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GitHub blocked in Russia

170 points by uldus 12y ago

ommunist 12y ago
Holy shmoly! Is wordpress.org the next?
- gear54rus 12y ago
  These two can't be compared. I wouldn't mind much them blocking wordpress.org (I rarely visit it and when I do, I can circumvent). GitHub, or, for the matter SO, will be a big hit.
  - sergiosgc 12y ago
    Note the domain. Wordpress.org, not wordpress.com.
    - gear54rus 12y ago
      I understand perfectly, I'm just saying not as many people depend on Wordpress as on GH or SO. Personally, I don't recall last time I had to deal with it.
- kasthack 12y ago
  >Is wordpress.org the next? They've blocked YouTube once for a day or two. btw, russian constitution/article 29/paragraph 5: "The freedom of mass communication shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be banned."
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  They already did that, some wordpress entry IP addresses were banned for like a year.
spanasik 12y ago
Yes, it is. We have to use VPN in order to pass the filter.
- acqq 12y ago
  Maybe the VPN is not needed at all. Try with https://192.30.252.128 https://192.30.252.128 and accept the certificate if it has A0:C4:A7:46:00:ED:A7:2D:C0:BE:CB:9A:8C:B6:07:CA:58:EE:74:5E SHA-1 fingerprint. (The uploaders can be related to the companies selling VPN access to Russians.)
- tummybug 12y ago
  I often find `ssh -D` to setup a local socks proxy far easier than using VPN assuming you have a machine you can connect to in a state that hasn't blocked the sites you are trying to reach.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Checkout sshuttle if you want an easy-to-use "VPN" over SSH. https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle
valgaze 12y ago
Looks like this happened a couple months ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401784
austerity 12y 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's not surprising.
- acqq 12y ago
  I guess some Russian reader hand corrected the translation of the article. Otherwise, Google translate is very poor for Russian text. the best example is the translated sentence from the text that caused the ban: "Skopostnye train DURING topmozhenii ppohod more about kilometpa" (...) (The sentence makes advice where the person doing suicide is best to do it, related to trains. Don't correct it and please don't post it in full here).
  - toxik 12y ago
    Why not? It might be inconvenient to read, but it is an article about the censoring of that exact information. Celebrate freedom by translating it properly!
    - gear54rus 12y ago
      Willing to translate it, but the piece posted here is not comprehensible. Post a direct link and I'll do it. Also, original: http://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=41171 http://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=41171 Edit: it does not look like sth about suicide. Words in order: High-speed (adj), Train, Customs (on the border), Passage, More, About, (of) kilometer.
      - acqq 12y ago
        The author of the text tries to be "funny." One of the options is "Start the third world war. Any red button in some army facility in your vicinity? Are you some president?" I can't imagine anybody will gain any insights from that "banned" information. kasthack links to the Wikipedia article that was an obvious starting point for the text, to which the "funny" parts were added.
eklavya 12y ago
Good, let the oppression reach the breaking point sooner and let the people rise and throw away the tyranny. If only that was true :(
- cLeEOGPw 12y ago
  More realistically the people will just run away from Russia leaving only those that are happy with the situation. Users of github are tiny minority in Russia. Even tinier is the part of those users that care enough to do anything about it besides leaving.
hit8run 12y ago
Very sad thing. I feel for you.
yc1010 12y ago
Has an official reason even been given? or is it just a case of "this site is blocked, suck it up, Mother Russia ftw"
- sjogress 12y ago
  According to the article, Github was blocked due to "the placement of text describing the methods of suicide".
- wereHamster 12y ago
  The answer is in the first paragraph. RTFA.
butwhy 12y ago
That's surprising to hear. I thought in Russia, Github blocks you.
BonoboBoner 12y ago
What next, also StackOverflow blocked? Next headline would be Russian software development comes to a sudden halt Edit: downvoted again. My mind is just not made for this hateful community here.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  It probably won't, but it'll evolve in a different direction, and knowledge from abroad (and from inside Russia) won't be distributed as much as before.
  - realusername 12y ago
    Indeed, I believe that is going to happen this way. But in the same time, it's a strong signal to avoid to do software related business in Russia. The blocking works both ways. Just look at what happened in China, they do have their own tools and networks but almost nobody is outsourcing work to China compared to other countries.
codeshaman 12y ago
Official reason for blocking: the site hosts texts describing methods of suicide. Because Github uses HTTPS only, it'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. I hope Russian citizens get a big fat boost of morality from blocking Github. Really, it's not the alcoholism, injustice, corruption, poverty and now economic collapse that causes people to commit suicide in Russia, it's... Github !! This just shows how braindead the people holding power in Russia are. Oh, and these censorship 'laws' have been adopted by people who've stolen billions and who've built a corrupt police state, which is really scary, because the same people have their fingers on the red button.
- acqq 12y ago
