China Isolates Itself From Worldwide Web For Over an Hour (theregister.com) 18
A complete shutdown of encrypted web traffic isolated China from the global internet for 74 minutes Wednesday morning, blocking citizens from accessing foreign websites and disrupting international business operations that depend on secure connections to offshore servers. The Great Firewall began injecting forged TCP RST+ACK packets to terminate all connections on port 443 at 00:34 Beijing time on August 20, according to activist group Great Firewall Report.
The standard HTTPS port carries most modern web traffic, meaning Chinese users lost access to virtually all foreign-hosted websites while companies including Apple and Tesla couldn't connect to servers powering their basic services. The blocking device didn't match known Great Firewall hardware fingerprints, suggesting Beijing either deployed new censorship equipment or experienced a configuration error. No significant events requiring information blackout occurred during the outage window. Pakistan's internet traffic dropped significantly hours before China's incident, potentially connected through shared firewall technology.
The standard HTTPS port carries most modern web traffic, meaning Chinese users lost access to virtually all foreign-hosted websites while companies including Apple and Tesla couldn't connect to servers powering their basic services. The blocking device didn't match known Great Firewall hardware fingerprints, suggesting Beijing either deployed new censorship equipment or experienced a configuration error. No significant events requiring information blackout occurred during the outage window. Pakistan's internet traffic dropped significantly hours before China's incident, potentially connected through shared firewall technology.
A message from the CCP for Chinese citizens? (Score:4, Funny)
"Look, we know you spend a lot of time connecting to Western sites, but ya'll have been getting a bit uppity again. Don't ever forget who's boss here".
Re: (Score:1)
Re:A message from the CCP for Chinese citizens? (Score:4, Insightful)
More likely, testing the steps to invade Taiwan, now that the Trumpistan under king donold has reneged on its promises wrt defense of the status quo.
China saw how the same king proclaimed the principle "might makes right" as the new rule of international law and sold out the allies of the country formerly known as USA basically everywhere and is preparing for a land grab.
Re: A message from the CCP for Chinese citizens? (Score:2)
I doubt that. ~Nobody cares about sites outside China. In fact, the Web isn't used much at all in China. Ditto email. Everything is inside wechat, or perhaps alipay or one of a few other native apps.
Requirements (Score:4, Insightful)
America will be doing this soon (Score:3, Insightful)
It's frustrating to watch everything the libertarians and right wingers have been screaming about government doing happening because of the people they put in charge.
VPNs (Score:2)
On a trip to China a few years go, I found that my VPN (using OpenVPN on the standard port) would not connect, but SSH wasn't blocked, so I just used SSH tunneling to a VNC session.
In the past, I have also used OpenVPN over port 53 (DNS). I think this was because I found a WiFi network with a paywall blocked ports 80 and 443, but not 53.
Call it what it is already. (Score:4, Interesting)
..suggesting Beijing either deployed new censorship equipment or experienced a configuration error.
Call it what it is already: A Test. The only suggestion needed is a reminder of the communist regime we’re talking about here. Injecting forged packets doesn’t sound like a “whoops” error. And to leave it alone for an entire hour? If that was an error, the hell were they waiting on to fix it? Was the metric fuckton of negative impact in the first 5 minutes not quite enough?
..while companies including Apple and Tesla couldn't connect to servers powering their basic services.
Perhaps we’ll start to recognize the downsides of products being “designed” in America but manufactured elsewhere. I truly wonder if the AAR will validate how blind Greed can be.
Oh? I didn't notice. (Score:2)
I am in China. I never noticed any issue at all. I'm desperately trying to recall what I was doing online but I don't recall specifics. I'd probably be listening to Times Radio and reading Sky News website, neither of which are locked. Likewise, slashdot...
I wonder if many people noticed...western sites just aren't all that important.
Re: Oh? I didn't notice. (Score:2)
I remember I made a WhatsApp call to my mother, which worked just fine. The rumours of WhatsApp being blocked are very exaggerated. Maybe it was a different time...
Re: Oh? I didn't notice. (Score:2)
Oh, it was at 00:34 so nobody would notice, including me...never mind.
Cloudflare is worse (Score:2)
It is a royal pita for people inside China wanting to access sites outside China - which mostly means foreigners, of course. Cloudflare blocks or challenges almost all accesses, ime.
WWW3 is already in progress (Score:1)