I'm always puzzled by these articles looking at the Great Firewall of China as if it is an alien thing. Much of it was designed in the US, by American engineers, working for companies like Cisco ( http://www.wired.com/2008/05/leaked-cisco-do ). So just ask them. People have even sued companies like Cisco about this ( http://blog.thomsonreuters.com/index.php/suit-over-ciscos-ro... ), but the US government dismissed those cases ( http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2015/03/china%E2%80%99s-go... ).

I read bizarre pieces from New York Times columnists ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/opinion/18kristof.html ) which say "If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he should support an “Internet freedom initiative” pending in Congress. This would include $50 million in the appropriations bill for these censorship-evasion technologies. The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier, and we can help puncture it."

Huh? US corporations built it. The US courts have OK'd it. Why should US taxpayers pay to circumvent the technology that S&P 500 companies like Cisco are building?

One word = money

I'm really glad to see the discussion really highlighting that this is not a problem unique to China:

“Our findings in China add another documented case to at least two other known instances of governments tampering with unencrypted Internet traffic to control information or launch attacks — the other two being the use of QUANTUM by the US NSA and UK’s GCHQ. In addition, product literature from two companies, FinFisher and Hacking Team, indicate that they sell similar ‘attack from the Internet’ tools to governments around the world. These latest findings emphasize the urgency of replacing legacy web protocols like HTTP with their cryptographically strong counterparts, such as HTTPS.”

sasvari: thanks for posting this – it's a great followup to the earlier blogs posts from the authors now that the dust has settled a bit and everyone has had more time to think on it:

https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/

(previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9353785)

DDoSing Github is pretty blatant and hopefully behind the scenes the Chinese have paid a price high enough to think twice about further actions.