This doesn’t work. The DDoS requests actually come from outside China when oversea visitors are hit by the malicious js while browsing Chinese websites.

So it does work. It doesn't really matter where you break the chain as long as it gets broken.

It only works if you somehow remove entire China from the Internet.

That would be the kind of signal that would be hard for the Chinese to spin in such a way that it would make them look good, and the economic effect would be pretty much instantaneous.

There is plenty of historical precedent for this: spammers' IP ranges would be blackholed to send a message to their ISPs that such behavior wasn't tolerated. That the Chinese authorities decide to play this game at the nation state level should not give them a free pass, but should result in a nation state level response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_(networking)

I'm not sure 'We have the technology to censor the internet, and it's okay to deploy it' is the message you want to give the CCP.

That's not censorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

The criminal co-opting of networks and nodes on those networks is not speech by any definition.

There are innocent users outside China who like to view innocent websites inside China. If you block the connection, you make the innocent users, and the innocent websites, mad. They might very well interpret it as censorship.

That's not the issue. The issue is that there is speech accompanying the malware, which should not be systematically censored. (Though any individual is free to do so for themselves.)

> The issue is that there is speech accompanying the malware

I'm either misunderstanding what you're saying, or it doesn't make sense. If a bunch of people take signs (with legitimate messages, free speech) and hang them off a bridge over the highway (causing accidents), then those people go jail. The fact that their message is free speech is irrelevant. The source of the message is being punished/jailed, not the message.

Am I mis-representing your statement?

Another iteration of this and we'll have bullets with text on them and killing someone with those bullets will be an expression of free speech. The degree to which the 'free speech' analogy is contorted is amazing, more so because the original scope was quite narrow, both legal and geographical.

The problem is closer to a ne'er-do-well taking someone else's signs and hanging them off a bridge over a highway. The person producing the speech is having their speech hijacked for malicious purposes by an MITM; that doesn't mean that it's not censorship when the sign's/webpage's creator gets caught in the censorship crossfire during the attempt to take down the malicious actor.

To put it another way: if someone steals my car and uses it to rob a bank, even if that car is now evidence in a criminal investigation, it's still my car. The police have every right to confiscate it from the thief—it's not their car—but that doesn't mean that it suddenly belongs to them; it belongs to me. In both this case and the above case, I have a right to not be unduly punished for the actions of an unrelated third party (by having my website taken down; or by having my car permanently confiscated, respectively.)

The context here is very similar to a story that was on HN just yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671579). Banning a site from the internet for happening to be MITMed by China is very similar in its ethical implications to banning a site from the Internet for happening to have a domain-name that fits a pattern used by a botnet.

The point is that technology could _also_ be used for censorship.

I'm sure spammers feel very much censored when they are blackholed. Tools are usually dual use.

We're kinda already past this?

At this point we really need to start doing the "You wanted a Great Firewall? Enjoy. You now have no connection."

Removing China from the internet would also likely cause things that phone home to China to break. That would actually create some consumer awareness to boot.

Not really, it is more like "if you behave like a malicious actor similar to a spammer, we will treat you like one".

The spin would be "US cuts off global internet in a petty attempt to interfere with China's management of its own network". Justified by a technical backstory that approximately nobody understands, I don't think it would play well even outside of China.

Who cares? China is a net negative on the Internet, they can stay over in their intranet as far as I am concerned, nothing of value would be lost.

Ohh no! Human to human connections are far too important to maintain in today's glocalized world.

It is possible: De-peer AS4134 (China Telecom) and reject all of their routes. They are the only international ISP that lands into mainland China. They are extensively peered around the world.

It's not just them. AS4837 (China Unicom) and a few others who have intl permission to route in and out of China. That said, you're going to hurt a lot of non-china multinationals who operate there.

> That said, you're going to hurt a lot of non-china multinationals who operate there.

Not my problem. Figure out a better way than getting in bed with fascist countries and then complaining when the inevitable door swings shut due to rightful backlash.

No big loss.

Maybe for you, but there are millions of people that work with people in China everyday.

China can easily operate any number of servers outside China.

Seems like it could work, there would be no way to pull down the JS.

I agree that such bad behavior should be punished, but why just couple of days? This would be similar to UN trade sanctions that are imposed on bad state actors.

I think we generally overestimate the hurt on the outside and underestimate the hurt on the inside considering the massive trade imbalance that China enjoys with the rest of the world.

Personally I have already pi-holed entire .cn and other domains.

> This would be similar to UN trade sanctions that are imposed on bad state actors.

