I’m all for avoiding nationalistic dog whistles when discussing things, but both China and Russia have rightfully earned their places as bad actors on the internet.
Add that to the fact that there are of course bad actors in countries including the US who happen to have proxies in other countries. Geolocating the IP address tells us nothing.
The largest botnets came from a variety of nationalities and are rarely Chinese. Conficker was allegedly from the Ukraine, and a Swede plead guilty. Alureon came from Estonia. Mariposa from spain.
Stop with the emotionally-charged flame baiting based on shallow data and anecdotal information.
Geolocating the origination points of an exploit is extremely useful. Your point of other countries using proxies being the prime reason. The simple fact is if China and Russia wanted to limit the number of attacks originating from their IP blocks they could do so. Since they more or less allow it to continue they are a common source of malicious traffic, and geo blocking will significantly reduce the number of attempted exploits you experience.
The crime is hacking, and your attempts to “expose” Chinese hackers is more like an agenda to prejudice Chinese even if statistically many Chinese-originated traffic is attempting to hack you.
In the chance that the hacking is actually caused by American hackers routing their traffic through China, then what purpose does your Chinese assumption serve except to encourage others to profile and prejudice Chinese?
In a more realistic example of how your comments may incite racial prejudice for no good reason is that it is actually very likely the biggest botnets have Chinese victims (because they are poor, run Windows XP still, and generally have very poor internet security practices). Oh, and also they happen to have the most people on Earth, so statistically any given thing would be mostly Chinese.
So, unless you are absolutely certain that being Chinese makes you a criminal hacker I would recommend leaving race or nationality out of the discussion.
These are archetypes, i.e. popularly associated examples of particular actions. But I'm not sure if they're full-blown stereotypes, where they get over-applied to members of that group. People don't believe that all Chinese and Russians are hackers, that all Nigerians are email scammers, that all Mexicans are drug overlords, etc.
Stereotypes tend to be more insidious. Many people (in America) do believe that Blacks and Mexicans are criminals, that Chinese are great at math, etc., to the degree that it changes how they actually treat people. So I think these are much worse and shouldn't be equated.
That said, despite the above analysis, I can see how being Chinese you would still cringe when you see the phrase "Chinese hacker" being used casually. I'm an ethnic minority and have felt similarly in similar situations.
"Black" refers to an ethnicity of a given group of people. Or their skin color, if you want things simple.
These are non-interchangeable terms, so by asking to switch them you are indicating they are interchangeable. You are doing this because you think it's important to keep people from blaming an individual based on group membership.
Yet, it remains that the CPC is something else beyond a person, a culture or a people. Defending it is irrational, but maybe people want to stand up for something important to them and think that defending everything's right to exist and speak its mind is more important than existence itself.
They just compromised a bunch of random computers in China and Russia, running an old copy of Windows XP, and built themselves a botnet.
What further evidence do you have, other than an IP address?
Personally, given that the Chinese will likely dominate the world over the course of the next century, I'd be less worried about insults for ethical/antiracism reasons (they're going to be the ascendant ethnicity and culture soon, don't worry- they'll be fine!) and more worried about insulting them or the PRC for reasons of self-preservation.
Whiiiiich of course assume that that's homogeneous, which, obviously, it isn't. Just like "Western morals" aren't (I'm trying to be good faith in parsing that and I can't figure out what you mean by western morals).
So when you say "The Chinese will be the ascendant ethnicity and culture," do you mean the rural American scapegoat? Aka, chopsticks, epicanthic folds, and Simplified Chinese? I could see how that could be the meat and potatoes of the argument, because even if what that actually ends up meaning in reality is that though a separatist Democratic movement overthrows the CCP, the (future) USA populist government successfully redefines the Chinese Threat to include this completely different political structure to fall under the umbrella of "Chinese," which society has allowed to mean what I'm arguing we should prevent it to mean.
I can say where you're completely wrong - it's not mildly humorous to find me in this position. It's fucking hilarious. Of all political considerations on earth nothing heats my blood more than the evils of Xi Jinping and the tyrannical PRC regime. They are bullies, they violate human rights, and they should be overthrown. I have to balance this against my love of all the good things that Chinese culture brings to the table, just by nature of being a bunch of humans with a rich ancestral background forming their language, food, traditions, etc. And by Chinese I again refer to that concept vague even in any of the languages that adopted the Chinese writing system.
Image the following comment: "You better buy a good bike lock, else you're at risk of having it stolen by a black man."
A comment like the one above would spark near universal outrage at the commenter, and with good reason. It's racist, and the original comment here is the same. Unnecessarily racist.
As such, a more accurate comparison than "black man stealing a bike" would be to something like a "Nigerian scammer," which is an archetype I don't think most of us have a problem with. Other examples I never see complaints about: "Russian hacker," "American imperialist," etc.
This isn't really true on it's own, and besides, isn't even a good faith interpretation. In an America where rural Asian-ethnicity people are facing discrimination because of covid being called "Chinese Virus," I think it's bold to claim that the concept of China as a country and Chinese as a racial heritage are not conflated.
That's not flavor.
