The Chinese government really hates the Internet, for all sorts of reasons. Probably the biggest one, though, is those damn journalists. Put the bastards in a camp and harvest their organs, they just pop up overseas and keep covering your mistakes and corruption anyway!
Take, for example, Boxun, a Chinese news website. They’re currently heavily covering the Bo Xilai scandal, wherein a Communist bigwig and his wife may have poisoned a British businessman and done a crappy job of covering it up. Said bigwig is currently out of a job, although considering his family connections, he’s not going to be hurting.
Then Name.com, the registrar for Boxun, got an email threatening a DDoS attack. And then it got even more interesting:
We immediately reached out to our customer, the domain owner of boxun.com, and explained the situation. …During the attack Name.com received an additional demand email that stated that unless we handed over the domain to the attackers and told the original owner that it was stolen, the attackers would continue the DDoS attack of our website and nameservers. At this point we helped the customer transfer the domain to another registrar as quickly as possible.
Needless to say, this is hugely illegal, not that the Chinese government really understands the concept as it applies to them. Boxun has a new registrar, and now everybody knows Bo Xilai isn’t just corrupt, he’s a huge wuss about it. Come on, China, when our politicians get caught banging a hooker or stealing, they don’t DDoS the media — they attack them for being biased! Really, get with the program!
(Image via Abode of Chaos on Flickr)