Comment by 07d046
7 years ago
An interesting aspect of this is that this is an online protest on a platform that the Chinese government doesn't control. They normally exercise strict control over their internet to prevent movements from getting out of their control (for example, censoring #metoo when it starts trending). Would the Chinese government be willing to block GitHub? Surely that would be damaging to China's tech industry.
What if people started creating repositories with nothing but information about topics that the Chinese government considers sensitive (like the Tiananmen Square massacre or other human rights abuses)?
> online protest on a platform that the Chinese government doesn't control
False (for Chinese residents). China used to block GitHub but stopped doing that when they realized they could politely ask GitHub to block access to certain pages from Chinese IPs. [0]
[0]: https://qz.com/718465/chinas-fierce-censors-try-a-new-tactic...
That appears to be the first and last time they received a request from China. https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns
On the other hand, Russia...
Interesting. I'm curious about whether the time they hijacked Baidu Analytics to launch a huge denial of service attack against GitHub was considered "politely" asking or not.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. I wonder if anything will happen with this protest then. For communists, the Chinese government isn't fond of labor protests.
They've censored the entire website in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China