China blocked ALL international HTTPS for over an hour

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ddesideria89@reddit

a training excersize to see what would break

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Bob4Not@reddit

That’s silly. Network Port 443 is every website, nearly every mobile app, it’s basically everything. They would know it would break nearly everything.

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ArthurBurtonMorgan@reddit

443 is Domain Name Service, specifically.

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Bob4Not@reddit

No, it’s HTTPS, the one your web browser uses, or should use, all the time. Phone apps too. DNS is 53 by default.

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ArthurBurtonMorgan@reddit

Yep… you’re right… I was tired to the point of practically drunk and talking out of my ass. My bad.

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You missed the "international" part. China has been doing significant efforts to pressure services to serve china from within china. They have no way of knowing how many actually do (and not just proxy to outside of the country).

Targeting specific port though seems silly, agree. I would expect them to use a sophisticated DPI, maybe that was indeed a misconfig.

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Takemyfishplease@reddit

Why not both?

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ddesideria89@reddit

DPI and port blocking? misconfigured excercize? what do you mean by "both"?

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UnauthorizedGoose@reddit

It's not silly. Fire drills for engineers and operations teams are a regular thing. Block HTTPS for an hour, document what breaks, document who is using alternative ports and use that data to make your blocking more effective.

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Raddish3030@reddit

Yup. China withdrawal stress test initiated by the CCP and Chinese Military.

Withdraw services. What services break. Which people call and email in a panic.

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AnomalyNexus@reddit

Not just that but also applies pressure on the parts of the systems that aren't internally self-sufficient to change that. Clever way to nudge things along

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pandershrek@reddit

I wonder if this is why my vacation booking website went down last night

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BitOfDifference@reddit

i just block all traffic from china anyways...

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MrLemurBean@reddit

On OUR internet. China and others have created their own internet, the Splinternet. BRICS countries are basically on a completely separate internet running in parallel to ours. Its kind of mind blowing I suggest everyone to take a look.

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improbablydrunknlw@reddit

Can we connect to it in anyway? I've never heard anything about that.

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MrLemurBean@reddit

By design, no. When the patriot act was unveiled, most modernizing countries obviously didn't want to be on the same internet as the US. Its completely independently dropped cable lines on land and in ocean. As for connecting to it, I'm honestly not sure how it would be possible for normal end users.

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-rwsr-xr-x@reddit

Just switching over to the routers that unwrap SSL and TLS with their new quantum computing farms. Nothing to see here.

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Chisignal@reddit

I love the implication that China is so hilariously advanced as to have functioning quantum computers capable of breaking current SSL but also not enough to apply a routing rule in less than a full hour

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who_controls@reddit

Why would they do that?

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Bob4Not@reddit

“The responsible device does not match the fingerprints of any known GFW devices, suggesting that the incident was caused by either a new GFW device or a known device operating in a novel or misconfigured state.”

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Zealousideal_Stuff91@reddit

What does that mean exactly

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Eldrake@reddit

Personally I think it means somebody fucked uppppppp on a config 🤓

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Young_Link13@reddit

All I can discern is that whatever fucked with it wasn't a known part of the GFW. Could be a new device with a bad config that took it all down. Could be something more malicious. Either way, this is interesting and I would love to understand more.

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Oedius_Rex@reddit

Great, hopefully they cut it all off so I won't have any more hackers in my lobbies.

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Unusual_Specialist@reddit

Pull ya money out of banks because shit is about to get shady.

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Scribblebonx@reddit

Almost as if they want to know how things would look if, oh idk say 'hypothetically' some giant underwater cable were cut?

I'm just spitballing, of course

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OppositeArt8562@reddit

Like if they hypothetically planned on invading an island in thr next couple years.

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Familiar_Dot8836@reddit

Can someone ELI5? What does this mean/imply?

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Girafferage@reddit

They are testing some of their interruption of service functionality. I would bet that they tested it locally to determine if it could be enacted globally.

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Outrageous-Quiet3891@reddit

Big reach on the last part lol

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Girafferage@reddit

Eh. Not a massive reach. Complete speculation? Absolutely.

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solipsist2501@reddit

Probably not significant. China is a huge internet node and they pull massive exercises every now and then. It could be to stress test their networks, or it’s some cyber security/intelligence move we will never know.

I remember a few years ago they showed unlimited network bandwidth for like 24 hours they routed all internet traffic through their networks. Did they steal everyone’s data for a day in crazy intelligence move, or just testing their capacity who knows.

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toastmannn@reddit

Not directly significant. GFW is very very complex, with the resources Chinese has (functionally unlimited) and how fast AI tech has been evolving, they were likely testing something.

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