  Don't worry, practically every European country censors something on the internet (example: (1)) Some level of absurdity is always present as there are almost always some methods to get to the data when the person is determined enough. 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit... I'm writing from one another West European country. Here even teens share the IP numbers of the video sites banned on the DNS servers of the providers, to type that in the browser's link bar. The providers were served the court orders. It's just on the DNS level at the moment.
  - drdaeman 12y ago
    Well, at least you have court orders (at least those are directed) and it seems that providers don't even bother to mess with IP payload, just make their DNS server spoof the zone (hope I'm not wrong they don't redirect all udp port 53 traffic to their servers). Not like it helps, but it's much better. The whole current situation in Russia is a bit different - there are no court orders at all (that is, the whole censorship is completely unaccountable), and every ISP has to blindly comply or risk getting their license to operate revoked (or at least not prolonged).
  - pantalaimon 12y ago
    > practically every European country censors something on the internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveil... doesn't support that
hal9000xp 12y ago
I live in Russia (Moscow) and I'm working for leading russian internet company. I'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'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. In a big picture, it's not just russian politicians who tight control over the free internet. The main problem in russia is not just politicians, it's a vast majority of russian people who voted for Putin and his party and totally support current regime. May be for western people it'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't have competitors like Google. Furthermore even IT guys like Putin regime and don'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's happening in Ukraine. Almost all people in Russia really hate western world. They don'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. 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. And this is why I'm actively looking for a job abroad.
- maga 12y ago
  Welcome to the club. I did the same 20 years ago precisely to the day.
- egeozcan 12y ago
  Had the same situation in Turkey. Half of the country supports a (for me obviously) corrupt party for reasons I can observe (religion, dreaming of becoming the glorious Ottoman Empire once again and so on), but can't make sense of. I have been living in Germany for the last 5 years - never been happier, even though I earn less. I try not to read any Turkish news (very depressing) with moderate success because of the common "{Yet Another Social Network} blocked in Turkey" posts on HN & others.
ende 12y ago
In Soviet Russia, repository commits you.
thomasfl 12y ago
I am glad I don't have to put up (and put in) with censorship shit like this. I wonder if Hacker News is also blocked in some countries? 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 "Justin Bieber is so cute I wish I was gay" or "the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage"?
pluma 12y 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?
- aleksi 12y ago
  They were committed by protestor or just troll.
- Muromec 12y ago
  >Are these just bandwagoning in protest or am I missing something? Some are. Some other just host blogs or something with funny satiric poetry.
- pluma 12y ago
  I have no idea why my question was downvoted. GitHub is a social site built around a software for version control, primarily for code. GitHub also has a history of removing content that uses GitHub for other purposes (e.g. GamerGate raid/doxing coordination). The reason I'm confused is that most of the examples I was able to find that match the claim are text files in otherwise unrelated repositories. It is odd to find a text file describing ways to off yourself in a source code repository that has nothing else to do with suicide. Also, unless it's a more complex document (e.g. an e-book), sites like GitHub Gists or Pastebin would seem to be more likely choices than GitHub proper.
znowi 12y ago
What a nice attack vector. Deliver a "suicidal" payload to a website, report to Russian authorities and watch it go offline in Russia. It might as well be SO or any other site with user content.
- acqq 12y ago
  Maybe we should follow the money? Who profits from it? Those selling VPN access. But maybe the full VPN is not needed at all. See my other messages here.
  - xor-ed-wolf 12y ago
    It can possible be orchestrated by some corporate interests but I don't believe they are powerful enough to overrule entire IT sector interests. It really seems more like a blunder of inadequate policy implementation like it was done a few times before.
- vog 12y ago
  It's not that easy. The site will also have to deny to remove the contents. I'm pretty sure SO would remove such content, simply because it's off-topic there.
  - vaxyzek 12y ago
    I'm sure there is sub-exchange on stackexchange, where it's not an off-topic. And as soon as stackexchange share the IP with SO it will be blocked all over. Thanks for the idea.
    - vog 12y ago
      Then, there's still the question whether SO will comply or not. Given that reports of suicide trigger more suicides than without, I wouldn't be surprised of SO community guidelines which discourage such content, even though it might otherwise be ontopic in that specific sub-exchange.
- deleted 12y ago
kethinov 12y ago
This is sad! I work with some people from Russia on some stuff on GitHub and this is not going to help. :(
Macha 12y ago
Good thing git is decentralized... Oh. People won't deal with changes from outside GH pull requests? Damn.
- drdaeman 12y ago
