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GitHub blocked in Russia

170 pointsby uldusover 10 years ago

36 comments

hal9000xpover 10 years ago
I live in Russia (Moscow) and I&#x27;m working for leading russian internet company. I&#x27;m very annoyed by current political and economical situation. I was so upset by events happening last months that I simply stopped reading russian news at all. And I spent all the time in places like GitHub, Topcoder, English Wikipedia, Hacker News etc. Yesterday, I&#x27;ve tried to make yet another commit to my private repository and suddenly I failed to connect to GitHub. After basic checking of network, I started searching for a news, and I got it.<p>In a big picture, it&#x27;s not just russian politicians who tight control over the free internet. The main problem in russia is not just politicians, it&#x27;s a vast majority of russian people who voted for Putin and his party and totally support current regime.<p>May be for western people it&#x27;s hard to believe how can it be possible to support this crazy regime. I can tell you that even top managers from leading russian internet company (from my private conversation with them) dreamed about great russian firewall because in that case, they won&#x27;t have competitors like Google. Furthermore even IT guys like Putin regime and don&#x27;t get worry about crazy laws passed against the internet. I assure you in that because many of my colleagues really like Stalin and really like what&#x27;s happening in Ukraine. Almost all people in Russia really hate western world. They don&#x27;t care about currency exchange rates and inflation, they care only about imperialism. When Putin made desision about Crimea, and when people totally supported it, I stopped believe in Russia at all.<p>Russia is a pure soviet country, with pure 100% soviet mindset, vast majority of russian people like idea of self-isolation. This is why Russia has no future as a liberal market-driven country.<p>And this is why I&#x27;m actively looking for a job abroad.
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codeshamanover 10 years ago
Official reason for blocking: the site hosts texts describing methods of suicide. Because Github uses HTTPS only, it&#x27;s impossible to block only the offending pages, so the whole IP range is blocked. Github ignored their requests to remove the offending content, so the site remains blocked.<p>I hope Russian citizens get a big fat boost of morality from blocking Github.<p>Really, it&#x27;s not the alcoholism, injustice, corruption, poverty and now economic collapse that causes people to commit suicide in Russia, it&#x27;s... Github !!<p>This just shows how braindead the people holding power in Russia are. Oh, and these censorship &#x27;laws&#x27; have been adopted by people who&#x27;ve stolen billions and who&#x27;ve built a corrupt police state, which is really scary, because the same people have their fingers on the red button.
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lambdadmitryover 10 years ago
Hello there.<p>I live in Russia, too (St-Petersburg, to be precise), and I would like to discuss the issue on a different angle. Russian government is done anyway (economic situation will finish it in a few years), so why bothering? What is more important, I believe, is GitHub&#x27;s attitude here.<p>You see, GitHub is sending polite-but-firm emails right now, asking users that hosted the file in question to remove it and hinting that they otherwise will remove it themselves. I&#x27;m deeply worried about this, because GitHub faces a tough decision: either it will stand to it&#x27;s ground and stay banned in Russia, or it will comply, possibly changing TOS to be able to remove content if it&#x27;s illegal in some god-forsaken country. Think LGBT-supporting groups and Nigeria, if not Russia.<p>In the first case, they will moderately annoy a most active part of Russian society and loose SOME subscribers — GitHub is for programmers, after all, we can handle VPNs. It will remind people that something is broken about their country, serving a good purpose. In the same time, GitHub will prove itself trustworthy to it&#x27;s true customers — programmers.<p>In the second case, the ban will be lifted, but now they have to comply more and more, as more and more programmers will deliberately post that suicide satire in their repos. GitHub will probably lose less subscribers in the short term, but in the same time they will help the devious &quot;divide and conquer&quot; KGBsque strategy, which is no good. Additionally, GitHub case will become a poster child of Russian Propaganda Machine Winning, which is no good, either.<p>So, it&#x27;s money-vs-face situation, when GitHub is forced to choose between helping one or another party. I strongly hope that they will choose The Right Thing To Do™.
