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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.)
... and yes in the "blocking freedom" event, China has already taken the gold!
FLR
Recently I read that people were arrested and/or beaten because they didn't promote the Olympics. Is it strange that the chinese govt blocks EVERYTHING that protests against it?
I can see politics entering a free for all site like Slashdot, but Sourceforge??? While I personally think it's disgusting that China even GOT the Olympics and find their regime and it's actions reprehensible, there are proper forums for such matters. Sourceforge isn't one of them.
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.
Their homepage has some information on there asking people to protest the olympics.
Of course a piece of editing software can't itself consciously object to a global event. No software AI is that advanced, not even in a text editor.
... though it's my understanding that Emacs comes close.http://mediagoblin.org/
I heard those lousy pirates in China were downloading files from that site without paying! Another victory in the war against copyright infringement!
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...
Yea, there's no text editing software that couDOWN WITH COMMUNIST BEIJING! FREE TIBET!ld ever object.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
By the same token I could say that free software is a perfect capitalist market with an entry cost only proportional to the difficulty to read the code.
Anyone can bend the concepts like that.
Except that an OSS project is voluntary. Totalitarian Marxism is not. It is imposed by a central Government and you have no option to fork the code...
It should be a rule to keep one's politics separate from such projects.
In Open Source? One might as well ask Stallman to run Vista.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I guess I don't understand your comment because you seem to be saying "good riddance!"... but why should the open-source community be happy that a government firewall is fracturing the community?
Why?
Actors feel free to express their ideas on politics, some corporations do not hesitate to sponsor or take position for a given cause.
Why should FREEsoftware refrain from doing so?
It's even distributed under GPL v2 which means they are not even forbidding those with whom they disagree to use it.
May I use your sig please?
Tell your editor that "communist China" has been down for quite some time. "China the generic fascist state" still stands, it seems.
The Olympic Brand is in very serious trouble
>I think it's idiotic for these project leaders are attaching their pet causes to software with bunch of
>contributors.
And I think you miss something fundamental about "Free as in Speech." I'd go as far as to say you are supporting the suppression of free speech with your comment.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It was one project page, notepad++. If a person wants to protest on their own personal project page, that's a perfect place to do it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"Silly ChiComms never learn, Napalm(TM) sticks to kids!"
Well I think the difference is the the US and British gov't stand for the ideals of freedom. I don't think freedom is something that exists... I think it's something we have to work towards. Sometimes we're not always as close as we'd like, but the ideals are still there. China has no interest and no desire for freedom of any kind. Ironically, they don't even like free software. China seems to work on the premise that if you block enough information for the outside people will begin to think they have it better than the rest of the world, and maybe they do... but I doubt it.
As a conscientious human being, you have a duty to speak out against injustice when you see it. If you have a large audience because of your software, you have a responsibility to use that platform. As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you want change, you have to speak out, you may even have to be a bit disruptive. Yeah it sucks for the rest of us, but it would suck even more if no one ever spoke up.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They're not fascist, they're totalitarian. Similar, but different.
Not a sentence!
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.
The code can be a bitch too.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
As it stands right now, entire sourceforge is being punished because of actions of some idiot who decided to tie his political grievances into a notepad application that has fuckall to do with Tibet.
That is interesting, because I thought it was China that was being punished because they have an overly controlling government that believes in suppressing freedom(apparently as in speech and beer in this case).I don't see the developer as the bad guy who keeps SF out of China, isn't it more the repressive chinese regime that is blocking SF because someone executes his right of free speach? So shouldn't we all rather be mad a this regime than at the guy who thinks he can say what he thinks (whether you agree or disagree with the content or form of delivery)?
How often do I have to say it ? To hell with the Chinese government. They punish their own, then expect us to shake their hand and play nice ? They promised the IOC things would change for the better, then days after they secured the 2008 events, they turned around and bragged about how they were going to eliminate the Falun Gong movement, the Dalai Lama and the muslim separatists. So why the fuck are we still letting them host the olympics ? Does no one remember Moscow 1980 ?
I've boycotted Chinese IP ranges for years, and I'm boycotting the Beijing Olympics. What that country needs is a coup d'état, and the Chinese people need to know the rest of the world will take side with them when the walls fall.
Every nation is guilty of crimes against humanity, but at least the others have the decency to bow their heads and lie about it. The Chinese gov't parades around, flaunting their total disregard for equality. I don't see why we should tolerate it.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Cynical Idealist
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.
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
M-x boycot-olympics -- Yup, it's in there...of course it crashed it when invoked, but that might be the expected result...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080623/ts_nm/olympics_mosque_dc
China demolishes mosque for not supporting Olympics: group
Mon Jun 23, 3:56 AM ET
BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities in the restive far western region of Xinjiang have demolished a mosque for refusing to put up signs in support of this August's Beijing Olympics, an exiled group said on Monday.
The mosque was in Kalpin county near Aksu city in Xinjiang's rugged southwest, the World Uyghur Congress said.
The spokesman's office of the Xinjiang government said it had no immediate comment, while telephone calls to the county government went answered.
"China is forcing mosques in East Turkistan to publicize the Beijing Olympics to get the Uighur people to support the Games (but) this has been resisted by the Uighurs," World Uyghur Congress spokesman Dilxat Raxit said in an emailed statement.
Beijing says al Qaeda is working with militants in Xinjiang to use terror to establish an independent state called East Turkistan.