  Hah, I've actually some discussions in spirit of "oh, we really need some distributed, peer-to-peer GitHub." I literally facepalm'd. (And, no, that wasn't about the issue tracker.)
x4m 12y ago
Github works for me, I'm in Yekaterinburg. I don'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's fixed most of the time.
emocakes 12y ago
Thank god we don't do anything like that in America, our governments are too busy jailing negroes and fanning the flames of civil war across the middle east. The level of self-righteousness in this thread is reaching levels of never before seen hilarity.
drdaeman 12y ago
Sincerely hope GitHub won't give up an inch to censorship and handle the situation with "your government is your problems, not ours" attitude. With all seriousness - I think the whole situation just can't be solved otherwise. All this censorship things went generally unnoticed and went along the "oh, they're blocking evil child molesters' sites, it's alright" line of thought. To raise the awareness, some high-profile sacrifices are necessary. Hope they'd also block Wikipedia. Disclaimer: yep, I'm Russian. Had some issues accessing GitHub. Between inconvenience and censorship I'd chose the former any day.
- xor-ed-wolf 12y ago
  They are also blocking sites that have references to virtual (drawn or CG) molesting like danbooru or chan.sankakucomplex nowadays. I.e. this bullshit stepped into domain of thought police already. And a thought police is a certain "Nope!" sign whether it is for good (awareness) or not.
Tisoga 12y ago
I live in China and many websites has already been blocked here such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. How could you imagine that one person in this planet do not know Google? And this will be happen in China. Here, some freedom has already been lost.
humanfromearth 12y ago
Not sure if anybody offered here, but if you're in Russia and looking to leave and Paris sounds like a good place, maybe I could help out. Currently I'm doing a lean startup and that means that I don't have a lot of resources, but I do know a few people who are hiring. The area is: golang, python and js mostly. alex @plugaru org p.s. I speak russian.
fedya 12y 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'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.
Lapsa 12y ago
Damn Microsoft. If only they had made NTFS Object Idenitifers easier.
lambdadmitry 12y ago
Hello there. 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's attitude here. 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'm deeply worried about this, because GitHub faces a tough decision: either it will stand to it's ground and stay banned in Russia, or it will comply, possibly changing TOS to be able to remove content if it's illegal in some god-forsaken country. Think LGBT-supporting groups and Nigeria, if not Russia. 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's true customers — programmers. 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 "divide and conquer" KGBsque strategy, which is no good. Additionally, GitHub case will become a poster child of Russian Propaganda Machine Winning, which is no good, either. So, it'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™.
- waps 12y ago
  This is the strongest argument against democracy I've ever heard. When it comes right down to it, fact is that >50% (and more likely >80%) is in favor of laws against LGBT. At least 50% of the 7 billion humans is in favor of criminalizing freedom of religion. In favor of censorship is probably >75% as well, because when push comes to shove, a large majority of muslims, chinese and russians are in favor of it, as is most of Africa. The problem I do see is that the "other side", specifically the UN, is not really any better. Freedom of religion is constantly under attack in the general assembly, and so is freedom of speech. Take for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_of_religion_and_the_United_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_of_religion_and_the_... (TLDR: attempts to introduce blasphemy laws world-wide supported by the UN) ... details a constant campaign against freedom of religion that's entering it's third decade now of majority support in the general assembly. And this is but one of many examples. This makes it clear that defending human rights using either the UN of the ICC is like asking Putin to solve Ukraine's internal government crises. Whatever the solution is to guarantee freedom, it's not the UN. Sad part is, if anything, these groups are growing, not shrinking. I know it doesn't look like it in the middle of the US, but you should remember that the US is barely 350 million people. The number of people that would like their country to attack the US today, no matter how stupid an act it would be, world wide, is bigger than that. The number of people that would like to see the US taken down several notches even includes >50% of Europeans, so you can imagine what it is in the rest of the world (talk about a moronic position : China will replace the US should that happen, and it is blatantly obvious that will not be an improvement, not even for Chinese, although most Chinese I've talked to argue otherwise). In most places it doesn't even have anything to do with the US, other than that the US culture is leaking into their countries perhaps. In Europe, it's mostly political jealousy, the US has all this power, and is not using it "for good" (good can mean climate change, economic stuff, various wars, and now that 10% of europe or so is muslims "because it is destroying islam", not that you can ever get a straight answer of what that means, though references to Gaza seem common). It's not exclusively the US either. India seems to be as hated as the US sometimes, except for in Europe. And this is ignoring the wild cards, like how >30% of Europe constantly votes for the extreme right, more than that even in some countries (and less in Germany, but it's