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BonoboBonerover 10 years ago
What next, also StackOverflow blocked? Next headline would be Russian software development comes to a sudden halt<p>Edit: downvoted again. My mind is just not made for this hateful community here.
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znowiover 10 years ago
What a nice attack vector. Deliver a &quot;suicidal&quot; payload to a website, report to Russian authorities and watch it go offline in Russia.<p>It might as well be SO or any other site with user content.
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humanfromearthover 10 years ago
Not sure if anybody offered here, but if you&#x27;re in Russia and looking to leave and Paris sounds like a good place, maybe I could help out. Currently I&#x27;m doing a lean startup and that means that I don&#x27;t have a lot of resources, but I do know a few people who are hiring.<p>The area is: golang, python and js mostly.<p>alex @plugaru org<p>p.s. I speak russian.
austerityover 10 years ago
Interesting... Google Translate did a very decent job on the article, but the comments are all kinds of hilarious. Looks like informal speech is much harder to translate correctly. Although on the second thought it&#x27;s not surprising.
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eklavyaover 10 years ago
Good, let the oppression reach the breaking point sooner and let the people rise and throw away the tyranny.<p>If only that was true :(
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1gorover 10 years ago
Github is down for Russian developers because some anti-Putin political activists are eager to make a point.<p>It works like this:<p>- they push some content deemed illegal in Russia to a github repo (something like instructions on committing suicide or on growing marijuana).<p>- then they themselves post a complain to the Russian internet regulator, accompanied by the link to illegal content;<p>- the ugly bureaucrats machine (which is mostly automatic) bans the whole of Github.<p>- at some point later in the day a human intervenes and unblocks the site, as happened several times in the past.<p>However, by that time the media has picked up the story, and many oppressed Russian developers who don&#x27;t know how to use a US proxy, have received job offers.
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drdaemanover 10 years ago
Sincerely hope GitHub won&#x27;t give up an inch to censorship and handle the situation with &quot;your government is your problems, not ours&quot; attitude.<p>With all seriousness - I think the whole situation just can&#x27;t be solved otherwise. All this censorship things went generally unnoticed and went along the &quot;oh, they&#x27;re blocking evil child molesters&#x27; sites, it&#x27;s alright&quot; line of thought. To raise the awareness, some high-profile sacrifices are necessary. Hope they&#x27;d also block Wikipedia.<p>Disclaimer: yep, I&#x27;m Russian. Had some issues accessing GitHub. Between inconvenience and censorship I&#x27;d chose the former any day.
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valgazeover 10 years ago
Looks like this happened a couple months ago too: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401784" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8401784</a>
kirillplatonovover 10 years ago
This is shit. Few weeks ago I looks to the situation with &quot;black list&quot; afar. I absolutely wasn&#x27;t involved and don&#x27;t believe that this &quot;initiative&quot; will &quot;touch&quot; me someday. Yesterday it happened. Important website that I use everyday was blocked. And now its seriously. I cant access it. My internet provider said that it&#x27;s a law and he can&#x27;t help me. Now I need to setup VPN for commit to github. And I already understand that it&#x27;s temporary solution and the government can forbid VPN too in future.<p>I really don&#x27;t now what to do and how to affect the situation. The most fun thing - that 85% of persons in this country now think that &quot;it&#x27;s just some another porn site was blocked, Putin care us and our children&#x27;s&quot;. Sad reality.
spanasikover 10 years ago
Yes, it is. We have to use VPN in order to pass the filter.
