Weibo Traffic Temporarily Redirected To Freedom Software

jjp9999 writes "Weibo, China's replacement for Twitter and Facebook, went offline for about two hours on Jan. 20, when a DNS attack switched its IP address to overseas VPN software used to circumvent censorship. On Jan. 21, the brief IP switch was the most discussed topic on Weibo, with one user, ITHome, saying posting 'What IP is 65.49.2.178? It's sure to go down in history.' The IP address is one of those used by Freegate, which is free software released by Chinese dissidents in the U.S. intended to help Chinese people break through the Great Firewall. However, Bill Xia, president of Dynamic Internet Technology, which makes Freegate, said he and his team of volunteers thought their networks were under attack when they got a surge of traffic with about 100,000 users a second hitting their IP address. Xia said they are still trying to analyze the incident, but he assumes it was a slip-up [on the part of] the Chinese authorities in charge of censoring content. 'Our guess is they messed up again,' he said. 'This doesn't make sense for them, so I assume it was a mistake in their operation.'"

Comments

An "accident"?

[ElectricTurtle]

Exactly who would fall of the turnip truck and believe that one of the most popular web services in China would be rerouted to another service whose main purpose is to undermine censorship by accident? I'll believe that Freedom Software wasn't complicit, it was probably some lone wolf, but to think this wasn't a deliberate hack is naive beyond words.

Re:An "accident"?

[Sockatume]

I would imagine that their most popular social network and a high-profile freedom-enabling tool are part of a high-priority subset of the internet filtering operation's targets. They would be configured by a more trusted group than the rest of the rest of the sites they control. Having them in the same subset would make it all the more likely that a DNS configuration mistake would involve both.

It does seem more likely that it's deliberate, though.

Re:define "weibo"

[plasticsquirrel]

To be fair, it's probably one of the most popular sites on the Internet (100 million messages each day). Some of these sites are good to know about -- like Baidu, QQ, Taobao, Sina Weibo, Weixin, etc. While you and your friends may not use them, they practically define the Internet for hundreds of millions of people. In China, people don't commonly use eBay, Facebook, or Twitter, and they also rarely use email (even elderly people would typically use QQ instead).