being repressed, so there's no real data on the actual number). Japan is re-arming at a speed that if you told me 5 years ago that might happen I would have laughed). Russia is but one example of a nation that seems to be regressing to the situation before WWI. Turkey is similar. As we know, most of the middle east and northern Africa sees a return to the pseudo-roman-empire caliphate of the 7th century as a solution. China pretty much is an empire, including conquered colonies, and however dictatorial the current government is, from talking to Chinese people here I believe it would actually win an election, should there be one. All want an empire, and of course their own empire to win. None of these attitudes seem rational to me, as people are worse and worse off, yet that only seems to fan the flames. All of these empires are calling for war, to some extent. I fear that as time goes on, the amount of sparks needed to light the powder kegs seems to be going down, and I feel really queasy about how little energy it took to start the ISIS war in the middle east, for example. How much sparks would it take to start something similar in Europe ? (yes there's less muslims there, but it's not like ISIS has even 10% support in Iraq)
phpeek 12y ago
git commit suicide
nablaone 12y ago
https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md sic! There is something about suicides on github in russian.
- acqq 12y ago
  One more copy of the "want to be funny" text which includes the "start the third world war" advice. But also "chop your own tongue, die from bleeding." The guy who posted it maybe isn't involved with the VPN tunnel sellers but it seems it simply became a meme. People like to do something easy (like just copying a file) and feel good for "provoking" something. At the moment it's just a denial of service for the programmers in Russia. Let's see how long it lasts.
uaygsfdbzf 12y 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. https://www.torproject.org/ https://www.torproject.org/ https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html
1gor 12y ago
Github is down for Russian developers because some anti-Putin political activists are eager to make a point. It works like this: - they push some content deemed illegal in Russia to a github repo (something like instructions on committing suicide or on growing marijuana). - then they themselves post a complain to the Russian internet regulator, accompanied by the link to illegal content; - the ugly bureaucrats machine (which is mostly automatic) bans the whole of Github. - at some point later in the day a human intervenes and unblocks the site, as happened several times in the past. However, by that time the media has picked up the story, and many oppressed Russian developers who don't know how to use a US proxy, have received job offers.
- Muromec 12y ago
  1. This is not true. It was actually blocked on purpose with head of federal agency speaking about it and posting funny picture. 2. (some) Content in question is work of satire about censorship agency and ridiculous laws written and hosted on github in Feb 2013 3. (some) of the links in question are not even posted by Russian citizens or residents, not even speaking about political activists
  - dfkf 12y ago
    https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md Here you are. Posted by a Russian citizen from a commit labeled "Privet, Roskomnadzor!" Such a rebel! Demonstrating the world unspeakable horrors of the Putin's regime.
grandalf 12y ago
It's really interesting to read the comments of Russian HN readers.
kirillplatonov 12y ago
This is shit. Few weeks ago I looks to the situation with "black list" afar. I absolutely wasn't involved and don't believe that this "initiative" will "touch" 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's a law and he can't help me. Now I need to setup VPN for commit to github. And I already understand that it's temporary solution and the government can forbid VPN too in future. I really don'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 "it's just some another porn site was blocked, Putin care us and our children's". Sad reality.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jblus 12y 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's economic importance is too great to the Chinese government to warrant a complete block https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/github-blocked-china-how-it-happened-how-get-around-it-and-where-it-will-take-us https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/github-blocked-china-...
- nbkolchin 12y ago
  Since "gitlab.com" have no relation to "gas and oil" business, it has zero economic importance for russian government.
jblus 12y ago
Does anyone know of any other information that's politically sensitive to the Russian authorities that was posted on Github? It can't be just this on text on suicide methods, right?
tormeh 12y 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.” -Angela Merkel
Procedural 12y ago
Russian here. Guys, let's face it: we have a Great Firewall of Russia now, like in China. Everyone who wants to continue to work with Github should install TOR, here's how to do it for Linux Mint 17: http://procedural.tumblr.com/post/104233731883 http://procedural.tumblr.com/post/104233731883 Also, you can discuss it with me on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8695299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8695299
nbkolchin 12y ago
To make "git clone https://github.com/xxx" https://github.com/xxx" work, just add '192.30.252.136 github.com' to /etc/hosts. Only git will work, not web browser.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
vanilla_user 12y ago
repost to reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2o90sp/russia_banned_github/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2o90sp/russia_ba...