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fedyaover 10 years ago
I suppose not all ISPs are obliged to comply with the ban (or not willing to; or maybe it takes time to propagate). I&#x27;m from Moscow and have not had a problem accessing github.com with my local provider either yesterday or today. However, it is banned on my cell network.
x4mover 10 years ago
Github works for me, I&#x27;m in Yekaterinburg. I don&#x27;t belive that ban, if realy exists and enforced, will last long. They, people with that list, do stupid things from time to time, but it&#x27;s fixed most of the time.
uaygsfdbzfover 10 years ago
Wow, a whole thread about Internet censorship and not one mention of the Tor project and their bridges and obfuscated pluggable transports? Tor is not just for anonymity but also for censorship avoidance.<p><a href="https://www.torproject.org/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.torproject.org&#x2F;</a> <a href="https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.torproject.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;bridges.html</a> <a href="https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.torproject.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;pluggable-transports.html</a>
jblusover 10 years ago
Interesting development. Github was temporarily blocked in China in january because it was used to host politically sensitive information. However, it was later unblocked because the site&#x27;s economic importance is too great to the Chinese government to warrant a complete block <a href="https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/github-blocked-china-how-it-happened-how-get-around-it-and-where-it-will-take-us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.greatfire.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;jan&#x2F;github-blocked-china-...</a>
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Proceduralover 10 years ago
Russian here.<p>Guys, let&#x27;s face it: we have a Great Firewall of Russia now, like in China.<p>Everyone who wants to continue to work with Github should install TOR, here&#x27;s how to do it for Linux Mint 17: <a href="http://procedural.tumblr.com/post/104233731883" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;procedural.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;104233731883</a><p>Also, you can discuss it with me on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8695299" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8695299</a>
thomasflover 10 years ago
I am glad I don&#x27;t have to put up (and put in) with censorship shit like this. I wonder if Hacker News is also blocked in some countries?<p>What does it take to get the privilege to get blocked in Russia and China? Is it enough that someone on HN post things like &quot;Justin Bieber is so cute I wish I was gay&quot; or &quot;the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage&quot;?
nbkolchinover 10 years ago
To make &quot;git clone <a href="https://github.com/xxx&quot;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;xxx&quot;</a> work, just add &#x27;192.30.252.136 github.com&#x27; to &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts. Only git will work, not web browser.
kethinovover 10 years ago
This is sad!<p>I work with some people from Russia on some stuff on GitHub and this is not going to help. :(
Tisogaover 10 years ago
I live in China and many websites has already been blocked here such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.<p>How could you imagine that one person in this planet do not know Google? And this will be happen in China.<p>Here, some freedom has already been lost.
nablaoneover 10 years ago
<a href="https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stevebest&#x2F;suicide&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;suicide.md</a><p>sic!<p>There is something about suicides on github in russian.
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jblusover 10 years ago
Does anyone know of any other information that&#x27;s politically sensitive to the Russian authorities that was posted on Github? It can&#x27;t be just this on text on suicide methods, right?
tormehover 10 years ago
“I understand why he has to do this—to prove he’s a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”<p>-Angela Merkel
Machaover 10 years ago
Good thing git is decentralized...<p>Oh. People won&#x27;t deal with changes from outside GH pull requests? Damn.
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vanilla_userover 10 years ago
repost to reddit - <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2o90sp/russia_banned_github/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;worldnews&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2o90sp&#x2F;russia_ba...</a>
grandalfover 10 years ago
It&#x27;s really interesting to read the comments of Russian HN readers.
Lapsaover 10 years ago
Damn Microsoft. If only they had made NTFS Object Idenitifers easier.
plumaover 10 years ago
Why are there text files describing methods of suicide on GitHub anyway? From what I can tell they show up in seemingly unrelated repos. Are these just bandwagoning in protest or am I missing something?
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endeover 10 years ago
In Soviet Russia, repository commits you.
ommunistover 10 years ago
Holy shmoly! Is wordpress.org the next?
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hit8runover 10 years ago
Very sad thing. I feel for you.
phpeekover 10 years ago
git commit suicide
butwhyover 10 years ago
That&#x27;s surprising to hear. I thought in Russia, Github blocks you.
yc1010over 10 years ago
Has an official reason even been given? or is it just a case of &quot;this site is blocked, suck it up, Mother Russia ftw&quot;
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