Anecdote, but I once ran a blog for many years. Country breakdown for traffic was roughly 30% China, 30% Russia, and 30% US. Almost 100% of requests out of China and Russia were hacking attempts, I assume mostly by bots. They've earned a reputation and there's nothing wrong pointing it out. If you operate a website, unless China and Russia are part of your market/audience, I'd suggest blocking them altogether.
Just wanted to second this. I ran several public Linux servers at a major university. China and Russia based IPs we’re constantly trying to brute force all of our servers. It got the point where we would just apply a geoblock just in case one finally managed to get through.
I’m all for avoiding nationalistic dog whistles when discussing things, but both China and Russia have rightfully earned their places as bad actors on the internet.
It adds no information or value to the discussion by giving the hackers a nationality. If there was a statistic that the majority of hackers wore hoodies, would we be calling that out and saying "Attacked by hackers in hoodies?" Obviously not because their clothing has nothing to do with the fact that they're malicious. What's happening here is profiling and it doesn't work.
Add that to the fact that there are of course bad actors in countries including the US who happen to have proxies in other countries. Geolocating the IP address tells us nothing.
The largest botnets came from a variety of nationalities and are rarely Chinese. Conficker was allegedly from the Ukraine, and a Swede plead guilty. Alureon came from Estonia. Mariposa from spain.
Stop with the emotionally-charged flame baiting based on shallow data and anecdotal information.
Please note I never used a nationality in my comment, but referred to the countries themselves. Nothing I stated had any emotions behind it. I stated simple facts from personal experience.
Geolocating the origination points of an exploit is extremely useful. Your point of other countries using proxies being the prime reason. The simple fact is if China and Russia wanted to limit the number of attacks originating from their IP blocks they could do so. Since they more or less allow it to continue they are a common source of malicious traffic, and geo blocking will significantly reduce the number of attempted exploits you experience.
If I had a shop and everyone that robs me has a hoody I would damn well point it out and ban them. That doesn't mean every person with a hoody wil rob me but it's a very effective and filter. It's not emotionally charged it's completely logical.
Either the problem is with the analogy and you're taking it too literally, or your reasoning is severely distorted and leads into very dark, hellish places. People can decide not to wear hoodies anymore. Chinese people cannot choose to just not be Chinese anymore, nor should they have to.
I don't think that we should 'ban' Chinese or Russian people if you are pointing towards that. I do think that we shouldn't pull a smokescreen over the truth by dissallowing statement of fact that most hackers are Chinese or Russian.
We also shouldn't shout down people who are hit everyday by this as rascist or emotionally charged. It's completely logical for them to want to ban these groups. Instead we should educate on exactly what kind of a very dark and hellish place banning leads to.
Geolocating tells us which country the ip address belongs to. The countries policies towards companies operating those ips have a big effect. Nationities do matter.
Change your statement to read “black” instead of Chinese and see if you still think it’s OK.
The crime is hacking, and your attempts to “expose” Chinese hackers is more like an agenda to prejudice Chinese even if statistically many Chinese-originated traffic is attempting to hack you.
In the chance that the hacking is actually caused by American hackers routing their traffic through China, then what purpose does your Chinese assumption serve except to encourage others to profile and prejudice Chinese?
In a more realistic example of how your comments may incite racial prejudice for no good reason is that it is actually very likely the biggest botnets have Chinese victims (because they are poor, run Windows XP still, and generally have very poor internet security practices). Oh, and also they happen to have the most people on Earth, so statistically any given thing would be mostly Chinese.
So, unless you are absolutely certain that being Chinese makes you a criminal hacker I would recommend leaving race or nationality out of the discussion.
The implication isn't that being Chinese makes one likely to be a hacker. It's the other way around. It's that being a hacker makes it unusually likely that you're Chinese (or Russian). Similarly, being a Nigerian doesn't make you an email scammer, but being an email scammer makes you unusually likely to be Nigerian. Being a drug lord makes you unusually likely to be Mexican.
These are archetypes, i.e. popularly associated examples of particular actions. But I'm not sure if they're full-blown stereotypes, where they get over-applied to members of that group. People don't believe that all Chinese and Russians are hackers, that all Nigerians are email scammers, that all Mexicans are drug overlords, etc.