170 points by uldus 12y ago

ommunist 12y ago

Holy shmoly! Is wordpress.org the next?

gear54rus 12y ago
These two can't be compared. I wouldn't mind much them blocking wordpress.org (I rarely visit it and when I do, I can circumvent). GitHub, or, for the matter SO, will be a big hit.
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  Note the domain. Wordpress.org, not wordpress.com.
  - gear54rus 12y ago
    I understand perfectly, I'm just saying not as many people depend on Wordpress as on GH or SO. Personally, I don't recall last time I had to deal with it.
kasthack 12y ago
>Is wordpress.org the next? They've blocked YouTube once for a day or two. btw, russian constitution/article 29/paragraph 5: "The freedom of mass communication shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be banned."
guard-of-terra 12y ago
They already did that, some wordpress entry IP addresses were banned for like a year.

spanasik 12y ago

Yes, it is. We have to use VPN in order to pass the filter.

acqq 12y ago
Maybe the VPN is not needed at all. Try with https://192.30.252.128 https://192.30.252.128 and accept the certificate if it has A0:C4:A7:46:00:ED:A7:2D:C0:BE:CB:9A:8C:B6:07:CA:58:EE:74:5E SHA-1 fingerprint. (The uploaders can be related to the companies selling VPN access to Russians.)
tummybug 12y ago
I often find `ssh -D` to setup a local socks proxy far easier than using VPN assuming you have a machine you can connect to in a state that hasn't blocked the sites you are trying to reach.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Checkout sshuttle if you want an easy-to-use "VPN" over SSH. https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

valgaze 12y ago

Looks like this happened a couple months ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401784

austerity 12y 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's not surprising.

acqq 12y ago
I guess some Russian reader hand corrected the translation of the article. Otherwise, Google translate is very poor for Russian text. the best example is the translated sentence from the text that caused the ban: "Skopostnye train DURING topmozhenii ppohod more about kilometpa" (...) (The sentence makes advice where the person doing suicide is best to do it, related to trains. Don't correct it and please don't post it in full here).
- toxik 12y ago
  Why not? It might be inconvenient to read, but it is an article about the censoring of that exact information. Celebrate freedom by translating it properly!
  - gear54rus 12y ago
    Willing to translate it, but the piece posted here is not comprehensible. Post a direct link and I'll do it. Also, original: http://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=41171 http://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=41171 Edit: it does not look like sth about suicide. Words in order: High-speed (adj), Train, Customs (on the border), Passage, More, About, (of) kilometer.
    - acqq 12y ago
      The author of the text tries to be "funny." One of the options is "Start the third world war. Any red button in some army facility in your vicinity? Are you some president?" I can't imagine anybody will gain any insights from that "banned" information. kasthack links to the Wikipedia article that was an obvious starting point for the text, to which the "funny" parts were added.

eklavya 12y ago

Good, let the oppression reach the breaking point sooner and let the people rise and throw away the tyranny. If only that was true :(

cLeEOGPw 12y ago
More realistically the people will just run away from Russia leaving only those that are happy with the situation. Users of github are tiny minority in Russia. Even tinier is the part of those users that care enough to do anything about it besides leaving.

hit8run 12y ago

Very sad thing. I feel for you.

yc1010 12y ago

Has an official reason even been given? or is it just a case of "this site is blocked, suck it up, Mother Russia ftw"

sjogress 12y ago
According to the article, Github was blocked due to "the placement of text describing the methods of suicide".
wereHamster 12y ago
The answer is in the first paragraph. RTFA.

butwhy 12y ago

That's surprising to hear. I thought in Russia, Github blocks you.

BonoboBoner 12y ago

What next, also StackOverflow blocked? Next headline would be Russian software development comes to a sudden halt Edit: downvoted again. My mind is just not made for this hateful community here.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
It probably won't, but it'll evolve in a different direction, and knowledge from abroad (and from inside Russia) won't be distributed as much as before.
- realusername 12y ago
  Indeed, I believe that is going to happen this way. But in the same time, it's a strong signal to avoid to do software related business in Russia. The blocking works both ways. Just look at what happened in China, they do have their own tools and networks but almost nobody is outsourcing work to China compared to other countries.

codeshaman 12y ago

Official reason for blocking: the site hosts texts describing methods of suicide. Because Github uses HTTPS only, it'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. I hope Russian citizens get a big fat boost of morality from blocking Github. Really, it's not the alcoholism, injustice, corruption, poverty and now economic collapse that causes people to commit suicide in Russia, it's... Github !! This just shows how braindead the people holding power in Russia are. Oh, and these censorship 'laws' have been adopted by people who've stolen billions and who've built a corrupt police state, which is really scary, because the same people have their fingers on the red button.

