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China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites

Posted by timothy on from the state-is-still-not-your-friend dept.

frogger writes "China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently, however, several reports came in from China indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu."

18 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. So, what have they found? by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Informative

    This seems to be SOP whenever the Chinese authorities find content they like accessable by a search engine, just redirect the entire search engine to Baidu until the site owners comply.

    1. Re:So, what have they found? by compro01 · · Score: 3, Informative

      A little of each. Baidu is a publicly traded corp on NASDAQ and it also operates in Japan, though this is definitely a case of government connections.

      --
      upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
    2. Re:So, what have they found? by pha3r0 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I disagree AC. I have just recently established my own small business. $25 and a one page form filed with the Secretary of State and I am doing business. Now should I want to take it further and go LLC or incorporate or what have you there will be many thousands spent on lawyers, taxes, bribes etc. But, I have a small business and the only government connect I have is to my P.O.( think Probation not Post)

    3. Re:So, what have they found? by Apple+Acolyte · · Score: 4, Informative

      Now should I want to take it further and go LLC or incorporate or what have you there will be many thousands spent on lawyers, taxes, bribes etc.

      You really think an LLC or corporation requires thousands in fees, taxes and bribes? Have you ever heard of legalzoom.com or bizfilings.com? They'll get either one of those business entities established for you for under $500. No lawyers need be involved. Now, if you're in a state that punishes small businesses like California you pay a huge $800 per year fee for your corporation or LLC regardless of whether you make a single cent or not, but in most states there are no such mandatory fees.

      --
      Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
    4. Re:So, what have they found? by iNaya · · Score: 5, Informative

      How long did you go for? 2 weeks? A month? You can't see a country in just that time.

      You will have to support your claims for it being communist... Because I've never seen anything to support that. Corruption in China, though not good, is much better than a lot of other countries, including India, and great pains are being made to reduce it.

      I never said that corruption was a capitalist thing - it's not a communist thing either. In fact, I don't know of any political ideology that supports corruption.

      The capitalist sentiment in China is very strong, especially in places like Shanghai. In Beijing, although the Mao Zedong 'religion' is thriving, things are not much different. The rich drive around in their BMW's while the poor try to carve out their lives in the slums, which were conveniently fenced off for the Olympics.

      I haven't met many people in China who were dumb enough to believe that it is anything other than Capitalist, not in the cities anyway. It is usually just uninformed foreigners who would deign to believe anything other than the blatantly obvious truth - which China goes through no lengths to hide.

      A lot of people in China still believe it is Communist, but that is mainly because they don't know what Communism is. They haven't read Karl Marx, or any other important Communist literature, and I wouldn't believe you have either.

      Communism requires Socialism. Almost none of that is present in China. Free education? Ha! For a poor person, they can never expect to get into a good school, unless they are absolutely BRILLIANT at their studies, while the rich mofos just pay a bit of cash, and so the best schools are filled with stupid, ignorant, rich kids. University is no better, except, the truly rich parents usually send their kids to study overseas, where results vary.

      No - China is a place for the rich, even more so than the US of A. True Communism has no place for the rich, but China does.

      One major tell-tale sign of the inherent capitalism is the fact that most Chinese students studying overseas are studying business. If you have access to a nearby University, a quick survey will show you what the majority of them study. At my University (Victoria University), there were hundreds of Chinese studying Bachelors of Commerce, while there were barely any studying anything else, a few, but not many. Why? Because their parents know, that to succeed in China, one has to do business.

      --
      The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
  2. Re:Censorship? by corsec67 · · Score: 4, Informative

    How about when a Judge in KY orders the domain names of companies to be transferred to the State of Kentucky. I don't mean just redirection the DNS lookup, but changing the ownership?

    http://techdirt.com/articles/20081020/0058002578.shtml

    Or when a judge in CA blocked wikileaks?

    http://techdirt.com/articles/20080218/115934282.shtml

    --
    If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
  3. Re:Hijacked? by lysergic.acid · · Score: 5, Informative

    in a word, no. they're committing DNS hijacking on file sharing sites. instead of domain names resolving to the correct IP address, the DNS resolution is being hijacked to send users to a different host to whom the requested domain does not belong. that's why the articles call it "hijacking."

