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They want to block Github entirely because Github allows for the free flow of information (politically sensitive information, not just code) and they don't have
by etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
They want to block Github entirely because Github allows for the free flow of information (politically sensitive information, not just code) and they don't have a way of doing currently without just blocking all of Github... Which would be bad for business, and China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way.
Actually, if you want to send large amounts of text information to users in China right now, Github is probably one of the better ways. Unfortunately probably not for long!
- golemiprague 6y agoI thought the opposite, they are afraid github will block some Chinese software because of political reasons, the same way happened now with Trump supporting companies. I can understand the reasoning and I think more and more people will try to find alternatives to big tech, especially if their politics is not aligned with SV taste du jour.
- 430scuderia 6y agoThis. I can't believe there are people on HN cheering on the CCP for strengthening its censorship. I guess those are the very people that also support it on American soil.
- onenightnine 6y agoyeah agreed, i don't think they are connecting the dots. they are missing large sections of knowledge that would protect them and the lives of those around them. but for some odd reason they have mental blocks when trying to help them out flawed framework
- 430scuderia 6y agoI mean look how fast they flagged my comment. I guess they wanted to prove my point badly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- dang 6y agoCould you please stop creating multiple accounts like this? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... That applies 10x when said accounts are breaking the rules, as you've unfortunately been doing. If you want to pick one account and want to commit to following the rules, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and let us know which username you want to use.
- Symbiote 6y agoThis is a flamebait comment. Not one comment on this article is supportive.
- jxramos 6y agoflamebait, that is a great word mashup that conveys a lot. Clickbait for starting a comment flamewar, never saw that one before. Gonna keep an eye out for these things with this lens.
- im3w1l 6y agoI'm pretty sure the word flamebait predates clickbait.
- Symbiote 6y agoHere's an early use of the word "flamebait" in rec.autos.tech (Usenet) in 1995: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.autos.tech/c/1WGLn35Et70/m/bboCY9TT5RoJ?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/g/rec.autos.tech/c/1WGLn35Et70/m/b...
- im3w1l 6y agoGoogle books finds earlier results: It's defined in the 1994 books Information Superhighway illustrated and Net Talk.
- 430scuderia 6y agoat the time I wrote it I've read a few comments that was fairly supportive but they've been deleted since. Thank you for policing the comments I think its great that you are making the best use of your time. wouldn't be the first time somebody tried to gate keep criticisms of CCP on here and won't be the last.
- worker767424 6y agoHow long before this strategy backfires? When does the CCP hurt itself because it stifled innovation? When does it have political problems because it suppressed the wrong thing? I can't tell if this style of governing is super robust or a house of cards.
- temporalparts 6y agoI'm sure it's hurting CCP right now. Being closed off from the rest of the world does have its consequences. It probably just doesn't hurt CCP enough to matter in the short term. It'll probably take closer to half a century before we can truly understand if the cumulative effects of the pain will amount to anything significant.
- dheera 6y agoWell yes and no. If they are open to the rest of the world a lot of money would end up in Silicon Valley. If Facebook and Google ran ads all over China, a nice big cut of that revenue goes to the IRS instead of China's government.
- PradeetPatel 6y agoGiven that China already has its own equivalent of Facebook and Google, possibly backed by the government. Penetrating that market may prove to be a significant challenge.
- majormajor 6y agoThat's the parent comment's point: closing the doors led to them being able to build and establish that in-house stuff instead of sending money to other countries...
- temporalparts 6y agoThe money would only flow there if the services Silicon Valley is producing is worth the money to the purchasers. None of these transactions are zero-sum and tech isn't the only thing in the world that matters.
- beerandt 6y agoI assume it also has just as much to do with Microsoft buying it. See also: skype. Not just because they don't want Chinese code stored on foreign servers, but because they want it on servers they have easy access to. Even if this is far-fetched, it's not about what we think, but the risk China perceives.
- ipsum2 6y agoMicrosoft / Bing is allowed in China.
- beerandt 6y agoFlip the perception: In China, US govt doesn't have MS levels of access to info, potentially including protected user data & non-public hosting /admin data. Even if that's not the case, being in China avoids (most?) NSA choke points.
- zizee 6y agoHonest question: are you suggesting that microsoft buying github makes it harder for the Chinese government to access the servers?
- beerandt 6y agoNo (well ultimately yes, but not the point)- it's easier for US govt access. China doesn't trust that for its users, whether right or wrong.
- zizee 6y agoThanks for the clarification, that makes more sense. Personally, I would think microsoft would be easier to "motivate" to share given they probably have more investments in china which could be used as leverage.
- cbozeman 6y agoThe idea of China wanting an open source platform like GitHub is akin to Adolf Hitler starting The Nazi Center for Jewish Appreciation & Cultural Enrichment.
- ausbah 6y agothis is a very distasteful analogy
- cbozeman 6y agoYou fake fucking outrage is distasteful. Your inability to clearly see that the plight of the Uyghurs is little different than the plight of the Jewish people during World War II is distasteful. The only difference now, is that we at least know the Uyghurs are being systematically targeted. Pity no one has the goddamn backbone to do anything about it.
- evidencebased 6y agoNo, Charlie. For the hundredth time, Jewish people were not sent to vocational training camps for violent extremism during WWII. Uyghur are also not being killed. Nice "backbone" tho.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't do this here. It can't help.
