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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

If Github is truly blocked, that could be devastating for outsourced work, on both sides of the equation.

This just in: Indian Government is taking kickbacks from Bitbucket. /s

Those who use Github knows how to bypass the ban.

I don't think it's helpful to consider this ban a non-issue because it's easy to bypass. It's easy to bypass this time, next time it may be a bit harder, depending on what the government orders ISP's. And there probably will be "next time", depending on the effects of all this.

Also, someone else here asked about legality of bypassing the ban, that is a good question I'd like to see answered, even though I think we all know the answer to that one.

This slippery slope is exactly what happened in China.

- First, they block a few websites: no big deal, I'll just use a VPN.

- Then they block OpenVPN default port: no big deal, I'll just use another port or IPSec.

- Then international connections slow down to a crawl: no big deal, maybe they're not throttling but just having capacity issues, let's wait a bit see if it gets better.

Then one day your realize that what was at first a minor inconvenience is now wasting hours of your life and killing your productivity.

Yes, but we are powerless to change anything. It is not like that we can vote or have any voice in the governing of ourselves.

And even China doesn't block GitHub. It tried once, but backed down soon for unknown reasons.

It's less easy to put workarounds in place for, say, a configuration-managed CI system pulling from github than for your own dev workstation. In theory it's simple, but in practice there's a lot of boilerplate and testing.

I use github, and off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you how to bypass it.

Is it dns based? I guess you could manually set up the correct IP addresses locally for the host names. Other than that, I'd have to read.

VPN pipe most likely. At least, that's what I would do.

My guess is someone will set up a proxy service specifically for this.

So all of a sudden work being outsourced to India needs to go through a VPN located somewhere else in the world. Whoever is doing the work will need to jump through at least a couple of hoops to set that up and keep working through it. Additional costs will be introduced. It's not a show-stopper, but it seems as though it could easily have a material impact.

That's my initial reaction. At the very least this is destabilizing, until they can refine how courts may/may not order such blockages in such surprising ways.

VPN outside India. Really easy to get around.

Would circumventing the ban be considered a serious offence? Not that it would be easy to determine who is doing so, or that they care enough to try.

They'll find a way to bypass that quite easily, however with the amount of outsourcing based in India it will be an inconvenience for some time. Probably not as much as it would've been if it wasn't NY.

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