  4. Has never worked for me.. by SpineZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm pretty sure that I've never been able to access piratebay from China. Even now, I don't even get redirected to Baidu. Nothing comes up in the browser at all. The "to"s below are timeouts *s that slashdot said I had too many junk characters ;)

    tracert -d thepiratebay.org

    Tracing route to thepiratebay.org [83.140.65.11]
    over a maximum of 30 hops:

        1 2 ms 1 ms 3 ms 192.168.1.1
        2 to to to Request timed out.
        3 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 221.224.243.169
        4 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 222.92.175.74
        5 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 202.97.27.110
        6 7 ms 6 ms 6 ms 202.97.39.165
        7 9 ms 9 ms 14 ms 202.97.44.58
        8 to to to Request timed out.
        9 to to to Request timed out.
      10 to to to Request timed out.
      11 to ^C

    1. Re:Has never worked for me.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      minor aside, some networks will block UDP/ICMP tracert, you can use hping instead, to trace via TCP (say, port 80)

  5. Re:Censorship? by MacDork · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't remember any recent file sharing cases ending in jail time.

    Wow... really? Let me refresh your memory.

  6. similar was happening in 2007 by itsthebin · · Score: 2, Informative

    I was in China for a while in 2007 and while I could search TPB I could not download the .torrent as it would just time out - similar to normal golden shield blocking

    this was simply solved by putting the D/L url into my overseas proxy and from there the torrent client worked normally.

    --
    ...I obey the laws of physics....
  7. Re:This is all Barack Obama's doin'! by ScrewMaster · · Score: 3, Informative

    I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but anyway...

    Surely even the most dim-witted super-conservative would realise that even under Obama, USA is still the most conservative nation outside of the middle east and Austria. Therefore, calling Obama socialist (as a pejorative) is calling the rest of the world socialists (or worse). Given the vast number of western countries that are "socialist" and have been for some time, (and are still going strong sans economic crisis) the next logical conclusion is "Well, maybe "socialism" works?" (not that what Obama is advocating is actual socialism by any accepted definition of the word).

    Sorry for the offtopic.

    No, the real question is this: what does one mean by "works"? Europe's brand of socialism wouldn't work for the U.S. for a variety of reasons, and our style of capitalism would probably be a disaster over there. There is one thing that a "working" socialism generally requires: an effective and trustworthy bureaucracy (Germany is a good example of this, I think.) The U.S. has an ever-expanding, ever more powerful bureacracy that has its own agenda, which coincides less and less with the needs of the people.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  8. Re:Censorship? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Well not if you don't live in the U.S.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hew_Raymond_Griffiths

  9. Re:Censorship? by TubeSteak · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since when has the U.S. directed thepiratebay.org (or suprnova, or mininova, or demonoid, etc.) to google.com?

    Last I checked, they hijack the DNS and redirect to a Dept of Justice page or FBI warning.

    remember isonews? elitetorrents? etc..

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
  10. Bad Article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    In Beijing right now
    The pirate bay hasn't worked from here for at least a year. Mininova and ISO hunt are still accessable. This would be roughly the tenth bogus article about China in the past few months. Why does slashdot bother posting rubish without checking their facts?

    Flame bait
    I am happy to see that the sheer number of bogus articles posted weekly about China has declined post olympics, Shock Horror!

  11. Re:Censorship? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    What about when Wikileaks was black holed because they hosted the Palin email leak?

    Isn't that the single biggest example of censorship in the US internet history?

    Is the US government supposed to black hole websites instead of using the court system?

  12. Re:Censorship? by corsec67 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Except OpenDNS does the exact same thing, to their own "whoops" page.

    --
    If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
  13. Science? by MasaMuneCyrus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Perhaps no Chinese study science in Canada (or wherever Victoria University is), but at Purdue (Indiana, USA), you'd have to be blind to miss the Chinese studying in all fields of science. There's nearly as many Chinese students as there are black students, and lots of Chinese professors, too.