Stereotypes tend to be more insidious. Many people (in America) do believe that Blacks and Mexicans are criminals, that Chinese are great at math, etc., to the degree that it changes how they actually treat people. So I think these are much worse and shouldn't be equated.
That said, despite the above analysis, I can see how being Chinese you would still cringe when you see the phrase "Chinese hacker" being used casually. I'm an ethnic minority and have felt similarly in similar situations.
Yes but I also gave a pretty likely hypothesis as to why the hackers appear Chinese. The OP is claiming DDoS attacks which are likely from compromised machines.
So if that is true then the viewpoint of blaming it on Chinese becomes nonsensical and also wrong. So given that there is reasonable doubt, is it right to attribute this "being a hacker" to having anything to do with being Chinese in any way?
"China" is a place, which is an origin of hacking attempts detected by some users, which could be of known or unknown origin (i.e. people who are pink or AI)
"Black" refers to an ethnicity of a given group of people. Or their skin color, if you want things simple.
These are non-interchangeable terms, so by asking to switch them you are indicating they are interchangeable. You are doing this because you think it's important to keep people from blaming an individual based on group membership.
Yet, it remains that the CPC is something else beyond a person, a culture or a people. Defending it is irrational, but maybe people want to stand up for something important to them and think that defending everything's right to exist and speak its mind is more important than existence itself.
Except that being a fairly homogenous place saying "China" has in all practical purposes the same effect as saying Chinese.
That being said, see my other replies on how the OP's assumptions may very likely be wrong, and attributing hackers to China has the same effect as calling the coronavirus "China virus" in that for all intents and purposes it has the effect of associating Chinese people with hackers in the same way that calling the coronavirus is an attempt to deflect blame to a particular group of people.
I'll third this. Every single IP that I have geo-located that has attempted to get into one of my home servers/routers is coming from China. I didn't go as far as blocking all of China because I was sure that some point down the line it would cause some other random issue and I would have long forgotten blocking Chinese IP's. If I remember correctly I used fail2ban or similar software to blacklist IP's after X failed attempts. That plus moving all services to non-standard ports (save for 80/443).
Why just those two countries then? Why don’t I see a thousand get requests for /wp-login from countries all around the world? Wouldn’t that be significantly more effective since you can’t simply block a range of addresses to mitigate it?
I think it's serving as shorthand for "in a country halfway around the world, with a government that isn't going to intervene on your behalf as a foreigner even if you figure out who did it and hand them the evidence on a silver platter".
Right, it wasn't necessarily hateful on purpose, but as another poster pointed out, what does it mean that we default to using one specific group of people for that example? If they'd said "PRC hacker" it'd be a different story, but the word "Chinese" conflates a nationality and heritage. It does this, by the way, in written Chinese as well, hence a lot of arguments I've had in the past with PRC-citizen exchange students about whether Taiwanese people are Chinese or not (even though they are, obviously, not PRC citizens, Taiwan being a sovereign nation).
I find your worry interesting and mildly humorous. You seem to be worried about hurting the feelings of chinese people for personal western moral reasons, but seem fine with insulting the PRC.
Personally, given that the Chinese will likely dominate the world over the course of the next century, I'd be less worried about insults for ethical/antiracism reasons (they're going to be the ascendant ethnicity and culture soon, don't worry- they'll be fine!) and more worried about insulting them or the PRC for reasons of self-preservation.
This is assuming, of course, that the PRC value system and legal framework is lock-step with Chinese modern ethics, traditional ethics, or Chinese culture.
Whiiiiich of course assume that that's homogeneous, which, obviously, it isn't. Just like "Western morals" aren't (I'm trying to be good faith in parsing that and I can't figure out what you mean by western morals).
So when you say "The Chinese will be the ascendant ethnicity and culture," do you mean the rural American scapegoat? Aka, chopsticks, epicanthic folds, and Simplified Chinese? I could see how that could be the meat and potatoes of the argument, because even if what that actually ends up meaning in reality is that though a separatist Democratic movement overthrows the CCP, the (future) USA populist government successfully redefines the Chinese Threat to include this completely different political structure to fall under the umbrella of "Chinese," which society has allowed to mean what I'm arguing we should prevent it to mean.
