Claims About China's April Internet Hijack Are Overblown 78
sturgeon writes "Yesterday, we discussed what most of the world's major media outlets were reporting on China's April 2010 hijack of '15% of Internet traffic,' including sensitive US government and defense sites. The alarm came following a US Government report (see page 244) on China / US economic and security relations released on Tuesday. Unfortunately, few bothered with fact checking or actually reading the report. The actual study never makes any estimate of Internet traffic diverted during the hijack — it only cites a blog post to suggest large volumes of traffic were involved. And curiously, the cited blog at the heart of the report never mentions traffic at all — only routes. You have to go to an interview with a third-party security researcher in a minor trade magazine to first come up with the 15% number (and this article never explains where the number came from). In a review of real data and actual facts, Arbor Nework's Craig Labovitz has a blog post looking at the traffic volumes involved in the incident (only a couple of Gigabits per second, or a 'statistically insignificant' percentage of Internet traffic)."
Only more Evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
[J]
It's not the 15% that mattered (Score:4, Insightful)
THe 15% number was just an eye grabber. The point is if a foreign government can redirect even a few messages that it chooses it is not good. Simply doing traffic analysis on the state department will alert people to crises. (they already do that with pizza deliveries to the whitehouse). I'd like to hear more abouthow it's done. is it some sort of DNS poisoning or publishing misleading ford-bellman shortest path info or rARP spoofing?
Not surprising at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounded alarmist (Score:2, Insightful)
The post that was referred to sounded alarmist in the first place so I doubt most people gave it too much thought.
Media abuses this formula too much these days... (Score:3, Insightful)
2. FUD
3. ???
4. Profit!
PS: Media includes sites such as /.
Re:Inconceivable!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why Slashdot (News for Nerds) is "news" like Fox News is "news" - it's not.
Maybe. But you'll never see a correction to an overblown sensationalist headline that Fox News put out hit the front page of foxnews.com. That's the difference.
Re:Inconceivable!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Cowboy Neal also cries fewer Crisco tears into his Golden Grams in public than Glen Beck does. That's another (pretty big) difference.
Re:Not surprising at all (Score:1, Insightful)
This (in my experience) is true. I haven't quantified this figure very recently (I have more useful ways to spend my time, since my anecdotal impression is unchanged), but last time I checked the proportion was over 98%.
However, the Chinese take the prize in the number of scam sites. I apologise in advance if the following comes across as racist, but sometimes it seems almost as if there is some wide and deep-seated national streak of dishonesty that they have to feed in order to validate their existence. I never cease to find it scary that our governments and larger corporations all fall over themselves scrambling to do business with the Chinese when they keep showing us, time and again, that they are not to be trusted.
Re:It's not the 15% that mattered (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is if a foreign government can redirect even a few messages that it chooses it is not good.
So if it wasn't a foreign government it would be ok? Remember, all governments are foreign to some of us.
Re:Only more Evidence (Score:1, Insightful)
Yet, this is what you demand in political journalists. If they don't praise Obama, or fail to ignore it when he talks about the 54 states, you rant and pull out the pitchforks and torches.
What do you expect to end up with when you shut down all opposing views. Politics is the news leader, and when you screw that up enough, why should you expect the rest of the media to act any differently? You don't want facts, you want a happy meal with apple pie.
Volume doesn't matter (Score:2, Insightful)
The volume of traffic captured isn't as important as the actual traffic received.
According to the low volume making it ok, if someone could steal 100 bytes off your 600gb hard drive, you'd be ok with that because it is such a small percentage. If that 100 bytes contained everything needed to use your credit card, would you still feel the same? It's the data that is important, not the volume.
Re:Only more Evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
There are certain keywords to look for to know if the journalist knows what he/she is talking about (regardless of subject). Note: "there was speculation that
Re:Only more Evidence (Score:2, Insightful)
This panic over misinformation could be useful when discussing encryption and the clipper chip proposals of the mid 90s and the newer escrow law proposals.
If the government were to mandate a back door, there would effectively be a master key that could be leaked, requiring a complete digital "changing of the locks" every time the key were suspected of being compromised.