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Great paper! Things that stood while skimming:

- Bidirectional DNS poisoning: China can send forged DNS responses if you try to access certain Chinese domains from outside the GFW. This isn't server-side enforced geoblocking.

- GFW uses a small space of forged IPs, some belonging to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox which may be responsible for a non-negligible overhead in server costs responding to HTTP requests for irrelevant hostnames.

Can FB sue China in court for damages for the cost of serving these forged requests?



No they cannot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity.

They had to pass a special law to allow the 9/11 families to sue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_Against_Sponsors_of_...


Sovereign Immunity would only apply to attempts to sue China in a Chinese court, other courts in other nations may well side with Facebook. Of course these other courts would have limited means to enforce their rulings.


No, it applies in foreign courts as well. That’s why the 9/11 families needed that US law, they didn’t sue in Saudi they sued in New York


> Can FB sue China in court for damages for the cost of serving these forged requests?

Sure they can. They can't win, but they can waste time and money.


Packets from the China mainland to these forged IPs are routed to blackhole at the international network outlet of China. So, normally there is no overhead for sites like Facebook.


Nope. For 2nd item, I don't see a reason why GFW would do that. I did see some domain names resolved to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 which is nice and easy and unlikely going to cause a problem. And in most of cases, the host names were actually correctly resolved but the request either timed out or got a connection reset error etc. as such methods are the cheapest way to block accesses at scale.


you do realize that a concept of a court is completely country specific? what court do you mean?


Courts in China works just as well/bad as in, say, the US. A specific name doesn't change that.


i mean that china isn't an entity that you could sue, any foreign court has no power over china, and suing chineese government in chineese court is a joke(much more than doing the same in us, by the way)


Suing the US government in a US court is only possible insofar as the US government agrees to be sued. It's the principle of sovereign immunity.




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