

Chinese websites defaced by Anonymous - ra5cal
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17623939

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adnam
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".

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

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

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est
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.

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tokenadult
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...](http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/146187235.html)

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

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laic
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.

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devy
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>

~~~
noarchy
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.

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

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

~~~
mhurron
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.

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kristofferR
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.

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mkwayisi
Unnecessary.

