineers got to run things without interference from those smelly common people, look no farther than China.
Re:Fragmentation of the "old internet" (Score:5, Interesting)
The scientists and engineers are the third-generation leadership and are on the way out. Hu Jintao was the archetypical example. The fourth-generation leadership (the Xi Jinping crowd) is settling in. These are the "princelings"; privileged children of former party leaders. Take a guess at how well they're going to do.
The rapid economic growth that you saw under the second- and third-generation PRC leadership is going to come to a screeching halt, and nobody will want to admit it but the reason is that, to put it in Western terms, the new leaders are not Dilberts but instead are PHBs.
Re:hey (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone knowing even a little about, say, DNS, BIND, networks, and specifically DOS attacks knows that you absolutely do not need high bandwidth connectivity to orchestrate an devastating DOS attack. So either you are ignorant, or being deliberately misleading. Second - Guardian "a site well-known for its anti-US bias" - that is the extent of your fact finding truth exposing debating prowess, the equivalent of "...Snowden leaks lalalala head in the sand, all disclosures ANTI-US lalalala...". Not much to I can say to that overwhelming logic DNS-and.BIND (461968)...
Well, other than this [youtube.com], perhaps. Cold Fjord - is that you?
Re:Fragmentation of the "old internet" (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure what chops the current leadership has, but China's real problem is loose monetary policies and a tendency to lie to themselves using official statistics. During the West's economic meltdown, they became concerned the Chinese people would go all Falun Gong on their collective Party asses if their economy slowed significantly. And it would have had to because the West was not buying nearly as much Chineseware. So they opened the spigots from their central bank. However, they didn't count bank loans made off the books more or less in the shadow economy. These loans kept large enterprises in the money, including those dinosaurs, the State companies.
Bad things happen when you mis-allocate investment (see U.S. economy and the housing boom). And China has been mis-allocating in very large way for a number of years. They cannot slow it very well because their Falun Gong Ass problem and the fact they do not really control their banking sector with the off-the-books loans.
They could try increasing consumption and have been making an effort in this area. But to do that effectively, you have to give people a reason to buy now rather than saving for later. Cheap money would do that, but they are bursting at the seams with cheap money and it hasn't really increased consumption that much.
They have another problem, they've spent a lot of time and money on creating an educated workforce. They still have a lot of un-educated workforce but they simply have too many people. The educated workforce is having trouble finding educated jobs and hence could contribute to the Falun Gong Ass problem. The new young people have high expectations.
To make matters worse, Chinese companies believe in getting ahead at any price, and that price includes the Environment. Now they are poisoning the land. Pollution is a real drag on the economy because to fix it you must re-allocated money from other investments without any immediate return on investment. And you must knacker the state-owned enterprises which pollute in a state-sized way. To not fix it means you are poisoning your own people and that has deleterious effects on productivity.