Oil-rich Xinjiang is home to 8 million Turkic-speaking Uighurs, many of whom resent the growing economic and cultural influence of the Han Chinese.
Dilxat Raxit added that the mosque, which had been renovated in 1998, was accused of illegally renovating the structure, carrying out illegal religious activities and illegally storing copies of the Muslim holy book the Koran.
"All the Korans in the mosque have been seized by the government and dozens of people detained," he said. "The detained Uighurs have been tortured."
The Olympic torch relay passed through Xinjiang last week under tight security, with all but carefully vetted residents banned from watching on the streets and tight controls over foreign media covering the event.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie)
(For more stories visit our multimedia website "Road to Beijing" at http://www.reuters.com/news/sports/2008olympics; and see our blog at http://blogs.reuters.com/china)
In Open Source? One might as well ask Stallman to run Vista.
"In Closed Source? One might as well ask Gates to run Debian."
Whether a project is open source or closed source is irrelevant in this context and people who continually pretend that open source is any more political than closed source are talking nonsense.
All decisions, including monetary decisions, that affect other people are political decisions, whatever marketers might like to pretend.
---
Beware deceptive astroturfers.
I agree that China is very bad when it comes to freedom, and that the country would have been better off if the Coomunist Party hadn't turned on the revolutionary partners they had in overthrowing the Monarchy. However, China hasn't had free thought in probably a millenia or more.
You cannot use European filtered glasses and understand the Chinese mind (although there were visionaries in China during the revolution). Sure, there are many enlightened Chinese now, but life in China is still much the way it has been for over a thousand years (altough probably better for many and worse for some). Freedom is a new concept in China, not even a hundred years old. I think over all, they aren't doing too bad for a people just discovering free thought. Japan too struggles with this foreign concept. In Japan it is still often "the nail that sticks out that gets hammered down". Whereas, in many European cultures, "the nail that sticks out" often gets pulled out to see how it works (although, from what I read - the younger generation in Japan has made the transition).
So, while we should continue to pursue a path to bring China and the other freedom denying countries into the light, one should try to keep a mind on the cultural heritage and other other factors when approaching them.
In the end, free thinking will win out, because it open up many more avenues than any other mind set. Of course with free-thinking, I think you also get more crime. It's all Yin-Yang in the end. Eventually there will be a tipping point and a cascade event in China, much like I think Japan has recently undergone.
Of course, I could be totally wrong.
So in other words, they learned how to handle networks from Comcast. Just great, now they have RSTs and nukes!
Great Intellect...
Thanks for the link... This is so funny. The notepad++ homepage loads from here in China, but sourceforge.net won't load. The only thing that won't load is the boycott logo. Here's a screenshot.
Posting from Shanghai.
There are at least a couple of methods to the GFW. One, which you mentioned, is the bi-directional RST packet method. This is typically reserved for the higher infractions, such as searching in google or yahoo for the religious group "Fa1unG 0ng" ( i can't actually spell it out, lest the RST packets disconnect me from slashdot for a while). Or sometimes, there will be something similar, like tÂbet (inverted exclamation used here for 'i' - ) in a web page - the page will load halfway, the GFW will see that and then the page will disappear with a "the connection was reset" (in firefox, of course). Different keywords are bad at different times for different people. Lack of reliable and clear No-No words keeps people unsure and reluctant to take chances, which is undoubtedly more effective than telling people exactly what they can't do. For the *most* part, domains are not blocked this way. There *are* some exceptions, like xanga.com, for whatever reason.
Second: Usually, IP blocks (or full-domain/subdomain blocks, which i think are just IP blocks) come in the form of a connection that times out, or firefox resulting in a "The server at sourceforge.net is taking too long to respond." (IE produces the same error for both the above mentioned situations). It is my belief that the method in one of the parent posts (null-route or something to that effect) is used for these type of blocks.
The reason, I guess, is that the first kind of block, where the server is sending out lots of RST packets, and has to *SCAN* the entire payload of each POST/GET, and its entire response, is very resource-heavy, and having to scan for too much stuff would be a lot more expensive than just Null-routing a bunch of IP addresses.
For the second kind of block, a proxy server works quite well (furthering my suspicion that it's actually just an IP block). For the first kind (RSTpacket kind), you need a secure connection like a VPN, or other terminal-type connection where plaintext is not so visible.
The reporter on this Reuters piece, Ben Blanchard, has lived and worked in China for many years and is widely regarded in China as one of the best of his generation in terms of China expertise. He speaks Mandarin fluently and reads and writes both traditional and simplified.
No one, including China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has ever suggested that he is "anti-China" not biased against either China or its government.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I'm not sure I follow, but I'll try. If you want to add a "Free Tibet!" splash screen, please do. If you want to create a patch that others can use, by all means do. If you want to submit the patch, feel free. Just don't expect the patch to be accepted by anyone. If it gets accepted, don't be surprised if someone else submits a patch to remove it or forks a version lacking the patch or makes the splash screen optional. They'd be free to do so as well.
I'm not sure were suppression comes into it unless you mean that rejecting your patch would be suppression. You can publish you patch or a forked version of the package all you want. You've no right to expect other to publish your work though. I'm free to not repeat what you say.
Unless you expect someone to hunt you down and destroy all copies of such a patch. If thats the case, I'm not qualified to help you. Maybe you need to move?