Good morning SuperForest!
And what a fine morning it is.
There are two pieces of news I read recently that totally blew my mind and reminded me of the power of the internet to both create and destroy.
The first is that the Kremlin recently admitted that it’s anti-fascist youth group the Nashi were responsible for the 2007 cyber attacks that shut down the country of Estonia. The young hacker group brought Estonia’s internet to a complete standstill by launching a DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service) on the country’s servers.
So basically a government sponsored group of kids used computers to overload another country’s internet, effectively bringing all electronic commerce in that country to a halt. This would be like a World of Warcraft guild electronically taking out Jamaica.
This is astounding news. Jaw-dropping in its implications. What astounding power! Only keystrokes needed to shut down a country.
A DDoS attack basically runs like this: Hackers use zombied computers to try to repeatedly load a web page. Try to load the same web page enough times, from enough computers and the server hosting the web page shuts down. Do this again and again, and with enough computers requesting web pages and enough servers shutting down, and you’ve effectively shut down the whole country. That’s what they did. And the Kremlin is admitting to backing it.
Wild times, these. (Crazier still, it’s only the second biggest cyberattack to date. Here’s numero uno, Titan Rain, launched against the US.)
Without bothering to condemn or condone, let’s jump straight to learning from this. States and countries need better protection against cyberwarfare, that much is certain. What other information can we parse from this? Teenage Russian hackers are highly skilled, but were their attacks fueled by nationalism, teenage unrest, merely boredom? A mix of all three? Something I’ve not mentioned?
If the Nashi can destroy, which it clearly can, what then could it create? And what steps is Estonia taking to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?
We shall wait and see.
And number two on the list of cyber-news that will astound… have you heard the news about the “grass-mud horse“?
If not, let us clue you in on a grand joke being played on the censors of China’s internet by clever Chinese citizens.
It seems that the words: “Grass-mud horse” in Chinese are a vile obscenity. But only in spoken Chinese! In Chinese characters, the name is once more benign. Obscenities are not tolerated on China’s internet, but the “grass-mud horse meme” is proliferating like mad anyways… How? And why?…
From the NY Times:
“Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.
Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”
“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”
Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said in an interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility of censorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want to express, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a water flow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, or overflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”
Here is that outlet taken form:
“An alpaca-like animal — in fact, the videos show alpacas — it lives in a desert whose name resembles yet another foul word. The horses are “courageous, tenacious and overcome the difficult environment,” a YouTube song about them says.
But they face a problem: invading “river crabs” that are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, “river crab” sounds very much like “harmony,” which in China’s cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been “harmonized” — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintao’s regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society.
In the end, one song says, the horses are victorious: “They defeated the river crabs in order to protect their grassland; river crabs forever disappeared from the Ma Le Ge Bi,” the desert.”
I read recently that the internet treats any form of censorship as a form of damage, it immediately begins routing information around the “damage.” And thus the “emotions as water” analogy is a perfect one. So, if emotions, like information resist all forms of censorship and actively seeks ways to express themselves, are emotions the internet? Or is the internet our emotions?
It’s all so fascinating! One thing’s for sure, little by little China’s citizens are growing ever more aware of the electronic thought oppression they live under and are actively working to subvert it.
Here’s the full story from the Michael Wines @ the Times.
Behold the power of the internet. It can bring down, it can build up, it can tear apart, and it can seal together.
But it is at it’s heart just a reflection of its creators, and it is there to show us what WE are capable of, and how to learn from our own actions.
We at SuperForest are so pleased to be along for the ride!
What a wild world this is where children can stop a country with silicon, and a mythical creature can fight for freedom of thought for billions of people.
I love love love this planet.
-Jackson
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