acqq 12y ago
Don't worry, practically every European country censors something on the internet (example: (1)) Some level of absurdity is always present as there are almost always some methods to get to the data when the person is determined enough. 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit... I'm writing from one another West European country. Here even teens share the IP numbers of the video sites banned on the DNS servers of the providers, to type that in the browser's link bar. The providers were served the court orders. It's just on the DNS level at the moment.
- drdaeman 12y ago
  Well, at least you have court orders (at least those are directed) and it seems that providers don't even bother to mess with IP payload, just make their DNS server spoof the zone (hope I'm not wrong they don't redirect all udp port 53 traffic to their servers). Not like it helps, but it's much better. The whole current situation in Russia is a bit different - there are no court orders at all (that is, the whole censorship is completely unaccountable), and every ISP has to blindly comply or risk getting their license to operate revoked (or at least not prolonged).
- pantalaimon 12y ago
  > practically every European country censors something on the internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveil... doesn't support that

hal9000xp 12y ago

I live in Russia (Moscow) and I'm working for leading russian internet company. I'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'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. In a big picture, it's not just russian politicians who tight control over the free internet. The main problem in russia is not just politicians, it's a vast majority of russian people who voted for Putin and his party and totally support current regime. May be for western people it'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't have competitors like Google. Furthermore even IT guys like Putin regime and don'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's happening in Ukraine. Almost all people in Russia really hate western world. They don'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. 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. And this is why I'm actively looking for a job abroad.

maga 12y ago
Welcome to the club. I did the same 20 years ago precisely to the day.
egeozcan 12y ago
Had the same situation in Turkey. Half of the country supports a (for me obviously) corrupt party for reasons I can observe (religion, dreaming of becoming the glorious Ottoman Empire once again and so on), but can't make sense of. I have been living in Germany for the last 5 years - never been happier, even though I earn less. I try not to read any Turkish news (very depressing) with moderate success because of the common "{Yet Another Social Network} blocked in Turkey" posts on HN & others.

ende 12y ago

In Soviet Russia, repository commits you.

thomasfl 12y ago

I am glad I don't have to put up (and put in) with censorship shit like this. I wonder if Hacker News is also blocked in some countries? 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 "Justin Bieber is so cute I wish I was gay" or "the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage"?

pluma 12y 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?

aleksi 12y ago
They were committed by protestor or just troll.
Muromec 12y ago
>Are these just bandwagoning in protest or am I missing something? Some are. Some other just host blogs or something with funny satiric poetry.
pluma 12y ago
I have no idea why my question was downvoted. GitHub is a social site built around a software for version control, primarily for code. GitHub also has a history of removing content that uses GitHub for other purposes (e.g. GamerGate raid/doxing coordination). The reason I'm confused is that most of the examples I was able to find that match the claim are text files in otherwise unrelated repositories. It is odd to find a text file describing ways to off yourself in a source code repository that has nothing else to do with suicide. Also, unless it's a more complex document (e.g. an e-book), sites like GitHub Gists or Pastebin would seem to be more likely choices than GitHub proper.

znowi 12y ago

What a nice attack vector. Deliver a "suicidal" payload to a website, report to Russian authorities and watch it go offline in Russia. It might as well be SO or any other site with user content.

acqq 12y ago
Maybe we should follow the money? Who profits from it? Those selling VPN access. But maybe the full VPN is not needed at all. See my other messages here.
- xor-ed-wolf 12y ago
  It can possible be orchestrated by some corporate interests but I don't believe they are powerful enough to overrule entire IT sector interests. It really seems more like a blunder of inadequate policy implementation like it was done a few times before.
vog 12y ago
It's not that easy. The site will also have to deny to remove the contents. I'm pretty sure SO would remove such content, simply because it's off-topic there.
- vaxyzek 12y ago
  I'm sure there is sub-exchange on stackexchange, where it's not an off-topic. And as soon as stackexchange share the IP with SO it will be blocked all over. Thanks for the idea.
  - vog 12y ago
    Then, there's still the question whether SO will comply or not. Given that reports of suicide trigger more suicides than without, I wouldn't be surprised of SO community guidelines which discourage such content, even though it might otherwise be ontopic in that specific sub-exchange.
deleted 12y ago

kethinov 12y ago

This is sad! I work with some people from Russia on some stuff on GitHub and this is not going to help. :(

