Sourceforge.net Blocked In Mainland China

gzipped_tar contributed a link to Moonlight Blog, which says that "SourceForge, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to be blocked in Mainland China. The current blocking may be related to the recent anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games, which will begin on 8 August. Some days before, a very popular free source code editor in SourceForge named Notepad++ start to boycott Beijing 2008. The project's developer said that the action is not against Chinese people, but against Chinese government's repression against Tibetan unrest earlier in this year. SF.net has once been banned by China in 2002. However, the ban was lifted later in 2003." gzipped_tar adds: "As a SourceForge user in Beijing, I can confirm this first-hand. I also tried traceroute to sourceforge.net, only to find the connection being dropped at a Beijing ISP's gateway router. It appears that the projects' respective homepages are available even if they are hosted by SF, but the summary and download pages are blocked." (As you probably know, Slashdot and Sourceforge share a corporate overlord.)

Comments

Boycott China!

[jellie]

If there are posts on Slashdot advocating for the boycott of China and the Olympics, would the government block access to Slashdot?

Yes, this is a test.

I'm in Beijing right now and it loads OK

[sith]

I just loaded sourceforge.net from Beijing. Admittedly I'm in a hotel, but my connection appears to otherwise be filtered like all the others I've used in China, so I don't imagine there's anything special about this case.

So, perhaps I'm just lucky, or perhaps it's not really blocked...

Re:I'm in Beijing right now and it loads OK

[pangloss]

I can't access it from Shanghai. However, if the Sourceforge website is being blocked, it's not from a tcp reset as is typical for most (all?) of the sites blocked by the Great Firewall. Sourceforge is just timing out so it's entirely possible this is all just paranoia. Notably, svn access is working just fine--which is to say, just as slowly as ever.

Tempted to put up pro-Tibet things on my website

[naken]

I'm tempted to put up pro-Tibet / anti-Chinese government things on my website just so they block me. Maybe it will help cut down on hacker attempts and spam email.

Spread a good message and hinder the jerks.. it's win-win if you ask me.

Re:Why would we care?

[amRadioHed]

The code can be a bitch too.

Re:How is it blocked

[GuidoW]

As far as I know, the great firewall of China works by sending RST-packets to both ends of an unwanted connection as soon as one is detected.

Re:How is it blocked

[KiloByte]

Idea: could you split packets between "Ti" and "bet"?

Reassembling the whole TCP stream for every flow would take a heap of memory and quite a bit of CPU, so I really doubt anyone they'll try that.