Our Plan for Conquering Censorship
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Our Plan for Conquering Censorship - Video
Episode 12 : Batgirl Variant Cover and Censorship
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Episode 12 : Batgirl Variant Cover and Censorship - Video
I hope we put ourselves out of business, said Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous head of Great Fire. And he was serious. After all this Chinese Internet monitoring watchdog GreatFire.org is no ordinary case.
Started in 2011 by three anonymous individuals tired of Chinas approach to the internet,itinitiallytracked the effects of the countryscensorship system on websites. Over time, ithas risen to become perhaps the most trusted authority on the subject.
The Great Fire site itself is censorshipdatabase. Visitorsto input a URLto determine if the website isblocked inChina. It is available in English and Chinese, and periodically tests its collectionof over 100,000 URLs to produce a history of the availability/restriction for each one. A hugely useful resource in its own right, GreatFire has come to mean a lot more than just checks. These days, thethree founders document new instances of internet restrictions and foul play in China viathe organizations blog and @greatfirechina Twitter account.
Great Fire regularlyreferenced byReuters, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and other global media including TechCrunch, of course. Stories it has dug up have included apparent attacks on Apples iCloud service, the blocking of Instagram and messaging apps, restrictionson Google services(of course) and most recentlydetails of a man-in-the-middle attack on Microsoft Outlook users in China.
Thats made the site and its founders a go-to resource for media, activists andanyone with an interest in the internet in China.
In terms ofblogging, weve amazed ourselves, said Smith. Smith highlighted the recent Microsoft attack and the role that Great Fire played publicizing it.
The story began like many others with a post on the Great Fire blog. That was picked up by media which gave the finding aglobal platform and attention.Microsoft entered the scene when itconfirmed that a small number of customers [were] impacted by malicious routing to a server impersonating Outlook.com and suddenly what was initially a small discovery had become a topic in media across the world, China included.
It got me thinking, if wewerent around who wouldve exposed that? Its a serious thing, Smith said.
Great Fire is an invaluable resource for Asia-based tech reporters, but blogging and retroactively documented censorship isnt going to down theGreat Firewall, as Chinas internet censorship organ is known. For that, Smith and his fellow vigilantes have a more sophisticated plan of action that they call Collateral Freedom. Its a concept that leverages cloud-based content networks to give blocked websites and services a new, unblocked lease of life in China.
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These Activists Are Plotting To End Internet Censorship In China
Home News Security China anti-censorship projects attract GitHub's largest ever DDoS attacks GitHub has halted most of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks it has faced from Thursday of last week.
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A GitHub service called Gists, which lets people post bits of code, was still affected,the site said yesterday (Sunday 29 March). On Twitter, GitHub said it continued to adapt its defenses.
The attacks appeared to focus specifically on two projects hosted on GitHub, according to a blogger who goes by the nickname of Anthr@Xon a Chinese- and English-language computer security forum.
One project mirrors the content of The New York Times for Chinese users, and the other is run by Greatfire.org, a group that monitors websites censored by the Chinese government and develops ways for Chinese users to access banned services.
China exerts strict control over Internet access through its "Great Firewall," a sophisticated ring of networking equipment and filtering software. The country blocks thousands of websites, including ones such as Facebook and Twitter and media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Bloomberg.
Anthr@X wrote that it appeared advertising and tracking code used by many Chinese websites appeared to have been modified in order to attack the GitHub pages of the two software projects.
The tracking code was written by Baidu, but it did not appear the search engine -- the largest in China -- had anything to do with it. Instead, Anthr@X wrote that some device on the border of China's inner network was hijacking HTTP connections to websites within the country.
The Baidu tracking code had been replaced with malicious JavaScript that would load the two GitHub pages every two seconds. In essence, it means the attackers had roped in regular Internet users into their attacks without them knowing.
"In other words, even people outside China are being weaponised to target things the Chinese government does not like, for example, freedom of speech," Anthr@X wrote.
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China anti-censorship projects attract GitHub's largest ever DDoS attacks
Github, a popular site where coders store and collaborate on software projects, was hit on Thursday and again on Sunday with cyberattacks that researchers believe originated from China.
Two GitHub pages were flooded with an onslaught of Internet traffic, bringing the entire site to its knees as GitHubs servers buckled under the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Security experts say the attack is an attempt by China to cripple anti-censorship tools.
The attack began when an individual or group hacked software used by Baidu, Chinas largest search engine. The attackers altered the software Baidu uses to serve ads on Chinese websites, causing Baidu users computers to automatically and repeatedly connect to other sites. The attack was invisible, so Baidu users didnt know that their browsers were hammering away at other servers.
That flood of traffic was directed toward two anti-censorship tools hosted on GitHub. One is a piece of software developed by GreatFire, a non-profit group that monitors censorship in China. The Chinese government harshly restricts what websites its people may visit, and has repeatedly censored products from Google and other Western companies in recent years. The other tool under attack allows Chinese users to access a translated version of The New York Times, which is blocked in China. It isnt known who is behind the software that copies the Timess content.
GreatFires own site was subjected to a similar DDoS attack earlier in March. The traffic that flooded GitHubs servers originated from browsers outside China that used Baidus advertising software, suggesting China itself is to blame. Its unclear who exactly was behind the attack, but security researcher James A. Lewis told The Washington Post that the most likely candidate is the Chinese government itself. The attack could be a way for the government to make a show of force, or to target specific tools it dislikes.
The Chinese government briefly censored the entire GitHub site back in 2013, but reversed its decision after software developers complained that this made it too difficult for them to do their jobs. GitHub is widely used by individual programmers and software companies alike to collaborate on projects, and is all but indispensable to the technology industry. Because the site is encrypted, governments cant block access to some parts of GitHub while leaving others accessible.
The DDoS attack didnt disrupt service to Baidu itself, and the company denied that its own servers had been hacked. GitHub said in a blog post on Friday that the attack the largest in the sites history was probably meant to convince us to remove a specific class of content. As of Monday, GitHub was back up and running, and the project that allows Chinese users to access the Times was reachable.
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Why experts think China launched the cyberattacks against GitHub