back to article Blue Coat owns up to Syrian Web-blocking

Blue Coat Systems has fingered itself as one of a number of US companies whose Web filtering kit is being used by the Syrian government. The company has told the Wall Street Journal that the Syrian government’s online crackdown is being partly enabled by its devices. However, the filtering, WAN optimization and deep packet …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hang these lying bastard CEOs and be done with it. These are not people that should be allowed to exist in a world that they so willingly work against.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Big Brother

      > Hang these lying bastard CEOs

      Your national-socialism is duly noted. Go jump under a train, mmmokay?

      Back to :

      >> out of a shipment it believed was bound for Iraq.

      Please explain me how this is any better? Syria is not considered an "ally" but they torture, control and put down as much as Maliki. Hell, they even torture on demand, if the US needs a quiet cellar free from any FOIA requests. I don't get it.

      Ah hold on, they are "against" Israel.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    but

    the same capabilities are enshrined in uk/us law as a *requirement* of the telcos to provide lawful intercept.

    isnt crying foul when someone else does it a bit hypocritical?

    1. Ramazan
      Joke

      used for lawful intercept

      Not at all, because laws in UK/US are used to right the wrongs, while in Syria to .. vice versa, of course, how else? Now shouldn't someone come and teach those barbarians what law really is?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "We totally thought it was going to Iraq"

    1. Ramazan
      Coffee/keyboard

      it believed was bound for Iraq

      Where it would've been used to protect Iraqi people's rights and freedoms, of course?

  4. XMAN

    Why is it embarrassing?

    Why is it embarrassing? They didn't sell their kit there, nor did they get caught selling their kit there.

    Someone bought their kit and then sold it on. There's nothing they can do about that.

  5. Jason.Cole
    Big Brother

    Blame manufacturer for having their stuff stolen?

    So, Blue Coat's hardware was not sold to Syria, but the gear ended up in Syrian Government hands? Sounds like their gear got stolen, or sold illegally.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sure

      And no one has ever, ever looked the other way in order to sell their pricey kit to dubious regimes via quite legit intermediaries.

    2. Adam White

      RE:Blame manufacturer for having their stuff stolen?

      "Sounds like their gear got stolen, or sold illegally.."

      Or just resold by the Iraqi customers to someone in Syria - nothing illegal about that (in Iraq). There's a good chance the Iraqis ordered it on behalf of Syria in the first place.

      Export controls are a bit of security theatre, once the stuff is out of American hands it's legal to do what you want with it.

  6. Mike Bell
    Headmaster

    Thanks, Bluecoat

    I had some fun & games with Bluecoat myself.

    We found that some people in Europe were being routed through their devices to our dynamic websites. And their dumb boxes were substituting query string parameters with invalid character sequences (doubly URL-encoded ampersands, for example). Net result: broken websites. I'd have probably been stuffed if they hadn't given themselves away by injecting their name into the request headers.

    I thought I'd be helpful and point out to them that their boxes were making schoolboy mistakes but it didn't get me very far. In the end I implemented an inconvenient workaround for their interference in my own code.

    A lovely waste of my time all round.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    OK if Iraq does it, not if Syria does it...

    So, um, why exactly is it OK for the government to be filtering the internet in Iraq, but not in Syria?

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