{"id":182205,"date":"2015-03-19T13:03:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T20:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=182205"},"modified":"2015-03-19T16:38:08","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T23:38:08","slug":"greatfire-under-attack-following-wsj-article","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/03\/greatfire-under-attack-following-wsj-article\/","title":{"rendered":"GreatFire Under Attack Following WSJ Article"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, Eva Dou and Alistair Barr of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article describing the ways anti-censorship groups use major cloud computing company servers<\/strong><\/a> to host mirror sites of websites that are blocked by the Great Firewall. From Dou and Barr’s report:<\/p>\n

Activists outside of China say they are disguising Internet traffic banned by Beijing\u2014which includes anything from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, to Gmail and news websites\u2014by tunneling it encrypted through cloud servers run by major U.S. companies.<\/p>\n

These cloud services run by Amazon.com Inc.,Microsoft Corp., Akamai Technologies Inc. and others are meant to help businesses improve their website speeds by storing their data on remote servers. But activists say they are using them to get around China\u2019s so-called Great Firewall, which could draw the cloud providers unwillingly into the censorship clash.<\/p>\n

To stem the flow of prohibited content, authorities would need to block entire servers of these companies, disrupting hundreds of businesses, according to the activists.<\/p>\n

\u201cEssentially, it\u2019s similar to forcing authoritarian regimes to kill everyone in a protest because they can\u2019t tell the real agitators from the bystanders,\u201d said Adam Fisk, a Los Angeles-based programmer who in 2013 founded an app called Lantern that is designed to outmaneuver censors. Lantern uses the method along with other groups such as anticensorship activist group Greatfire.org and anonymous communications software provider Tor. [Source<\/strong><\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

GreatFire has written about their efforts to “liberate” blocked websites (including China Digital Times) using this method<\/strong><\/a>, which they term “collateral freedom”:<\/p>\n

As has been widely reported, VPNs have been severely disrupted in China. We have a different approach to circumvention. We host content with the world\u2019s leading content delivery networks (CDNs). For the censors to block our websites and apps, they would have to block all websites and apps being served by CDNs (content delivery networks). The entire blocking of all CDNs would cause a severe disruption of internet services for everybody in China as CDNs account for over 50% of all global web traffic. The economic damage caused by such a disruption would be major. We believe that the Chinese authorities would not dare block all websites and apps being served by CDNs because they understand the economic implications of this action. [Source<\/strong><\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Soon after the Wall Street Journal article was published, GreatFire experienced severe DDOS attacks which rendered the mirror sites they had set up inaccessible<\/strong><\/a>. Charlie from GreatFire writes on their blog:<\/p>\n

We are not equipped to handle a DDoS attack of this magnitude and we need help. Some background:<\/p>\n