GitHub Has Become a Haven for China's Censored Internet Users | Hacker News Reader

GitHub Has Become a Haven for China's Censored Internet Users

npr.org

64 pointsjs241 comments

Wouldn't this just add more fuel to the fire for China to crackdown on access to GitHub and ultimately make it even harder for engineers there to use and contribute to projects? Only asking because I recall a time where they did indeed block GitHub because of some of the projects hosted and I'd imagine this might potentially cause a similar course of action.

I don't think they could afford to block it because China's tech sector is dependent on lots of American-developed open source projects hosted on it. They could set up their own git service and fork them, but they wouldn't get the benefit of ongoing development; they'd be on their own. It's almost like connecting with the rest of the world has tangible benefits...

Yup the PRC's approach so far has been to force the rest of the world of kowtow, company by company, to their ridiculous petulant insecurities and autocratic fascism. That way they get the best of both worlds - a connection to a wide world the paranoid, boot-black politburo need not fear.

Is that not what most countries would do if they had the power to?

I was recently told on HN that Russia is trying to set up something like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19521584

Or just have a separate instance that automatically forks all pre-approved projects while blocking off the rest, similar to how Google does it.

Honestly I don't see how Github will remain unaffected by the Chinese Government.

that was for shadowsocks I think (e.g. a powerful tool to escape the chinese firewall).

they even tried to DDoS github as far as I remember.

One of my long-idle projects is oddly popular in China (it's about 30 lines of shell script total) so I've been adding pro-Tibet and pro-Taiwan messaging. Figured it's worth using it for _some_ good.

Anyone have a suggestion for a good pro-democracy message that could be targeted at Chinese developers?

I find it concerning that someone might think it's appropriate to add political messages to software projects. Imagine if some software developer added a "fuck Bernie Sanders!!!" remark to the README of a popular repo. Just my two cents.

Well if Bernie Sanders becomes a totalitarian dictator that starts suppressing democracy, I'll be more than happy to add "fuck Bernie Sanders" to all my repos.

who defines what a totalitarian dictatorship is? you? Here is an example:

If you ask most christians (or minorities) in Syria what they think of Bashar´s leadership, they´d hail him as their christ and savior. Meanwhile, for us here in the west he´s a dictator and a murderer.

I am not justifying any actions or atrocities committed by such an actor. I am merely point to the fact that if you want to politicize an aspect of our lives, you need to at least have rigid and firm definitions. Otherwise, all you end up doing is giving ammunition to your opposition to do the same. Ex. I can add the same about Trump now into my repos and call him a fascist, or do the same thing when Obama was in office. Or heck, imagine having "LOCK HER UP" at the top of each ReadMe.

That cannot possibly be a healthy way of going about things.

I'm more that comfortable with my stance. You're invoking the slippery slope.

That's not "the slippery slope", it's a valid point.

Yeesh not everything has to be a fallacy, and honestly if even if it had been he still had a point, a fallacy doesn't magically invalidate the argument being made.

concerning is an understatement. Politicizing every aspect of our lives can in no possible way end up in anything other than a disaster, especially considering the current apatite for politicians and activists to regulate every aspect of the internet.

It's not only about that. We all have our political ideas and I don't want anybody to shove theirs up my butt while I am in github; if I want to read that kind of stuff I'll look at twitter or facebook, thanks.

I think its more like '9/11 Never Forget' than 'Fuck Bernie Sanders'

And who cares anyways. Its their repo. If you don't like it fork it.

Are you saying you think there should be restrictions on the ideological content of what people should be allowed to create?

No, I said I believe it to be inappropriate to use your position in a public software project to push your politics. I didn't ask for "restrictions on ideological content". Believing something to be inappropriate doesn't mean I think it should be forbidden or restricted.

Why do you think that's inappropriate?

Because a) politics is an extremely divisive topic which leads easily to flame wars and b) politics is completely unrelated to software development, so there's absolutely no reason to deal with a) in the context of software development.

Is it so controversial to say that technology is related to power and money? If you ignore it you're simply letting someone else take care of the matter for you. How should technology and power relate to the rest of society in a harmonious way? Not obvious, but you can always let someone else take care of the matter for you.

Do apps like WhatsApp or Facebook inherently have severe political considerations, even though they're primarily apps for communication and connecting people together?

> politics is completely unrelated to software development

I strongly disagree.

I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and my politics/philosophy is one of the things that makes F/OSS so very attractive to me.

Seems like a reasonable argument if the case we were talking about is a large software project that requires consensus building & collaboration, but it sounds like OP was talking about a personal project that is largely defunct. It seems like there are few stake holders that OP needs to satisfy.

Not all politics & software development are unrelated btw, there have certainly been political movements that would have targeted & tightly controlled software development if it was as big as it is now when that movement happened. Khmer Rouge comes to mind.

There are also explicitly political software development projects: Bitcoin, Tor, arguably GNU, the great firewall, stuxnet, whatever nation state actors are cooking up for mass social media manipulation etc

There's a long tradition of political messaging in open source. Vi has "Help poor children in Uganda! type :help iccf<Enter> for information", for instance.

Perhaps reading material on the Tienanmen Square Protests? It's virtually impossible to find content relating to them within the Great Firewall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests

If they're using a project with an English README, they can just visit that Wikipedia page. Only the Chinese version of Wikipedia is blocked by the Great Firewall.

How do you think people in China will react to your pro-Tibet and pro-Taiwan messages?

And what do you think they'll think of democracy when it's associated with those feelings?

It can definitely be irritating to hear unsolicited opinions about politics in your country from people who don't even live in it.

Free the Falkland Islands?

Of course most likely someone will just submit a pull request or fork the repo.

Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=709490855

Also, previous discussion of 996.icu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620

and about Chinese-made browsers blocking the GitHub repo (not 996.icu itself): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553681

I think all this will do is eventually lead to China copying repositories from github that they agree with, make their own internal repo system and block access to the actual github.

Github's has also become a haven for starred repositories gamed from China.

Could you please explain what you mean? Or what the benefits would be?

If you have a 1k+ star repo, you might get a higher salary when finding a new job

Sometime in 2018 or '17 I've read that GitHub is again blocked and programmers have to switch jobs because it's pretty hard to do programming without GitHub now. So, they can come after your repos too.

(The source of the info was a Chinese redditor who makes Arduino-like robots, so I hope she knew what she was talking about.)

Prior discussions (didn’t notice these when I submitted this story):

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=996

I'm surprised Microsoft-owned GitHub hasn't started censoring yet. I suspect it's only a matter of time.

Headline from next week: "GitHub Was a Haven for China's Censored Internet Users".

Microsoft is in a really awkward position with this now, curious how it will play out

I subscribe to a couple of newsletters that send the most popular repositories in several languages to my email every week. There's been a trend of increasing Chinese activity for months now. The problem with Chinese programmers is that they very rarely bother to use English, as the rest of the world, rendering their technically "open source" code largely useless for most of us. There's clearly a niche for a Chinese language counterpart of Github, and I suspect it's going to be filled soon.

Chinese programmers use English at about the same frequency as programmers from other non-English-speaking countries, but there are so many of them that the minority using Chinese for everything is still very visible.

FWIW, most of the Chinese-only repos I've seen on GitHub are tutorials, other study materials or social gathering places like 996.icu, so I don't think you're actually missing a lot of relevant open source code.

The most likely contender for a Chinese-language GitHub-replacement is probably the hosted GitLab instance offered by Alibaba: https://code.aliyun.com/explore

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