Battle for the Internet

Re:Battle for the Internet by JohnTHaller on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @10:18AM (#14752683)

There's the fact that anything hosted within China can be altered by the great firewall of China for nefarious purposes by the Chinese government. Like when the Chinese government used the great firewall to slip malware into the Baidu analytics javascript for every visitor outside of China to every website that used Baidu whether located inside or outside of China to stage a DDoS attack on github. All because github dared to host open source projects that let mainland Chinese read the New York Times uncensored. Given documented activities like this, is it possible to trust anything that passes through the great firewall of China?

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Re:Battle for the Internet by dis-sys on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @12:04PM (#14753661)

"is it possible to trust anything that passes through the great firewall of China?"?

You do realize that your comments above just past through GFW and I am reading it on the other side of the GFW? To answer your question, no, I don't trust what you said.

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Re:Battle for the Internet by JohnTHaller on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @12:16PM (#14753771)

You don't have to 'trust' my comment. China using the great firewall to infect Baidu javascript to attack github is a well-documented fact. You can even view the infected Baidu javascript designed to attack GreatFire and cn-nytimes projects on github archived on github itself here: https://github.com/BenMQ/cbjs-baidu-github-attack

Happily the Chinese government let the Baidu javascript work as intended for Chinese users, it was only for international users that they converted it into malware. Bottom line, don't load any javascript file hosted in mainland China.

If the the US government forced all traffic through a single firewall and used said firewall to infect Google Analytics javascript files on third party websites to force international users to unwittingly engage in a DDoS against a Chinese site that was hosting open source code designed to allow US citizens to get around the 'great US firewall', I'd be advising folks against trusting Google Analytics and US-hosted javascript the way I advise them against trusting Baidu analytics and China-hosted javascript now.

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