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Anonymous Claims To Have Defaced Hundreds of Chinese Government Sites
Hkibtimes writes, quoting the International Business Times: "The Anonymous hacking collective has landed in China, home of some of the most tightly controlled Internet access in the world, and defaced hundreds of government websites in what appears to be a massive online operation against Beijing. Anonymous listed its intended institutional targets on Pastebin and has now attacked them."
Visiting them I get a bunch of square blocks and some funny looking drawings.
I have also "defaced" many sites on my own. I very recently defaced Slashdot itself, with a silly message mocking a group of hacktivists for contributing approximately nothing to the world but headlines.
My message is subtle enough that it will likely remain on the site for the remainder of its existence. Anonymous can't say the same for their messages.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It does upset the "benevolent dictatorship" propaganda the Chinese government has been putting about though, not for nothing did they start promising new freedoms immediately when they heard about the events of the Arab spring. It also occurs to me that the Anonymous group is a perfect cover for intelligence agencies to run wild on the internet.
No, but imagine putting up "banned information" on those websites - the great firewall doesn't work when the information is posted online on the allowed website. And it's not something they can block, because they'd be blocking a legitimate website. (What's the government going to do - take down their own web site?).
Post said information on several other sites like the government-controlled media sites and you'd get pretty wide coverage...
few Chinese citizen ....and most will buy into government propaganda of the west attacking the China
You give the Chinese people way too little credit. Remmber Tiananmen Square? The Chinese do.
And as far as others saying stuff about a type of Chinese Spring - it won't happen until their economy starts to slow down. As long as the Chinese workers can make their comparable better (much better than in rural China) living with their booming economy, their happy. But wait until things start slowing down. Then you'll see the protests and tanks rolling.
They blew an opportunity to enlighten the people of China about freedom, democracy, and how the current government can foster this change through internal reforms without a confrontational tone. The process is more slow, and there's already progress being made with each change of leadership. I'm afraid all this will do is cause a reactionary clamp-down on even more freedoms.
Or to put it anther way. These people do not have guns! They cannot fight a revolution. It's folly to think they can. In fact if I recall, the PLA station soldiers far away from where the live. This way it makes it much easier to follow order and shoot their own civilians without hesitation.
Life is not for the lazy.
You give the Chinese people way too little credit. Remmber Tiananmen Square? The Chinese do.
Yeah but most of them "remember" only what the party line was. I dated a gal from China a few years back who was a quite intelligent and reasonable individual living in the west, and she was quite perplexed by the western "portrayal" of that incident. ...remember that they aren't seeing what you and I are seeing, even when it's inside their own country.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.--Mark Twain
As in, if they don't like their government, or if they are okay with it.
I suspect Chinese feel their government is much better now that it isn't starving tens of millions of people to death or commiting widespread violent political persecution especially given that over 100 million Chinese have been brought out of absolute poverty.
But at some point, these relative enhancements in government performance may no longer seem enough.
Seems like China would just blame the US government... the same way that if we see any attacks from China, we blame the Chinese government.
To be fair, you have to look at why the Chinese governments acts the way it does nowadays.
Many of those who comprise China's top leadership do actually support greater freedoms nowadays, but they're a bit more pragmatic than many would like them to be.
The fundamental problem with China is that you have a population of 1.3 billion with gross income disparity, countless opposing religious and cultural backgrounds and differing levels of attachment to the Chinese leadership.
There's this rather naive view in the west that if China just dropped it filters, and allowed free elections, a completely free press and so forth tommorrow that suddenly everything would be okay and China would become a vast bastion of freedom and democracy with modern standards of living that envy rich western nations. In reality though it's not that simple.
The problem is that if China stops controlling information and limiting the freedoms of dissidents then there would indeed be an arab spring like event, but we're not talking about Libya here with it's mere 6 million people, we're again talking about a place with 1.3 billion people. If the government loses it's stranglehold you suddenly have uighur rebellions, you have tibetan rebellions, you have the poor rising up against those who have done well from China's economic growth, you have the Taiwanese separating, Hong-Kong separating, and you have those loyal to the government fighting back against all of them. You lose what little remaining control there is of a nuclear armed North Korea, and Russia, Japan, and all of the other neighbours are given a chance to seize territory which they dispute with China. In other words you have massive regional chaos that has the potential to spill over globally.
If you actually go and visit China, those areas that have really benefited from the boom aren't actually terribly different to many western cities. Effectively the restrictions in China are aimed and prevalent mostly in areas that are poorer and particularly want to split away. You can argue that splitting away is a fair goal, and I'd agree, but if you let say, Tibet go, then other parts are bound to be emboldened by this and follow, and again you're in a position where there's a massive risk of destabilisation through separation running away with itself.
It's pretty clear that whilst the Chinese government wants to change things that to do so over night would almost certainly be much more problematic for the region and possibly the world as a whole. The Chinese government's tactic seems to be to try and spread the benefits of growth as wide and fast as they reasonably can because when a population has nice things it's far less likely to be interested in violent disruption.
China is changing, but it needs to be left to do so at it's own pace, they didn't just start promising freedoms as a result of the arab spring they were doing it before that.
The fundamental challenge China has is in providing freedoms to those Chinese now rich and educated enough to demand and fight for them, against offering too many freedoms such that those who are poor and angry cannot use them as an opportunity to try and gain their freedom violently in a manner that would cause massive scale civil war. I don't envy this pretty high stakes balancing act the Chinese government is being forced to undergo, so whilst it may appear shitty for many Chinese compared to our standards in the West I do actually think modern Chinese leadership is genuinely trying to make the best of a pretty poor situation that they've inherited.
It's worth Googling and reading about some of China's current, and future leaders (they're having a leadership change soon). Many of them are actually quite genuine about reform and do have that as the centrepiece of their policy.