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Chinese Government Appears To Be Blocking GitHub Via DNS
An anonymous reader writes "Reports are coming in that the social coding site GitHub has been blocked in China. While the service has seen blocks in the country before, this appears to be a much broader denial of service, affecting most, if not all users in the world's most populous country online and offline. GitHub released a statement saying: 'GitHub is still investigating, but it does appear that we’re at least being partly blocked by the Great Firewall of China. We’re looking into it, and will update with more information when we have it.'"
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/01/21/1644254/oreilly-giving-away-open-government-as-aaron-swartz-tribute
through github....
News at 11! ... seriously though you'd think the "communist"/"capitalist" nature of github would appeal to China's government's philosophy or something.
But I am sure that most users of any value for GitHub know how to easily circumvent The Great Firewall. But seriously, this is quite pathetic demonstration on China's part. Whom can GitHub hurt, anyway? Too bad I don't think there is a legal method to challenge the Chinese governments decisions for the Chinese citizens and residents.
It is just like a nationwide apple app store. When they secretly pick who can compete in China and who cannot with these firewall rules they are manipulating The economy and picking winners and losers without merit (usually Chinese companies that knock off Western ideas).
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
They are probably blocking the free download of Open Government from O'Reilly that was a story on Slashdot earlier today. http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/01/21/1644254/oreilly-giving-away-open-government-as-aaron-swartz-tribute
Time was when politicians in most Western countries would point at the Great Firewall of China as an example of a repressive regieme. Now they seek to emulate it.
Well, I think quite a lot of people in the west are afraid of the rise of Chinese economy, fearing that China is going to take over the world one day. I think it is exactly this kind of behaviour that is causing the fear. I am from China. I think China is basically like Soviet Union with slightly more freedom and better economy. The political structure and censorship process are both still very Soviet-like. This kind of news does not do any good for China's international image. Most people in west don't want the world to be ruled by a nation that does not allow people's mind to be free. I personally don't want my thought process to be dictated by the commies from Beijing.
Security seems to be much higher here currently. We are having a more difficult time right now shipping anything such as liquids and chemicals using the local logistics companies within China. I've asked around, and the most common answer is that it's due to it being right before the busiest travel period in China.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Good luck with that considering many of the parts in our computers and communications hardware built in China have serious security compromises in the form of back doors.
The name alone is hysterical! The people have nothing to do with the government of China. The name really should be the Communist Party's Republic of Oppression of the Chinese People. That would fall much more squarely on the truth side of things.
Am I missing something? DNS is the easiest (trivial) block to get around, just enter the dotted quad -- 207.97.227.239 in this case.
If all DNS traffic to their nameservers is blocked, you might need to enter some more (images.github.com) in your hosts file.
Really just a very low hurdle -- kinda like the US fiscal-cliff (just a sidewalk crack).
governments that work on consensus last forever
governments based on intimidation, force, and censorship are doomed
make no mistake, you are going to learn this the hard way (revolt) or the easy way (road map to change)
good luck
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Usual totalitarian bashing aside, this may actually be the real reason:
Back ground info: Spring Festival is coming (this year it's Feb. 10th), which calls for all people to go home to unite with their family. And this makes the train tickets very difficult to obtain and the beginning and ending the holidays. The railway ministry in China has build an online train-ticket buying/reserving system (12306.cn) a couple years back and it is now well known when new tickets would be available online, and they sell out within minutes.
A while ago some Chinese programmer wrote a (naive) browser plugin to automate the ticket reserving operation. A few factors contributed to this plugin causing a lot of extra strain on the already burdened 12306.cn site: it would poll the site repeatedly if the service was not available; as it relies on some Javascript hosted on GitHub and it tries to load that repeatedly as well; the plugin is packaged in some binary distribution of a couple Chinese re-branded browsers which brags about it's ability to "help you grab the ticket".
As a result, it brought down GitHub a couple weeks ago (when the grabbing of this years tickets begin), and the ticket sellout windows went from minutes to seconds.
The railway ministry is pissed and claim that this practice is "illegal" or "immoral" and should be banned. Blocking Github could just be the attempt at blocking that "ticket assistant" plugin: No Github, no plugin.
refernce: http://www.techinasia.com/china-railway-ministry-asks-kingsoft-shut-browser-addon/
I live in china and I can read this. Can't get to github though.
Sure wish it was vice versa :)
Wow! And here I thought, that the high speed trading markets was limited to stock markets and concerts.
Seriously? Train tickets?
That and Nexus 4s.
Anytime you sell a limited commodity below market prices you end up with situations like this. In the case of high-speed trading selling below market prices isn't intended, and the practice is just the result of some people understanding the market better than others (ie a few nanoseconds faster). In the case of most other things there is some strange sense of fairness that dictates that products that are limited in availability be sold at ordinary prices leading to these huge runs.
The solution in this sort of situation is simple - just have a dutch auction. Everybody places bids for their train tickets and whatever price is sufficient to sell all of them is used to settle the trades.
For various reasons this is popularly called "price gouging," but the fact is that gouging of one sort or another is bound to happen. If you do traditional price gouging then those with the most money get the sale. If you instead set up lines (a la iPhone debuts) then those who have the most free time get the sale (oh, and since time is money it works out the same - just pay somebody to stand in line for you). If you instead set up some kind of online first-come-first-serve stampede then those who have the best technology get the sale (and since you can buy technical expertise again it works out the same). And, of course, those who get items in a rush frequently put them up for sale on various black/grey markets and the result is that those with money get their tickets/phones/generators/whatever. In the interest of fairness we end up setting up markets that are both unfair, and inefficient as a bonus (with all kinds of middle-men profiting off of trades that could just be two-party).
Cahokia!
Forever!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it