[outworlder]

> Terrible, this is Internet curfew.

If you think this is bad...

You can't even have a blog in China without authorization. It doesn't matter if you pay "AWS" for a machine. It won't open port 80 or 443 until you get an ICP recordal. Which you can only do if you are in China, and get the approval. It should also be displayed in the site, like a license plate. The reason "AWS" is in quotes is because it isn't AWS, they got kicked out. In Beijing, it is actually Sinnet, in Nginxia it's NWCD

You can only point to IPs in China from DNS servers in China - if you try to use, say, Route53 in the US and add an A record there, you'll get a nasty email (fail to comply, and your ports get blocked again, possibly for good).

In a nutshell, they not only can shutdown cross border traffic (and that can happen randomly if the Great Firewall gets annoyed at your packets, and it also gets overloaded during China business hours), but they can easily shutdown any website they want.

[leroyrandolph]

I laughed when I saw "Nginxia", thinking it was a portmanteau of, well, nginx and wuxia, a Chinese fiction genre. Reality is much less funny when I looked up NWCD, and you likely just made a typo of Ningxia.

[seeknotfind]

"Xia" would map to a single character (code point) in Chinese. For instance, in simplified Chinese, it could be 下 (xia, meaning down), 侠 (martial arts - like the xia in wuxia), or any number of other homophones. Since the characters are already combinatorial, I'm not sure a Chinese speaker would think of this as a portmanteau.

[UltraSane]

AWS in China also doesn't have the Key Management Service, which leads to me to conclude it must be pretty secure.

I added an A record for subdomain and pointed it at Chinese IP addresses. I wonder if I will get that angry email?

[bawolff]

Or they just dont want to be put in the position of having to give out keys.

I think the real paranoid people use cloudHSM.

[Faaak]

Actually, they wouldn't really know unless this domain is used. I guess they check the `Host` header to get the domain that targeted this IP and then check where the MX are hosted.

[Hizonner]

> You can only point to IPs in China from DNS servers in China - if you try to use, say, Route53 in the US and add an A record there, you'll get a nasty email (fail to comply, and your ports get blocked again, possibly for good).

Wait what? So I can DoS any Web site in China by creating a rogue DNS record that points to its IP address, even under a completely unrelated domain? How would they even find those records?

[hunter2_]

I guess they would find it the moment someone in China using a Chinese resolver tries to resolve your rogue record, since that would recurse to one of the root mirrors in China, which presumably feeds this mechanism.

Seems like a very minor speed bump in your plan, though: presumably something like https://www.chinafirewalltest.com would achieve that, or send a few emails for folks to click.

[fc417fc802]

I wonder if this is actually tied to Chinese domains and Chinese run registrars? That way it would be easy to flag the usage of foreign nameservers and there's no DoS risk.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

> It should also be displayed in the site, like a license plate.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht (Mandatory real name & address, not only for business, but private persons with web presence, too.

Same for Domain/DNS(which applies to everything in the European Union))

[fulafel]

What about other protocols, could you run eg Gopher or NNTP? I guess IMAP could work as well.

[kotri]

Not all Western companies comply with Beijing, like Route53, a name I've never heard of; Cloudflare seems to be most popular in China.

But yeah, they can shutdown anything unless proxy server is widely used. as <Nearly 90% of Iranians now use a VPN to bypass internet censorship>.

[darrenf]

AFAIK Route53 is AWS’s managed DNS product, not a company.