Well, a weird thing happened the other day (and not for the first time).
Turns out if you visited/commented on Facebook, you (and 10% of web traffic) took a trip to China, South Korea and back. Yep: Route-Jacking.
Facebook traffic for AT&T customers was routed through Chinese and Korean servers for some unspecified amount of time, raising privacy concerns.
Some of the network traffic heading to Facebook’s servers in Palo Alto, Calif., was re-routed to first pass through Chinese and Korean servers, on March 22. and was thought probably an accident.
“A similar incident surfaced almost exactly a year ago on April 8, 2010, when a Chinese ISP incorrectly published a set of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) instructions that could have potentially affected 37,000 networks. The incident lasted only 18 minutes, and China Telecom, the country’s largest ISP, denied trying to hijack Internet traffic. Experts speculated it was an accident because of how quickly it was fixed.”
If you’ll remember, I discussed BGP’s and how the net could be brought down by simply increasing the length of time in reporting ‘backups’ or ‘busy’ signals causing a massive net clog up.
I think you should take a look at the article. For me, I’d really like to know that when I’m communicating from inside the US, with a site inside the US, my info-packets won’t be “inspectable” by a country whose policies I eschew and be (perhaps) put on a list for questioning should I ever decide to visit there as a tourist. I also want none of my personal information in their hands.
Source article: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Facebook-Traffic-Diverted-to-China-Raising-Privacy-Concerns-130825/