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Github Under JS-Based "Greatfire" DDoS Attack, Allegedly From Chinese Government
An anonymous reader writes: During the past two days, popular code hosting site GitHub has been under a DDoS attack, which has led to intermittent service interruptions. As blogger Anthr@X reports from traceroute lists, the attack originated from MITM-modified JavaScript files for the Chinese company Baidu's user tracking code, changing the unencrypted content as it passed through the great firewall of China to request the URLs github.com/greatfire/ and github.com/cn-nytimes/. The Chinese government's dislike of widespread VPN usage may have caused it to arrange the attack, where only people accessing Baidu's services from outside the firewall would contribute to the DDoS. This wouldn't have been the first time China arranged this kind of "protest."
With Git, you have a full copy of the repo just by virtue of having "checked out" a copy.
Quick nitpick: that would be a clone, not a checkout.
For the non-git-users among us:
git clone: copy that repository to my local file-system. (All branches are copied across. This is normally over ssh or https.)
git checkout: give me the specified branch. (Doesn't require use of the network.)
git fetch: update the local store of the repository to reflect the current state of the repository on the server.