China's .cn Domain Servers Suffer DDoS Attack

jfruh writes "For years, DDoS attacks on various websites have been routinely launched by hackers within China. Now an attack of this sort has been launched against the foundations of the Chinese Internet — the domain servers for the country's top-level .cn domain. The attack raged over the weekend, disrupting and slowing access to .cn sites."

Comments

Fragmentation of the "old internet"

[DNS-and-BIND]

The internet as we know it today is clearly fragmenting. China's .cn domain is restricted and regulated up the wazoo. You have to have a legitimate registered company to get a .cn domain, and even after you do, you have to register with the government and display an ICP certificate on your front page. The government gives you an encrypted .cert file to place on your site which will be periodically verified by a web crawler bot (bazs.cert). Websites (even non .cn domains) without such authentication will eventually be blocked.

This clearly separates .cn from the rest of the internet. Moreover, most of China has no interest in the foreign-language internet, and most of the rest of the world has no interest in Chinese language content. So it makes sense that eventually the split will become official. Of course China will trumpet this as their own independent innovation (China strong!) and overthrowing the Western oppression capiDUHlism and whatever crap they need to spout to blame the foreigners and distract their population from the daily crimes of the CCP. You already can't go to an internet cafe without showing ID, and this has been used repeatedly along with CCTV footage to identify and imprison the foes of the Party.

I just can't wait for the TVs that watch you to become mandatory...for social stability, of course. Of course, it's hard to argue with the Party as China is a country where the smart people really are in charge. If any of you ever wondered what it would be like if democracy was repealed and scientists and engineers got to run things without interference from those smelly common people, look no farther than China.

Re:Fragmentation of the "old internet"

[Anonymous Coward]

The scientists and engineers are the third-generation leadership and are on the way out. Hu Jintao was the archetypical example. The fourth-generation leadership (the Xi Jinping crowd) is settling in. These are the "princelings"; privileged children of former party leaders. Take a guess at how well they're going to do.

The rapid economic growth that you saw under the second- and third-generation PRC leadership is going to come to a screeching halt, and nobody will want to admit it but the reason is that, to put it in Western terms, the new leaders are not Dilberts but instead are PHBs.

Re:Cyber soldiers cyber rattling their cyber saber

[shentino]

They should treat infected computers the same way they treat infected people.

With quarantines.

If you've got some sort of disease, the health police get to confine you. Even if it's not your fault you got sick, because the quarantine is to protect the public, which is why your freedom to go as you please is subordinate to the public's freedom not to catch your germs.

They should treat infected computers the same way. It doesn't matter if it's your fault it got infected or not. If your computer is putting the internet at risk, it should be quarantined. I don't care if the user of the computer is inconvenienced or if it's not his fault. He is harming the internet just the same.

If you defiantly refuse to care or fix it, you should be hit even harder, because at that point you're effectively aiding and abetting whatever criminal activity the hacker is using your computer for.

If I was an ISP and a customer failed to have their computer cleaned up after I warned them, I would terminate their access for abuse. Once they know and refuse to take care of it, they are complicit.