Chinese websites defaced by Anonymous | Hacker News Reader

Chinese websites defaced by Anonymous

bbc.com

56 pointsra5cal14 comments

Subtle. I'm sure that many Chinese Internet users are saying: "thank you for shutting off access to this website I want to access, and providing me with this useful and interesting information, in a totally non-patronizing way".

Worse, as stated in the article, is that the message is in English, which many people won't even be able to read.

There is a Chinese phrase in the BBC article's screenshot. But that's irrelevant to whatever Anonymous's intensions.

I am chinese and none of these sites made any sense to me. looks like anons just hacked a bunch of spam sites, low profile and irrelevant.

Some background on the situation in China, a commentary article "Chinese leaders cling to an illusion of stability"

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/146187235.ht...

by Joel Brinkley, Hearst Visiting Professional in Residence in the Department of Communication at Stanford University.

I wonder what economical consequences would have that kind of social crisis in China.

What this article described is very true. The communists party ordered the creation of an organization called "Stability Office" in every level of the government and state-run corporations, responsible for suppressing all kinds of protests and muting or jailing dissidents. The "Stability Office" has the power to mobilize all kinds of resources including police, state security, military to achieve its goals. Its annual budget is never released but is believed to be even bigger than the annual military expense.

It's not surprising to see a dozen Chinese government websites were on top of the list at Pastebin. In fact, 90% of the sites whose webmasters were not security-aware: pirated Windows with IIS installed a few crappy ASP pages slapped together.

Despite their "righteous" self-claim, hacking those amateur sites are really uncalled for and they are still a bunch of criminals no different. It will NOT change the fact that government will continue do censorships and more countries will follow shoes to do more of them. It's sad but true. FYI, a lot of the blocking & filtering are done on the Internet backbone routers made by Cisco. Worst yet, Tor is not effective any more as seen on yesterday's HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3793320

I would have rather seen the hacking done from within China, with messages in readable, relevant Chinese. It probably would have been far more powerful as a statement. Under those circumstances, I'd find it hard to call it criminal; it would be civil disobedience.

Damn, they couldn't spend a few minutes to look up Chinese language information?

Seriously, almost 500 sites hacked and they didn't do it in a language their users would be able to read. Massive waste.

Allow me to introduce you to the phrase 'For the lulz.'

I doubt most people operating under the Anonymous banner are all that different than the general population and just don't give a damn about what happens in China, or anywhere outside their back yard for that matter. But lulz, that's just awesome.

This is actually pretty "smart". Reaching out to ordinary Chinese is incredibly hard due to the heavy censorship.

Hacking a bunch of sites and displaying a message is the most effective way of spreading a message to a lot of ordinary middle class Chinese people I can think of. It's not like you can put up big banners everywhere.

Unnecessary.

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