GitHub may have been blocked in parts of China | Hacker News Reader

GitHub may have been blocked in parts of China

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64 pointssexy_seedbox41 comments

Hi, I'm in Shanghai and can reach Github fine, and there are no engineers speaking about github being blocked within China.

Also, in Shanghai, also works fine without VPN. The GFW can vary by province. I remember HN being blocked in Shenzhen but not Shanghai six years ago.

There are a website called https://www.17ce.com/, it's a speed test service, but their server mainly located in China (Of course, it's a Chinese website), so it can be used to test status of some GFW blocks.

That website tells me GitHub is fine, and that's all, I guess.

This is the speed test result for Google.com https://imgur.com/eOoxthu

This is the result for GitHub.com https://imgur.com/T9o0U79 (Red == Delay was very bad)

If they’re blocking using DNS, maybe GitHub is still in cache for you?

I thought that also, but no, I can access it on my computer and my phone, so I think it's just an overreaction on OP's part.

Maybe is the response to the 996 movement. https://996.icu/#/en_US

Interesting link, thanks for sharing.

It seems like the github repo of that site is being flooded with issues:

https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU/issues

Not sure if they are fake users or not

Yeah was going to say this might be relevant

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/f5et2r4-IePUTv8AvElpsQ

The linked site shows it as up. Was probably a temporary connectivity issue. Other tests show a response time of 10+ seconds, so this site could have just timed out.

I'm in China and it seems to be working fine.

A sad day for OSS indeed. A lot of great Chinese developers have helped me over the years.

I have exactly the opposite experience. As a Go developer, I'm used to seeing Chinese developers and users speaking Chinese in the issue tracker showing no regard and respect to the rest of the world.

Not that I condone blocking github in China, but my experience with the Chinese is less than stellar.

> showing no regard and respect to the rest of the world.

What the fuck? They're not showing "respect" because they don't speak English?

Yes, English is the "universal" language, whether we like it or not, and speaking in another language in a public place (such as a github issue tracker) is disrespectful, because it's like gatekeeping information and knowledge.

No it's not. This is imperialist thinking. There is no universal language.

If you want to understand what they're saying hire a translator or use an online service. They're not using some obscure language only a few people understand.

Get out with your western centric thinking.

I think you could have made your point without resorting to personal attacks.

Hmm. No.

Pretty disappointing. China has blocked GitHub multiple times in the past [1], each time unblocking it due to backlash and criticism. Hopefully they unblock it again soon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China

I have a friend in China who's trying to learn software development by himself. It's ridiculously hard compared to the west. It shouldn't be underestimated how Wikipedia, Stackoverflow and Github can increase your learning speed.

Sounds strange. Programming resources usually aren't blocked here - even when they're on Wikipedia. StackOverflow isn't blocked, and GitHub hasn't been blocked either.

E: Excluding Google search I've only encountered one blocked programming resource when sporadically programming on my spare time here: golang.org - which I'm guessing is because it's on hosted on Google's servers.

Yeah but how do you search for stuff there if google doesn't work? I.e. you try to learn "udp hole punching" how do you get the relevant wikipedia, stackoverflow etc pages?

https://cn.bing.com or https://baidu.com

Chinese Bing has an interesting feature where it pop ups a dictionary definition when you hover over any English word in the search results. Even with that, not everyone's English is good enough to understand Wikipedia/StackOverflow/... so they use Baidu Baike/Zhihu/... as alternatives.

Does China block specific parts of wikipedia then? How do they know what part of wikipedia you're visiting?

Chinese Wikipedia is blocked. I thought parts of English Wikipedia was blocked somehow as well, but seems like that's outdated information (after they started enforcing https in June 2015[0]). You'll find a list of the blocking methods on the Great Firewall wiki article[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#China [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall#Blocking_method...

On one hand this sucks, on the other hand, this is the precise audience that knows how to set up a VPN.

This has been occasionally happening since 2013. Most of the times it's just temporary.

There are plenty of Chinese repos on there. Sucks to have your code hosting platform banned.

It's working fine in Shenzhen. I cleared cache and still able to use it fine.

Very good news. For alternative open source git providers. And for p2p git versions. One on zeronet and one on ipfs. Wait, git is p2p itself in its core? So p2p issue boards with search may be OK.

What alternative platforms do Chinese developers use?

I use Coding [1] but Gitee [2] is also popular.

[1] https://coding.net/

[2] https://gitee.com/

Wow, gitee's UI looks familiar: https://gitee.com/assets/homepage/screenshots/repo_index.png

no vpn,it's working fine in GuangZhou.

But why? I can understand blocking Google, FB etc. and that's well discussed. Why block GitHub?

See the 996 thing in another comment.

Don't most Chinese devs in China use VPN to access Github anyways?

Using a VPN usually slows down your connection quite a bit if it's located outside the GFW, so most devs in China probably aren't using a VPN to access GitHub (myself included).

i am in WuHan, it has been blocked.

Looks fine in Beijing.

Fine in Hubei now.

Your own link says otherwise. How are people upvoting this?

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