China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites

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."

Comments

So, what have they found?

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:So, what have they found?

[c_forq]

Let me rephrase: Is the government connection overt or covert? I have spent time in communist companies, with ventures owned 51% by the government, and I am wondering if this is one of those, a bit shady, or just a local company that the government would like to encourage growth of (similar to how in France, while on business trips, you assume you are being bugged and information will go to your local competition).

Re:So, what have they found?

[iNaya]

Hahahahahahaha

China is communist in nothing but name. You really need to go there and check it out. China is a place for the rich, and the business men. The peasants have barely any rights at all, although this is changing, albiet, slowly.

You can see, from one of China's own newspapers, that social welfare only meets 5% of demand. And even that is probably pushing it.

Re:So, what have they found?

[pha3r0]

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)

Re:So, what have they found?

[Apple Acolyte]

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.

Re:So, what have they found?

[iNaya]

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.

Re:So, what have they found?

[meringuoid]

France? Don't you mean the United States? Or is it that the US prefers surveillance of electronic communications rather than hardware bugs?

It's much easier that way. Certainly the NSA has been known to monitor communications between Airbus and its customers in order to give Boeing a competitive advantage; a $6bn contract with the Saudis was lost when American spies found out about some backhanders Airbus had been paying to officials there. They've also been known to forward technical details of European inventions to American firms in order to get the patent first. There's quite a history of Americans using state spying agencies for industrial espionage, and so it's natural that they assume that everybody else is doing the same to them.

Hijacked?

[toxygen01]

Doesn't word hijack imply something else? More like hacked, took over, infiltrated? But use word like hijack for redirect is pretty ridiculous.

Re:Hijacked?

[lysergic.acid]

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."

Re:Censorship?

[corsec67]

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

Has never worked for me..

[SpineZ]

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

Re:Funny....

[Duncan Blackthorne]

What would be really funny would be if some guys in China tried to do a DoS attack to TPB... and it would DoS the government's (in essence) servers.

Yeah, that would be really funny, how the Chinese government would come in the middle of the night, take them, their family, and likely anyone else that knew or cared about them, and drop them in a hole somewhere, never to be heard from again. Yeah, that's fucking hilarious.