I can say where you're completely wrong - it's not mildly humorous to find me in this position. It's fucking hilarious. Of all political considerations on earth nothing heats my blood more than the evils of Xi Jinping and the tyrannical PRC regime. They are bullies, they violate human rights, and they should be overthrown. I have to balance this against my love of all the good things that Chinese culture brings to the table, just by nature of being a bunch of humans with a rich ancestral background forming their language, food, traditions, etc. And by Chinese I again refer to that concept vague even in any of the languages that adopted the Chinese writing system.
Not Chinese, I also care. That comment is an example of subtle racism.
Image the following comment:
"You better buy a good bike lock, else you're at risk of having it stolen by a black man."
A comment like the one above would spark near universal outrage at the commenter, and with good reason. It's racist, and the original comment here is the same. Unnecessarily racist.
You're incorrect. Chinese is a nationality, not a race, which means this isn't racism. An accurate description would be that this is stereotyping on the basis of nationality.
As such, a more accurate comparison than "black man stealing a bike" would be to something like a "Nigerian scammer," which is an archetype I don't think most of us have a problem with. Other examples I never see complaints about: "Russian hacker," "American imperialist," etc.
This isn't really true on it's own, and besides, isn't even a good faith interpretation. In an America where rural Asian-ethnicity people are facing discrimination because of covid being called "Chinese Virus," I think it's bold to claim that the concept of China as a country and Chinese as a racial heritage are not conflated.
> In an America where rural Asian-ethnicity people are facing discrimination because of covid being called "Chinese Virus…"
That's because of the specific context of who is saying "Chinese Virus," who their audience is, and why they're saying it.
This context is different. Nobody on Hacker News who encounters the phrase "Chinese hacker" is going to suddenly start discriminating against Chinese people, any more than we discriminate against Nigerians despite the fact that "Nigerian scammer" is a cliche in tech circles.
I'd delve deeper beyond my comment because there's a lot of reasons I'm not the greatest source, not the least of which I'm just some white american dude with a comically terrible grasp of ONE dialect/language of Chinese and a wikipedia sourced knowledge of Chinese history.
Here's my understanding: Chinese can refer to many things that have their origin in what we call Mainland China these days. Chinese Language. Chinese History. Chinese Food. Chinese territory. Chinese government. Chinese people (citizens). Chinese people (ethnicity). The word is super-descriptive in that way, because that region, for three thousand years, was "homogenous" in a convenient way for propagandists and the history writers throughout time.
But if you delve in, you can see that it's truly absurd to refer to anything as Chinese. Chinese language - well, sure, Mandarin, right? But only because the seat of government is in Beijing, and it just picked that flavor. Nearly every city in the borders of the PRC have their own distinct dialect, or straight up separate language. The written system was invented in the 1950s based off a historical system that didn't just write Chinese, it wrote Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and also every language in between (Guangzhounese aka Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese sub-languages, etc). Which is "Chinese writing?" Which language is "Chinese language?" And what about when the Huns were around? What about when the Mongolians ruled it all? Was that "Chinese?" (a PRC censor would say ABSOLUTELY NOT and probably say you were treasonous to the harmony of Chinese culture for even suggesting it).
Chinese food - different in every city.
Chinese government - which one, the Democratic one that is seated in Taiwan, or the Autocratic one seated in Beijing? Or the City State of Hong Kong? Or the dead kingdoms?
I'm trying to indicate here why trying to say "Chinese is a nationality, not race" is a silly thing to say when Chinese can mean so many things that so say it's "not" something is a hard thing to prove. On top of all this, walk up to your average American and say "Chinese" and these subtleties are completely lost - EVERYONE knows what you mean by Chinese, well, it's Orange Chicken and Communism! That's what the American education system teaches us, after all, or at least, what it taught me growing up in rural America.
Ask Chinese people, or Taiwanese people (which I have done), what it means to be a Chinese person, and you'll likely get a very careful separation of the concept of Chinese person from the PRC. Many Taiwanese people would consider themselves Chinese if they had the opportunity to ensure the distinction was being made that this didn't mean they were pro-Beijing, simply that their history and culture shared or was identical to many people that happened to be born in Beijing.