Macha 12y ago

Good thing git is decentralized... Oh. People won't deal with changes from outside GH pull requests? Damn.

drdaeman 12y ago
Hah, I've actually some discussions in spirit of "oh, we really need some distributed, peer-to-peer GitHub." I literally facepalm'd. (And, no, that wasn't about the issue tracker.)

x4m 12y ago

Github works for me, I'm in Yekaterinburg. I don'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's fixed most of the time.

emocakes 12y ago

Thank god we don't do anything like that in America, our governments are too busy jailing negroes and fanning the flames of civil war across the middle east. The level of self-righteousness in this thread is reaching levels of never before seen hilarity.

drdaeman 12y ago

Sincerely hope GitHub won't give up an inch to censorship and handle the situation with "your government is your problems, not ours" attitude. With all seriousness - I think the whole situation just can't be solved otherwise. All this censorship things went generally unnoticed and went along the "oh, they're blocking evil child molesters' sites, it's alright" line of thought. To raise the awareness, some high-profile sacrifices are necessary. Hope they'd also block Wikipedia. Disclaimer: yep, I'm Russian. Had some issues accessing GitHub. Between inconvenience and censorship I'd chose the former any day.

xor-ed-wolf 12y ago
They are also blocking sites that have references to virtual (drawn or CG) molesting like danbooru or chan.sankakucomplex nowadays. I.e. this bullshit stepped into domain of thought police already. And a thought police is a certain "Nope!" sign whether it is for good (awareness) or not.

Tisoga 12y ago

I live in China and many websites has already been blocked here such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. How could you imagine that one person in this planet do not know Google? And this will be happen in China. Here, some freedom has already been lost.

humanfromearth 12y ago

Not sure if anybody offered here, but if you're in Russia and looking to leave and Paris sounds like a good place, maybe I could help out. Currently I'm doing a lean startup and that means that I don't have a lot of resources, but I do know a few people who are hiring. The area is: golang, python and js mostly. alex @plugaru org p.s. I speak russian.

fedya 12y 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'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.

Lapsa 12y ago

Damn Microsoft. If only they had made NTFS Object Idenitifers easier.

lambdadmitry 12y ago

Hello there. 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's attitude here. 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'm deeply worried about this, because GitHub faces a tough decision: either it will stand to it's ground and stay banned in Russia, or it will comply, possibly changing TOS to be able to remove content if it's illegal in some god-forsaken country. Think LGBT-supporting groups and Nigeria, if not Russia. 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's true customers — programmers. 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 "divide and conquer" KGBsque strategy, which is no good. Additionally, GitHub case will become a poster child of Russian Propaganda Machine Winning, which is no good, either. So, it'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™.

waps 12y ago
This is the strongest argument against democracy I've ever heard. When it comes right down to it, fact is that >50% (and more likely >80%) is in favor of laws against LGBT. At least 50% of the 7 billion humans is in favor of criminalizing freedom of religion. In favor of censorship is probably >75% as well, because when push comes to shove, a large majority of muslims, chinese and russians are in favor of it, as is most of Africa. The problem I do see is that the "other side", specifically the UN, is not really any better. Freedom of religion is constantly under attack in the general assembly, and so is freedom of speech. Take for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_of_religion_and_the_United_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_of_religion_and_the_... (TLDR: attempts to introduce blasphemy laws world-wide supported by the UN) ... details a constant campaign against freedom of religion that's entering it's third decade now of majority support in the general assembly. And this is but one of many examples. This makes it clear that defending human rights using either the UN of the ICC is like asking Putin to solve Ukraine's internal government crises. Whatever the solution is to guarantee freedom, it's not the UN. Sad part is, if anything, these groups are growing, not shrinking. I know it doesn't look like it in the middle of the US, but you should remember that the US is barely 350 million people. The number of people that would like their country to attack the US today, no matter how stupid an act it would be, world wide, is bigger than that. The number of people that would like to see the US taken down several notches even includes >50% of Europeans, so you can imagine what it is in the rest of the world (talk about a moronic position : China will replace the US should that happen, and it is blatantly obvious that will not be an improvement, not even for Chinese, although most Chinese I've talked to argue otherwise). In most places it doesn't even have anything to do with the US, other than that the US culture is leaking into their countries perhaps. In Europe, it's mostly political jealousy, the US has all this power, and is not using it "for good" (good can mean climate change, economic stuff, various wars, and now that 10% of europe or so is muslims "because it is destroying islam", not that you can ever get a straight answer of what that means, though references to Gaza seem common). It's not exclusively the US either. India seems to be as hated as the US sometimes, except for in Europe. And this is ignoring the wild cards, like how >30% of Europe constantly votes for the extreme right, more than that even in some countries (and less in Germany, but it's being repressed, so there's no real data on the actual number). Japan is re-arming at a speed that if you told me 5 years ago that might happen I would have laughed). Russia is but one example of a nation that seems to be regressing to the situation before WWI. Turkey is similar. As we know, most of the middle east and northern Africa sees a return to the pseudo-roman-empire caliphate of the 7th century as a solution. China pretty much is an empire, including conquered colonies, and however dictatorial the current government is, from talking to Chinese people here I believe it would actually win an election, should there be one. All want an empire, and of course their own empire to win. None of these attitudes seem rational to me, as people are worse and worse off, yet that only seems to fan the flames. All of these empires are calling for war, to some extent. I fear that as time goes on, the amount of sparks needed to light the powder kegs seems to be going down, and I feel really queasy about how little energy it took to start the ISIS war in the middle east, for example. How much sparks would it take to start something similar in Europe ? (yes there's less muslims there, but it's not like ISIS has even 10% support in Iraq)

