Ask HN: Why isn't the GitHub attack being covered by the news?
Why is this not in the mainstream news? Even if it's not the Chinese government directly it's a group with significant power inside China -- so why isn't this being considered a foreign attack on a US company?
103 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadhttp://techcrunch.com/2014/06/21/heres-video-of-the-cyber-at...
If companies really want the media to get on board then create a figure for how many $/hour you're losing. Heck make a widget which counts upwards (e.g. we've lost $25,000 due to this DDoS since the start).
The downside is it might just encourage the DDoS-ers, the upside is the media might take it seriously.
Is anyone out there even attempting to estimate how much revenue they've lost as a result of this DDoS?
Now to get back to the OPs question:
1. Mainstream media might have too much to lose if they criticize China, just like in many countries where property bubbles burst the mainstream media suppressed any mention of bubble forming since they were making out like bandits from advertising property, could be something similar happening here.
2. The story is a non-story outside nerd circles, now if Facebook or Twitter was being DDOSed your sure would hear about it since journalists do care about these sites.
As should the net-based political press.
Never mind what "most people" care about -- this is news.
Gizmodo, slashdot, the register.
WashPo also had a blog, as did a few other non-tech sites.
The reason they don't show as Github specifically is because it is reported as "Anti-censorship group is under DDOS"
Perhaps it's interesting to reframe in a language that affect most people:
"Linux development halted by ciberattack!!!"
That's not completely true and too linkbaity, especially with the three bang sings. Is there another huge mainstream project hosted there?
Another linkbait:
"Hackers break hackers site!!!"
Not so appealing to most people, but you can exploit curiosity. Also, you'll get a lot of complains about the incorrect use of the word "hackers" in both positions.
Github still runs on Ruby on Rails, right?
"Massive blow to computer hobbyists as the Chinese government brings down their community website!"
"Chinese hackers cost US economy $100,000 / h"
Well, replace random accusations and numbers by facts of course, but that's a valid question: How many employees can currently not to any meaningful work because they don't have access to what they're supposed to work on? This times salaries spent on them anyway is a good lower bound for the damage done to the economy (actual damage should be higher since employees should of course add more value to the economy than their salary).
Now I don't know if this was directly related, but the timing raises an eyebrow.
Also, it's Sunday, so very few employees are expected to be working today.
Continuous integration tools directly pull from github.
When github is down, all exchange of patches between employes essentially halts, as does continuous integration and testing.
Of course, this is not the fault of git.
This is the fault of people keeping using centralized servers, instead of setting up and using their own local servers.
The same goes for email (gmail anybody? Really???)
The Internet is meant to be a decentralized, peer-to-peer, meshed network. Not a centralized, star network!!!
Oh the irony! Actually I bet many developers are sitting on their hands when they can't access github.
I don't want to dump on github. It has been a great driver of open-source software. But by making itself a single-point-of-... so much, it kind of defeats the purpose of git sometimes.
Ideally we'd be able to download not just the repo but all the meta-info; issues, comments, pull requests, etc.
What mainstream news do you read?
I'm sick of this mentality that old-media news is all evil. Fox News and MSNBC are not the industry.
Disclaimer: I do not work in journalism.
It's not blind "hate" for Al Jeezera as much as concerns that the parent organization is owned by the rulers of Qatar.
Nothing is "obvious".
For all we know this could be a bored teenager sitting in his basement in New York, Paris, Tokyo or Moscow.
It could also be a false flag operation by the NSA, to massage the western adolescent nerd's mindset into quietly accepting their next round of mass surveillance ("Must protect from the evil chinese!").
The Chinese openly attacking GitHub is the least plausible scenario, unless you think they are stupid.
At least as guilty, imho.
And who is "they"? Baidu? The Chinese Government? The great firewall administrator himself?
Sorry but how would a bored teenager somewhere have control over injecting attacks in traffic passing through the "Great Firewall of China". This really doesn't seem like a typical attack to me but you are right in that I should not be claiming this an obvious attack by a nation-state without the facts.
The same way a 15yr old once took out Yahoo, CNN, eBay, Dell and Amazon: Dedication.
Perhaps it's even a Chinese activist, looking to draw attention to the firewall or to spark a little diplomatic quarrel with the US?
"It's Obama's fault."
"It's the republicans."
"I make pee pee."
Yes. Why not? People complain about it not being in the "mainstream" news, but then say, "well, that's someone else's problem to deal with".
Although I'll note that it's just now getting to be a big enough story for this, i.e. how long it's gone on and how clear it's become that it is a state action.
It seems to me like you trying to make a parallel to the Sony hacking. These two instances are very different. The Sony hackers used a much more diverse toolset to inflict damage on a number of different vectors.
I'd like to ask back some questions:
1) What makes you think it's a worthy topic?
2) What makes you think China or any powerful group - not sure in what terms this group is supposed to be powerful - has anything to do with it?
HackerNews, Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook aren't mainstream? I beg to differ.
If this event was reported on any other media, I'd have no idea that it was occurring.
(Of course, political conversations could be going on but not publicized.)
This is the kind of story where a tech individual should probably do a compressive blog post which gets syndicated, rather than relying on journalists. I can understand why no one at Baidu, GitHub, or Fastly is doing this, though.
Ironically, you realize of course that if something is mainstream news (or any news at all) then that's a trophy that creates a greater likelihood of future copycat events happening. Notoriety is certainly part of the buzz of doing something like this.
The bigger question is where do you get your news? If it's here, guess what, it's the #1 story.
If you follow entertainment news sources, like CBS, NBC, etc, what do you expect? They are more interested in production of entertainment.
It seems almost certain, however, that in the coming week, this story will be told in the "mainstream news" (I don't really know what that is anymore tho, TBH)
I am sure, when things shake out, the attacks will be used in some political-posturing kind of way and by some politician who will judiciously use it to drum up support among an interested group.