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Chinese Government Appears To Be Blocking GitHub Via DNS

Posted by samzenpus on from the not-for-you dept.

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.'"

14 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Duh! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/01/21/1644254/oreilly-giving-away-open-government-as-aaron-swartz-tribute

    through github....

    1. Re:Duh! by stephanruby · · Score: 2

      It's funny, I've hosted customers that had sites blocked by China, and the blocks were always very specific.

      So the blocks would affect the main target with urls like this https://github.com/chinesedissident/* but didn't affect our other customers like this one https://github.com/otherguy/* even if those other customers were using the same domain name.

      In this case however, github makes it so easy to fork/clone the same project, and it's so widely used, the censors probably can't keep the block list up-to-date because the same project can get forked so many times under different name spaces. They probably just gave up and blocked everything.

      In any case, if I was a Chinese-based programmer right now, I'd be very angry. There is bound to be some backlash because of this.

    2. Re:Duh! by stephanruby · · Score: 2

      and in other news.

      An unprecendented number of US-based programmers at Verizon and other major Corporations are taking their sick days today.

  2. Communists Block Communism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    News at 11! ... seriously though you'd think the "communist"/"capitalist" nature of github would appeal to China's government's philosophy or something.

    1. Re:Communists Block Communism by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Funny

      Finally, we have a retort for all those nutjobs:

      Random right-wing American: "Open Source/Free Software/FLOSS is communism!"

      Random hacker: "If so, why do the Chinese block it?"

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:Communists Block Communism by Genda · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Could it be that the Chinese Government is simply totalitarian with just enough wiggle room to allow a little capitalism to flourish for the moment? That the folks currently running China couldn't give a running fsck at a rolling doughnut what Mao thought, and that they are trying to steer 1.3 billion people through a crazy narrow place between keeping the wheels on the socialist cart and dealing with the pressures generated by information technology. On the other hand calling the folks at github "communist/capitalist" suggests that maybe you lack a deeper understanding of either? Perhaps? Of course you might just be making a bad joke in which case.. hahahahahahah :-)

      But really, China is about control and github is about no control, I fail to see the mystery.

  3. Like an Apple nation by Kotoku · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Like an Apple nation by Yvanhoe · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well it IS actually insightful : Apple, fortunately, doesn't rule a country, but his process in approving contents for iPhones is pretty much the same : opaque and arbitrary, depending on hidden agenda and personal preferences. They used to push for no flash, no VoIP, no pornography. They allow themselves to forbid a standard, a technology, or a type of content. Their rejections come with minimal comment.

      No, really, the parallels are striking.

      --
      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
  4. Open Government by JestersGrind · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  5. The rise of Chinese economy and sinophobia by fufufang · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:China... by Genda · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. People's Republic of China by kawabago · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Good riddance, Xi by JimCanuck · · Score: 2


    It is about the train ticket program, many people in China feel cheated losing out to people with that program to automatically snip tickets, over a million train tickets were sold online in a mater of a couple of seconds due to it.

    This is a FIVE day holiday for Chinese New Year, and many millions every year go back home to their traditional villages with their families, and being unable to buy tickets due to such a program is quite upsetting for them.

    Hence the block.

  9. maybe it's because of the Spring Festival homerush by dapic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/