Slashdot Mirror
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....
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
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.
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.
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
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/