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Comment by cmpb | Hacker News Reader

Its because the requests aren't actually coming from China. China is redirecting worldwide users from Baidu to GitHub. Sorry, I don't have the link handy, but it was in that WSJ article on the front page.

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I do understand this, but if it's Chinese government behind attack the reason why they doing this it's these anti-censorship projects hosted on GitHub. Considering GitHub already supported censorship in Russia I see no reason why don't they just block access from China to projects that Chinese gov don't like.

Because Github does not want to be complicit in Chinese government censorship, and if they blocked what that government obviously wants them to block, then they would be.

> Because Github does not want to be complicit in Chinese government censorship

I think you are missing the guy's point: what is the difference between Russian censorship and Chinese censorship? Github made a deal with Russia - why not also China?

I know this might soUnd Kafkaesque but here it goes: Internet censorship is extralegal in China and the official stance is to deny its existence. They are known to be somewhat proud of the fact that "we respect internet freedom and never took down any websites hosted overseas". There is going to be no deal because that would be an admission of responsibility.

So fact that great firewall exist isn't officially documented?

Didn't know about that, that's make the difference. Usually in totalitarian countries everything is well documented as everybody want to put responsibility on someone else.

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