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Piracy in China cost film makers $2.7 billion last year, with domestic firms shouldering more than half those losses, according to a study commissioned by a trade group representing the major Hollywood studios. China's film industry lost about $1.5 billion in revenue to piracy last year, while the major U.S. studios lost $565 million, according to data released on Monday by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), whose members include the studio units of Time Warner, Walt Disney Co. and Viacom Inc..The study was the first for China done by a third party, LEK Consulting, for the MPA, which previously did a similar annual study itselfThe 2005 losses to U.S. studios were well above the MPA's own previous estimate of $178 million lost to piracy in 2003.Some 93 percent of all movie sales in China were of pirated versions of films, according to the latest study.
Computer experts from the University of Cambridge claim not only to have breached the Great Firewall of China, but have found a way to use the firewall to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific Internet Protocol addresses in the country. The researchers found that it was possible to circumvent the Chinese intrusion detection systems by ignoring the forged transmission control protocol resets injected by the Chinese routers, which would normally force the endpoints to abandon the connection. "The machines in China allow data packets in and out, but send a burst of resets to shut connections if they spot particular keywords," explained Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge computer laboratory. "If you drop all the reset packets at both ends of the connection, which is relatively trivial to do, the Web page is transferred just fine." Due to the design of the firewall, a single packet addressed from a high party official could block their Web access," said Clayton. Even though this technique would block communication between only two particular points on the Internet, the researchers calculated that a lone attacker using a single dial-up connection could still generate a "reasonably effective" denial-of-service attack. If an attacker generated 100 triggering packets per second, and each packet caused 20 minutes of disruption, 120,000 pairs of endpoints could be prevented from communicating at any one time.
Chinese authorities have announced their intention to step up their efforts to police and control the Internet and other communications technologies, including instant messaging and cell phones. Speaking at a conference in Beijing on June 28, Cai Wu, director of the powerful Information Office of the State Council, or China's cabinet, said new control measures were needed "because more and more harmful information is being circulated online." Another senior official who spoke at the same meeting, Wang Xudong, deputy minister of the information industry, said his ministry's next target would be developing technologies to regulate Web logs and search engines.
