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Thanks for providing context. It might be unfair to thrust GitHub, and all Chinese developers into this fight. The Chinese government— if the DDoS fails — may

Thanks for providing context. It might be unfair to thrust GitHub, and all Chinese developers into this fight. The Chinese government— if the DDoS fails — may very well just block access to Github, developer needs be damned. Of course that would provide an opportunity for a Chinese counterpart of Github to take market share, perhaps a favorable outcome?

jjcc 12y ago
I don't think so, Most Chinese developers love github not only because of infrastructure, but also the wealth of content. There's no substitute.
ttflee 12y ago
Many of us Chinese developers have already equipped with VPNs and tunnels as a daily productivity tool. It seems that the purpose of the gov'nt is to block access from less tech-savvy users, which greatfire and nytimes-cn provide.
mike_hearn 12y ago
I read that they tried blocking github already, but had to back down because of complaints from the software engineering community there. Basically the Chinese government is desperately trying to disconnect the Chinese people from the global internet whilst simultaneously trying to minimise the economic damage that creates. Blocking news sites doesn't do a whole lot of damage. Blocking CDNs is totally different. This sort of thing makes me think about an HTTP extension that lets arbitrary websites promise to proxy for others. Web servers could set an "X-Will-Relay-For: wikipedia.org, github.com, facebook.com, nytimes.com" header and then browsers would be programmed to store these mappings in their local cache as you browse the web. If attempting to reach a website fails, the browser would retry via an SSLd CONNECT request via one of the cached paths, sort of a Tor-lite but aimed purely at unblocking sites rather than anonymization. Of course there are lots of practical details to work out like traffic management, how to avoid an outage of a large website causing cascading failures etc.

jjcc 12y ago

I don't think so, Most Chinese developers love github not only because of infrastructure, but also the wealth of content. There's no substitute.

ttflee 12y ago

Many of us Chinese developers have already equipped with VPNs and tunnels as a daily productivity tool. It seems that the purpose of the gov'nt is to block access from less tech-savvy users, which greatfire and nytimes-cn provide.

mike_hearn 12y ago

I read that they tried blocking github already, but had to back down because of complaints from the software engineering community there. Basically the Chinese government is desperately trying to disconnect the Chinese people from the global internet whilst simultaneously trying to minimise the economic damage that creates. Blocking news sites doesn't do a whole lot of damage. Blocking CDNs is totally different. This sort of thing makes me think about an HTTP extension that lets arbitrary websites promise to proxy for others. Web servers could set an "X-Will-Relay-For: wikipedia.org, github.com, facebook.com, nytimes.com" header and then browsers would be programmed to store these mappings in their local cache as you browse the web. If attempting to reach a website fails, the browser would retry via an SSLd CONNECT request via one of the cached paths, sort of a Tor-lite but aimed purely at unblocking sites rather than anonymization. Of course there are lots of practical details to work out like traffic management, how to avoid an outage of a large website causing cascading failures etc.