Anonymous Claims To Have Defaced Hundreds of Chinese Government Sites 72
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."
Must be true (Score:5, Funny)
Visiting them I get a bunch of square blocks and some funny looking drawings.
No big deal (Score:2)
Re:No big deal (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"Taiwan has already applied to the UN, n'est pas?"
Yes, it failed largely because the PRC used it's weight, threatening to use military weight to boot if political clout failed.
I suspect Taiwan and Hong Kong will be one of the first to separate, but not until China feels comfortable that the rest of the mainland is stable enough to allow it to happen without them to doing so in a chaotic manner, but not yet.
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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I doubt the Government would put any secret info on a website.
Given what the U.S. government has been doing lately about publicly exposing "secret" information, including granting web access to core intelligence servers, I would definitely mod you as Funny. That is, I would if I had mod points.
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This!
If you throw stones at a fortress, the fortress sends out its archers and fortifies its walls.
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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.
Re:why not the message in Chinese? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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They are also conditioned to not think about those kinds of things even if they know all about it. It's really quite uncanny. They understand that it's easier for them to not worry about stuff like that and that's what happens.
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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.
Your post doesn't say anything. What was she 'perplexed' about? Is this somehow meant to have a negative connotation? Why does this even matter..? ie Anedoctal evidence, gotta love it. But since i'm also chinese living in western country/society, and i was also born and raised there so i don't have the 'party line' education that she had, so i'll share some anecdotal evidence of my own..
What was the 'western portrayal' vs the 'chinese portrayal'(if it exists)? I doubt either of their 'portrayals' are the
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The Chinese are well aware of the event. They just happen to know the Party line on it, rather than what really happened. The Party makes sure the real goings-on remain suppressed while promoting their own version of events and the motivations of the protestors. This is why rational Chinese people come to the conclusions that it was a good thing the protestors (they are taught they were separatists and terrorists) were ruthlessly (and fatally) suppressed. I have heard such things from otherwise reasonable
Maybe they are trying to make up for it (Score:2)
Naw, they probably did it for the lulz.
Hundreds, you say? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Just the first one defaced? (Score:2)
The first one on the pastebin list definitely looks defaced. I tried random ones down the list, can't find any others that are hacked.
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Pretty interesting: Aside from a free mp3 hosted on a private site it comes with a tutorial for safe browsing recommending (HTTPSEverywhere, Tor) http://www.qnwqdj.gov.cn/tuto.htm [qnwqdj.gov.cn] .
Would be more effective if it was written in Chinese I guess.
And if they had actually hacked more than one site.
And if the protest came from inside China rather than outside.
Looks to me like a single, rather unsuccessful script kiddie with political interests rather than the "Anonymous hacking collective".
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Chinese people are plenty enlightened... The reason the communist party there has lasted so long despite having jumped the shark a long time ago is that they give the people what they want. Give economic freedom and most Chinese won't complain about the government. You want to see change? Find a way to cause the Chinese economy to implode. But that won't be very good for the rest of the world, so no sane government would try to cause that to happen.
Anyway as a few have noted, this will not be viewed the
Any Chinese on Slashdot? (Score:2)
Re:Any Chinese on Slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] or commiting widespread violent political persecution [wikipedia.org] especially given that over 100 million Chinese have been brought out of absolute poverty [chinadaily.com.cn].
But at some point, these relative enhancements in government performance may no longer seem enough.
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This is an old anecdote from the early 1980s so I don't know what it's like now, but I worked at Disney World then and had free reign over pretty much the whole place.
I was "backstage" as they call it, behind the China pavillion at Epcot and struck up a conversation with a fellow who had just arrived from China. He was excited about our country and its great leader, so I set him straight about that doddering old fool Reagan. The poor fellow got nervous, looking around as if the FBI was going to jump out and
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The majority of people I met/know don't even talk about censorship or lack of rights. However, that's not indicative of fear, but rather of the fact it's just not something most people talk about in the first place. I have met guys that left China for the very purpose of escaping the regime to go to a place with more human rights; they're the Slashdot crowd-typ
Now this would be news... (Score:2)
Did they do this... (Score:2)
m
anon china twitter (Score:1)
Punishment (Score:2)
Will any admins or the people who run those sites now be punished by the CN gov to show them as an example to others to keep security tight?
probably a nameserver hack (Score:3)
So they 'hacked' a DNS service and then claim to have defaced hundreds, if not thousands of websites. Big deal. Come back when you effectively disabled the Great Firewall.
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info about the hacked site (Score:1)
The song playing (for those who don't know) is Teenage Wasteland by the Who.
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You mean Baba O'Riley by the Who.
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The song's title isn't Teenage wasteland, it's Baba O'Riley, [wikipedia.org] although most people think Teenage Wasteland is the title.
Anonymous way off the mark on this one (Score:1)
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Anonymous look the imperialist assholes with this totally counterproductive stunt. They need to see how offensive they have been in their misguided "quest." to "free" the Chinese people. I'm so embarrassed this has been done.
Setting aside whether this was a great idea or not... I'm not entirely sure what the hell you're trying to say. Are you saying the Chinese are already free and therefore don't need to be "freed"? While I admittedly didn't bring up the "hacked" pages, what was so offensive about it?
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When you think you're doing something for somebody's own good without consulting them, you can essentially be seen as doing it in their name and/or infantilizing them. Not only did this potentially cause danger to many of China's citizens, as your motto says, but they likely didn't appreciate it in form at all. You don't see reports of similar incidents on the mainland done by nationals. Just totally counterproductive and it embarrassed me.
I see what you're saying and in general agree with the idea that such actions could be taken to infantilize those who are ostensibly being helped. I also agree that such actions on the part of Anonymous are rarely productive and at best fall in the category of "look at me!". That said, how would this cause danger to China's citizens? Unless you're referring to the possibility of a general reaction on the part of the government?
To what end exactly (Score:1)
Just consider how you would react if a group of Chinese "hacktavists" defaced a bunch of local sites in order to bring our attention to the issues in our system. What a wonderful benefit that would be right?
Wrong
This is doing exactly zero good as far as I can see, and probably is doing some damage to the very cause they appear to be championing.
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As I hope would I, but are you honestly saying that most people would as well? or would they take offense at being lectured too?
As much as we all want to believe we'd be ever so enlightened in viewing such an event with an honest introspection, it's human nature to take offense when someone outside the tribe bitchslaps you.
There's one surfire way to tell if this is legit.. (Score:2)
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How do you say "pool's closed" in Mandarin?
Yunowata
No good will come from this. (Score:2)
Blame the US (Score:3, Insightful)
noobs (Score:2)
Slashdot has slashdotted 1000's of web sites, anonymous needs to get cracking.
Wrong target (Score:2)
Losing face (Score:1)