- himujjal 6y agoI am using a github fork of a chinese woman, dacez to build my own markup lang. I have seen considerable chinese github projects. xmake is one of them i use
- stunt 6y agoNo, I don't think it's about blocking Github. Many of their tech companies are using open source. For China it's safer to have a Chinese Github ecosystem. Just imagine if Github suddenly decide to block Chinese users like they did for Iranian users. It's also strategic for their government and some critical private sector to not put their source code on an American platform. So there are enough incentives especially after everything that happened to Huawei.
- hungryhobo 6y agothis is the correct answer. I think this is China's response after seeing Huawei getting blocked from using Google Services. Github is still owned by an american company and it has shown that it needs to comply with whatever foreign policy that washington enacts. It's reasonable want to have a contingency plan that would allow the Chinese domestic software industry to continue to function when things turn sour between the two powers.
- PakG1 6y agoThat being said, Github is now owned by Microsoft and Microsoft has a very strong relationship with the Chinese government such that they provided a custom version of Windows 10 for them. https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/21/14998644/microsoft-windows-10-china-custom-version https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/21/14998644/microsoft-window... But I see your point.
- whatshisface 6y agoThe USG steamrolls the interests of US companies without a second thought, whenever sanctions are implemented. It doesn't matter how badly Microsoft wants to trade with China, they can't stop sanctions.
- idrios 6y agoI'm pretty sure it's also about being able to ban Github. China banned it once before in 2013 but had to unban it when developers complained that the ban interfered with their work https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China
- steffandroid 6y agoGithub is hardly a bastion of free flowing information. Back in 2018 they removed a repository which listed names of ICE agents, based on data from LinkedIn - https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/ice-employee-list-github-linkedin/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/ice-employee-list-github-l...
- echelon 6y ago> China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way. All of our jobs and companies are at risk. China has far more software engineers than we do, all willing to work 996. They'll steal our tech and our data until they're ahead, then shut us off. We already lost our manufacturing industry. Our tech, entertainment, knowledge, and capital are next. China has bought our biggest gaming and media companies. We need to shut the CCP off. Yesterday. Biden needs to create easy immigration programs for Hong Kong and mainland residents. The recent Capitol shit show needs to be quickly dealt with and we need to take back our leadership role. Our image matters. Hollywood needs to step in line and stop kowtowing. Where's the "Chernobyl" series equivalent for Tiananmen? The Tibetans and Uyghurs? This is the most important issue of our time. I know the Chinese loyalists and many Europeans that hate the US are going to downvote me, but this should be the priority of all democracies. If the CCP reaches the top, it imperils democracy.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThey are hardly willing to work 996. Extreme opposition is mounting, and a lot - maybe most - of the younger generation of programmers soft-strike by not doing anything work related at all after 4-5pm. Because of relatively generous firing protection and a lack of programmers they generally get away with it too. This is actually a big reason why most Chinese people didn't care about the CCP going after Jack Ma, 996 is extremely unpopular. That said, given the shortage of programmers, being willing to work unreasonable and frankly unproductive hours is not a sufficient deterrent to competitiveness.
- blackrock 6y agoThis is completely ridiculous drivel. America is manufacturing more than it ever has. It’s producing more cars, trucks, airplanes, semiconductors, software, and military weapons than ever. It’s at historical highs. Oh and, it’s also highly mechanized and done by machines now. When did America lose entertainment to China? Back in the 90s and 00s, western people thought that China was going to steal all of Hollywood’s movies. But what happened instead? It turns out Hollywood movies are shit. The same boring stories, played by the same white actors. In a multicultural world, all the Hollywood actors are white. Why? Someone here is clueless, and it’s not the Chinese. It turns out, that the Chinese don’t care to watch western movies. Star Wars was a flop. All the major Hollywood blockbusters flopped in China. What happened instead? The Chinese people wanted to watch movies filled with people that looked like themselves. Movies that actually had multicultural people. Movies that had Chinese people in it. And it turns out, their movies are getting pretty good. You, as a westerner might not like their movies, but your opinion doesn’t matter here, since you’re not the target market for this money. And ironically, for a guy that professes the virtues of democracy, you’re talking about suppressing the Trump supporters, all 75 million of them that voted for him. Did it occur to you that the Chinese don’t care about your democracy? You can vote for whoever you want. You can have all the gay rights you want. You can have all the abortion or pro-life you want. You can protest your leaders, or mock them all you want. All irrelevant to the Chinese and to the CCP. What does the Chinese want? They just want to trade with you. And they’re willing to send their children to your schools and universities to learn English and your culture. At least before Trump threw this all away, and poisoned the well. Did it occur to you, that the Russians are playing you instead? They’re sitting back and laughing now from the comedy of the past 4 years.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI guess they will do something similar to CNPM. https://cnpmjs.org/ https://cnpmjs.org/
- apple_innocent 6y agoIs this a mirror/proxy of Github. IP address registered to company in Singapore. Domain registration has mainland China physical address: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25842028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25842028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472433
- personjerry 6y agoLooks like a proxy, not a mirror to me, because it's showing GitHub's bot protection page.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- apple_innocent 6y agoHow about caching proxy It has code that has been removed from Github
- howlgarnish 6y agoThat's not going to help a user in mainland China, because Singapore is a separate country and on the wrong side of the Great Firewall.
- apple_innocent 6y agoWould this help. http://mirror.github.taobao.org/cgit.cgi/ http://mirror.github.taobao.org/cgit.cgi/
- AntiImperialist 6y agoOnly in your coocoo world. Every country cares about flow of information, specially if it is propaganda against their establishment. Do that in any country and you'll disappear. There's nothing special about China.
- onethought 6y ago“Seems to be entering the software industry” ... seems a bit arrogant no? China has a capability to block arbitrary GitHub urls ... I don’t think this is that.