Free Republic

China’s mysterious Internet outage; speculation over a ‘kill switch’ By Hana Stewart-Smith | April 13, 2012, 5:33am PDT At approximately 11am local time yesterday, Internet users around China reported significant Internet blackouts. Not only were they unable to access some Chinese sites, but also many foreign Web sites that had not previously been blocked. The issue was not isolated to China. Web users in Hong Kong and Japan also reported issues with accessing Chinese sites. A number of explanations immediately came to light, with the most viable cause being the 8.7 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia on Wednesday, that might have...

The U.S. government has figured out how to bust through Internet censorship filters in order to deliver news and other vital information via e-mail to people in countries like China, according to a recent report. The official report from the Broadcasting Board of Governors detailed successful testing the agency conducted last year as it tried to slip data into inboxes in Hong Kong and China. The testing involved technology known as Feed Over e-mail, or FOE, to bypass traps the Chinese government has in place to screen out unwanted Internet content. According to the report, first obtained and published by...

According to U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report released Nov. 17 rerouted internet traffic may have been a smokescreen to hide targeted cyber attack against American and allied servers. The Hijacking From the report: “For about 18 minutes on April 8, 2010, China Telecom advertised erroneous network traffic routes that instructed U.S. and other foreign Internet traffic to travel through Chinese servers. Other servers around the world quickly adopted these paths, routing all traffic to about 15 percent of the Internet’s destinations through servers located in China. This incident affected traffic to and from U.S. government (“.gov”) and military...

Nearly 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic, including that of many U.S. government and military sites, was briefly redirected through computer servers in China in April, according to a congressional commission report due out this week. It is not clear whether the incident was deliberate, but the capability could enable severe malicious activities including the diversion of data and the interception of supposedly secure encrypted Internet traffic, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission states in a report to Congress. A draft copy of the report, which is to be released Wednesday but viewed by The Washington Times, reports...

For 18 minutes in April, China’s state-controlled telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, including data from U.S. military, civilian organizations and those of other U.S. allies. This massive redirection of data has received scant attention in the mainstream media because the mechanics of how the hijacking was carried out and the implications of the incident are difficult for those outside the cybersecurity community to grasp, said a top security expert at McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated Internet security company. In short, the Chinese could have carried out eavesdropping on unprotected communications — including emails and instant...

How the U.S. Can Free China's InternetNewsMax.com WiresFriday, March 3, 2002Editor's note: This is the conclusion of a series. Part one: U.S. Businesses Help China Suppress Internet. Part two: U.S. Capitalists Spread China's Communist Propaganda. Why has there been so little oversight of the corporate activity aiding China's oppression? As American computer engineer Michael Robinson puts it, for the first four years of the Net era, those with paranoid visions of China's government were never quite able to square their suspicions with the rapid expansion of the Chinese Internet. Although it was widely rumored in Beijing that up to...