Thursday, November 1, 2012

Media Share: hacking in China


Sorry for today's technical problem :(

It's about a serious high-speed railway accident happened last year resulting in the death of 40 passengers, and near 200 people injured. (The high-speed railway is supposed to be one of the prides of Chinese government for the innovation and highest speed surpassing that of Japan and Germany.) Shortly after the accident, the Ministry of Railway chose to bury the derailed cars without a complete investigation of the real cause of the accident. They simply claimed it was because of the weather--a light destroyed a train signal station. This made Chinese people really angry, criticizing and doubting the government's actions on the Internet through social network websites. And soon the government responded to it by blocking the keywords such as "train accident" on the Internet. 
So this video is a record of the official website of Ministry of Railways being hacked after the gov's restriction of media coverage:



(Youku is a video website which is the Chinese version of Youtube. And there would be ten seconds of ad before the video. Plz start at 00:45)
And the interesting part is that the hacking was done in a hilarious way. This somehow reflects the sense of humor of Chinese hackers and their contempt over the government as well. Also the Chinese people was already filled with painful emotions after the accident, they may be also trying not to make people even more sorrowful.


(More information about the accident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision
The normal official website of Ministry of Railways now: http://www.china-mor.gov.cn/ )

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for posting your media share link, Yiyang. I didn't realize the "hacking" involved having nyan cat invade the Ministry of Railway's web site! Is the first half a minute or so of just nyan cat supposed to make it harder to discover the video? Just wondering.

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