phpeek 12y ago

git commit suicide

nablaone 12y ago

https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md sic! There is something about suicides on github in russian.

acqq 12y ago
One more copy of the "want to be funny" text which includes the "start the third world war" advice. But also "chop your own tongue, die from bleeding." The guy who posted it maybe isn't involved with the VPN tunnel sellers but it seems it simply became a meme. People like to do something easy (like just copying a file) and feel good for "provoking" something. At the moment it's just a denial of service for the programmers in Russia. Let's see how long it lasts.

uaygsfdbzf 12y 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. https://www.torproject.org/ https://www.torproject.org/ https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html

1gor 12y ago

Github is down for Russian developers because some anti-Putin political activists are eager to make a point. It works like this: - they push some content deemed illegal in Russia to a github repo (something like instructions on committing suicide or on growing marijuana). - then they themselves post a complain to the Russian internet regulator, accompanied by the link to illegal content; - the ugly bureaucrats machine (which is mostly automatic) bans the whole of Github. - at some point later in the day a human intervenes and unblocks the site, as happened several times in the past. However, by that time the media has picked up the story, and many oppressed Russian developers who don't know how to use a US proxy, have received job offers.

Muromec 12y ago
1. This is not true. It was actually blocked on purpose with head of federal agency speaking about it and posting funny picture. 2. (some) Content in question is work of satire about censorship agency and ridiculous laws written and hosted on github in Feb 2013 3. (some) of the links in question are not even posted by Russian citizens or residents, not even speaking about political activists
- dfkf 12y ago
  https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md https://github.com/stevebest/suicide/blob/master/suicide.md Here you are. Posted by a Russian citizen from a commit labeled "Privet, Roskomnadzor!" Such a rebel! Demonstrating the world unspeakable horrors of the Putin's regime.

grandalf 12y ago

It's really interesting to read the comments of Russian HN readers.

kirillplatonov 12y ago

This is shit. Few weeks ago I looks to the situation with "black list" afar. I absolutely wasn't involved and don't believe that this "initiative" will "touch" 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's a law and he can't help me. Now I need to setup VPN for commit to github. And I already understand that it's temporary solution and the government can forbid VPN too in future. I really don'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 "it's just some another porn site was blocked, Putin care us and our children's". Sad reality.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jblus 12y 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's economic importance is too great to the Chinese government to warrant a complete block https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/github-blocked-china-how-it-happened-how-get-around-it-and-where-it-will-take-us https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/github-blocked-china-...

nbkolchin 12y ago
Since "gitlab.com" have no relation to "gas and oil" business, it has zero economic importance for russian government.

jblus 12y ago

Does anyone know of any other information that's politically sensitive to the Russian authorities that was posted on Github? It can't be just this on text on suicide methods, right?

tormeh 12y 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.” -Angela Merkel

Procedural 12y ago

Russian here. Guys, let's face it: we have a Great Firewall of Russia now, like in China. Everyone who wants to continue to work with Github should install TOR, here's how to do it for Linux Mint 17: http://procedural.tumblr.com/post/104233731883 http://procedural.tumblr.com/post/104233731883 Also, you can discuss it with me on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8695299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8695299

nbkolchin 12y ago

To make "git clone https://github.com/xxx" https://github.com/xxx" work, just add '192.30.252.136 github.com' to /etc/hosts. Only git will work, not web browser.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

vanilla_user 12y ago

repost to reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2o90sp/russia_banned_github/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2o90sp/russia_ba...