UN sanctions are not imposed on bad state actors. They are imposed on weak state actors. UN sanctions have never been imposed on the US, China, Russia, Britain and France easily the worst state actors globally - the biggest weapons sellers and the cause of instability all over the world. They also are the 5 permanent security council members with veto power.

> I think we generally overestimate the hurt on the outside and underestimate the hurt on the inside considering the massive trade imbalance that China enjoys with the rest of the world.

China doesn't enjoy a trade imbalance with the "rest of the world". The enjoy it with the US primarily. They are net importers of Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, etc.

Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc also enjoy trade imbalance with the "rest of the world". Do you support sanctioning them?

> Personally I have already pi-holed entire .cn and other domains.

That doesn't do much if you really think about it. It's not like chinese individual, company or government are barred from owning everything from coms to orgs.

> UN sanctions are not imposed on bad state actors. They are imposed on weak state actors.

That is a great point and I agree with it.

However, the way I look at it, a state sponsored attack like this is no different from a country firing missiles or shells on another country from over the border. And as such, such attacks should not go unpunished and there need to be consequences. In addition, the countries being attached have a right and a moral duty to protect themselves.

The mechanisms of such I leave to those with the power to make it happen.

And yes, blocking .cn doesn't do much, but it does some.

Google has had a lot of success blacklisting domains that spam. Getting blacklisted and losing 30-90 days worth of traffic because you wanted to bump your pagerank a bit is a bit silly.

We could potentially have sanctions that require Google to block commercial sites in China. That would definitely get their attention without massive financial implications on the economy.

This type of behavior CAN NOT be allowed to continue.

I would rather see more rigorous trade policy. Frankly fewer low-quality or fraudulent Chinese imports will probably be a net positive and even if it is more expensive, I would rather our trade dollars support countries with less corrupt governments and better ethics with respect to intellectual property, fraud, environmental protection, etc.

I’m sure this will garner plenty of whataboutism regarding how the west is imperfect (never minding that I didn’t say “the west”)...

The west is constantly pushing for stuff like this in every trade policy with China and others...

There’s a limit to how much leverage any one side has on a sovereign countries policies (and how much they actually enforce them when they agree).

There’s also the question of the benefits of having China at all in these deals, some concessions and a growing dependence on western markets from initial deals is better than no deals.

Plus a wealthier China is good for the world and the billion people coming out of poverty, getting educated, and slowly becoming an advanced economy.

> There’s a limit to how much leverage any one side has on a sovereign countries policies (and how much they actually enforce them when they agree).

I’m not advocating for anyone controlling sovereign Chinese policies. They can continue their awful anti-humanitarian policies, fraud, IP theft, etc. I just don’t want my country aiding and abetting it. At very least I want my fellow citizens to be able to make informed purchasing decisions.

And I’m all for lifting people out of poverty, but I’d rather do it in a country with some minimum base line respect for human rights and integrity, and where my purchasing dollars don’t end up propping up some dictatorial system that bullies other countries.

The UK kept trade with the US when slavery there was rampant. Any country will have hiccups throughout its development. It's convenient but counterproductive to categorize every argument against yours as "whatabouttism".

> The UK kept trade with the US when slavery there was rampant.

And we’re I a citizen of the UK in this tortured analogy (with my contemporary morals and all that), I wouldn’t want my money supporting that.

> Any country will have hiccups throughout its development.

Right, but we don’t have to support those “hiccups”. Anyway, China had 60 million hiccups in the last century. They’re all out of hiccup passes.

> It's convenient but counterproductive to categorize every argument against yours as "whatabouttism".

Not every argument, only the ones that start with suggest I can’t criticize China until <other countries that I presumably support> are completely without blame. Such as yours.

LIHKG requires a Hong Kong ISP to register anyway, so it's not like that site blocking mainland China would hurt it at all.

that's what they want. a bifurcation of the internet.

No they don't. They want to use it as a weapon against targets of their choosing and co-opt the rest of the net in doing so. The economic importance of the internet to China can not be overstated.

They want a semipermeable membrane that money can cross, but uncontrolled information can't.

I think what parent is saying is that (unrelated to TFA) China wants a separate information sphere, where only party-approved sites and services are available to their citizens. They have largely accomplished this.

I doubt it. China gets a lot of business from overseas via the Internet. Think about all those fabs where you upload a PCB design and for $2, they manufacture it and mail them to you. If Americans could not visit the Chinese Internet, those companies would be out of business overnight. When nobody has a job or money, people start questioning the government, which the government would probably like to avoid.

The reality of China is that they need the global economy as much as the global economy needs them. No one entity can really pick up their ball and go home, as much as China would probably love to.

I doubt that's what they want at least in the short term. The economic effects would be disastrous.