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Cambridge Breached the Great Firewall of China
Darren Rayes writes to mention a ZDNet article on Cambridge academics' claims that they have breached the great firewall of China. They also claim that by misusing the firewall they can launch DDoS attacks against IP addresses behind the wall. From the article: "The IDS uses a stateless server, which examines each data packet both going in and out of the firewall individually, unrelated to any previous request. By forging the source address of a packet containing a 'sensitive' keyword, people could trigger the firewall to block access between source and destination addresses for up to an hour at a time."
With enough people working on it, we can temporarily block the entire country from the rest of the Internet. How's that for a fourth of July?
What about those inside China using those exploits for legitimate ends?
Is Cambridge indirectly helping the Chinese government to fix firewall issues?
Are Cambridge researchers after fame at the expense of the freedom of the Chinese people?
Weird, I didn't know there were many mongolians at cambridge...
Stateless != ruleless. For example, you could use OpenBSD's "pf" to create a stateless firewall that references an external rules file, then use a cron job to rewrite that rules file once an hour. That might be a pretty reasonable approach if you're filtering billions of packets per hour and can't afford to track state for each connection.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
DDoS is using multiple computers to "flood" a target off the Internet. This would be a plain DoS attack using a software weakness to deny service.
Chinese firewall is nothing - try getting through the Saudi firewall. As I understand it, the Chinese are at least a bit less modest about what is banned, so you should be able to at least get some legit porn sites through Chinese internet. However Saudi internet would block not just porn sites, but womens rights websites, womens magazines websites, even medical sites - anything that would display a photograph or illustration of a naked woman or man was stricly banned. Even it was just part of a human body, i.e. shoulders up.
It's not something that is trivial to fix. Others can do a better job of explaining why, but for now, suffice it to say that it'd require a significant effort on the part of the Chinese Gov't.
Maybe it can be fixed in The Great Firewall of China v2.0
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
http://www.google.cn/search?q=Falun
Falun Gong Is a Cult
www.china-embassy.org
Research Society of Falun Dafa and the Falun Gong organization under its control are held to be illegal
english.people.com.cn
Fifteen Falun Gong Cult followers attempted to sabotage cable TV network equipment
app1.chinadaily.com.cn
southcn:Falun Gong Cult OUTLAWED
www.newsgd.com
Here we should point out that the banning of "Falun Gong" by the Chinese government is also part of
www.chinaembassycanada.org
Falun Gong Practitioner Not Sorry for Killing Father, Wife
news.xinhuanet.com
Now compare all that to
http://www.google.com/search?q=Falun
Now, if the Chinese Gov't is making Google filter based on English keywords, you think they're not going to do the same with their uber-firewall?
Many Chinese schools teach english. It isn't like they only speak various Chinese dialects over there.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Their research is concerned with DRM ass hat tactics and such...pity!
Me too, it was an incredible symbol. The story of one of the photographers who captured that image is pretty amazing as well.
I'm a nature photographer.
Go ahead, mod me down.
Couldn't the Chinese government view this as an act of terrorism? In the interest of national security the Chinese government will start an ambiguous "War on Terror" after the the US "War on Terror" and "War on Drugs" which are _also_ unwinnable and declared solely to keep the ruling party in power via fear.