A recent article by Sebastian Anthony, GitHub battles “largest DDoS” in site’s history, targeted at anti-censorship tools, 30 March ArsTechnica, [ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/github-battles-largest-ddos-in-sites-history-targeted-at-anti-censorship-tools/] is yet another indicator that some of the countries who can, try hard to influence content of the Internet that doesn't suit their political views. It is one thing for China (in this case) to dictate content in their own country, but quite another to try to influence what other countries put on the Internet. They did this previously by hacking the New York Times, Bloomburg, the Washington Post and however many others that are unwilling to talk or didn't know they were attacked. They specifically looked for sources in those cases and dried up some of the types of sources that might help newspapers publish critical articles.
In this instance they were after the New York Times again, which was distributed by GitHub in Chinese. The ArsTechnica article, nor GitHub actually say the Chinese are at fault here, though they do mention that it was a subversion of Baidu, which is not exactly free to be critical of the central government for what it may see as interference with the content of someone else's websites. "The ongoing attack appears to originate from China, with the DDoS specifically targeting two GitHub projects that are designed to combat censorship in China: GreatFire, and cn-nytimes, a Chinese language version of the New York Times."
Our concern should be that Russia, China, Iran, and a few others are not content to manage their own portions of the Internet, but insist on trying to manage ours too. We can talk all we want about Freedom of the Press or Net Neutrality, but the Chinese and their students are not wasting time by debating. They are moving to control what they can, influence what they can't, by whatever means they can find, including denial of service, hacking, and intimidation where necessary, manage content of the Internet. In this war, they are clearly winning. Dennis F. Poindexter books at Amazon
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