> Nobody on Hacker News who encounters the phrase "Chinese hacker" is going to suddenly start discriminating against Chinese people,
Yesterday there was a thread about the experience of Black programmers in tech and I got into some discussions there that have destroyed my ability to believe in a sentence like this. There are avowed racists on this site. I went through the history of one who danced the blade well enough to occasionally fire off comments about how African people are genetically predisposed to lower IQ, without getting flagged/banned. This is a website like any other, a good one with better rules and moderation, yes, but an internet breeding ground anyway.
Better censorship is what you are after? A website to censor things along the lines of how you think? A website that will protect you from racists? I heard reddit is trying really hard these days to be the censorship hot spot perhaps take a look.
The original point was Chinese are not a race they are a nationality.
You both are wrong.
Chinese are not a race.
Chinese are not a nationality.
The Han Chinese are a nationality. China is made up of many nationalities.
The important story now is the government of China is forcing birth control on a minority population called the Uighurs.
Save your outrage for something meanful. Real minority populations are being oppressed and your worried about your fellow Americans insulting them more by blocking ip ranges that China owns that military style hacking is coming from? If that's the case I would suggest you care more about trying to make yourself look a certain way (by putting other Americans in their place) than helping minority populations in great need. The next generation is watching, they will demand real action vs virtual signaling.
> Better censorship is what you are after? A website to censor things along the lines of how you think? A website that will protect you from racists?
Deplatforming racists isn't censorship.
> Save your outrage for something meanful.
Big words coming from someone that didn't mention that Black Lives Matter even once in their comment, and also didn't do anything to bring more attention to North Korean concentration camps, and hasn't even provided a donation link to an African farming initiative. See where I'm going with this?
> Real minority populations are being oppressed
Like ethnically Chinese people in the USA, or really just Asian people in American in general that get lumped under a random Chinese umbrella, for example?
> they will demand real action vs virtual signaling.
What's your point? What is anybody on this website doing besides "virtue signalling?" We're talking. That involves our virtues being put on display. Despite what conservative detractors might think, saying "you're virtue signalling" doesn't automatically win a debate any more than calling someone an SJW does. Yup, I have virtues, yup, I'm telling you what they are. Yup, I like social justice. You don't?
Isn't deplatforming racist because it creates a segregated society. Do you really want to separate society based on race? Soon we'll have schools for racist only. People will complain they when they get higher marks.
You think you like the idea of social justice? What you are doing is social judgement. Bullying.. using your power over someone less powerful to make yourself feel better.
Many causes need attention. Ignoring them all and pretending to care when people are around doesn't help anyone. The next generation is going to call you fake.
"Free speech activists" inevitably show off their actual value system.
> Isn't deplatforming racist because it creates a segregated society.
Racism is a choice, race isn't. Racists segregate themselves from society by believing that some humans are subhuman. Can't exactly share a well with someone that believes you're an animal, can you? Certainly can't have them in a jury.
> Do you really want to separate society based on race?
Transparent strawman argument lobbed at me most times I engage an "all lives matter" type. Black lives matter = white lives don't matter, right?
> People will complain they when they get higher marks.
Why would racists get higher marks? As racists they disproportionately fail to correct for cognitive biases - they are therefore either stupid or have a mental disorder.
> You think you like the idea of social justice? What you are doing is social judgement.
The SJW bit was fairly obvious bait that you bit straight onto. Something wrong with shaming racists? Bullying the bully? And today I learned, asking a bully to leave, is apparently bullying.
> Many causes need attention.
Again, you fail to address why you are spending time commenting on this instead of solving world hunger. Why are you spending time virtue signalling at me? Don't you care about starving children?
Culture war.. everyone is winning their own mono-culture war. All of your facebook friends agree? Twitter echoing back similiar opinions. The software is working if you think you are winning something.
You will hear shut up grandpa move over. When you had your chance you just talked but made no real gain in the world. You won't understand.. why does real change matter? You will say we got everyone to bully racism underground. They will shake their head you fools you made racism worse and now it's more secretive and powerful.
Sure, but there are degrees of offensiveness, and racism is a great deal higher on that totem pole than nationalist stereotypes (archetypes, really) like "Mexican druglord," "Chinese/Russian hacker," and "Nigerian scam," etc.
IMO, if one can't make the point that something shouldn't be said without inaccurately labeling it as racism, then one shouldn't make the point. The only thing they're accomplishing is watering down the negative connotations of racism.
