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Comment by guycalledfrank | Hacker News Reader

In Russia they seem to force all ISPs to ban specific IP addresses. Obviously, it blocks many stuff, and not just one page. I really HOPE that it'll be resolved soon, because a few months ago we had similar problems with wordpress and even youtube (!), but it was fixed in 1-2 days, because, you know, everyone watches youtube, and blocking half of it makes everyone mad. But github is not what everyone uses, it's just a thing for coders like me, so I'm also afraid, they wont give a shit, because only a "minority" of their clients complained. --- Can't load suggested IP as well

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I'm totally agree with you that they don't care about minority at all (by the way, in any field).

I think this issue with GitHub will be resolved soon.

But in general, this Internet Restriction Bill (Federal law of Russian Federation no. 139-FZ of 2012-07-28) is double purpose tool.

On the one hand it serves its first official purpose (i.e. by blocking illegal content). It often do it completely awkward and don't care about legitimate users (the issue with GitHub is the good example).

On the second hand it's very good and easy to use tool for internet censorship. For example, it's so easy to block sites with legitimate information which current regime don't like.

Just think about "sudden" blocking of GitHub or Wikipedia as a training for them (i.e. just to make sure that in case of political instability they can shutdown anything pretty quickly).

Or follow the money, who profits in this particular case? See my other comments here.

I'm travelling frequently to both Russia and Turkey - to avoid having stupid spatial location based limitations I've been using privateinternetaccess.com for more than 6 months now. it's pretty cheap and has gateways all around the world - I recommend it without any hesitation... I especially like having access to streaming video for the shows I watch that is limited to country ip's like the daily show...

We're hackers, let's promote using our own servers and service providers, don't support the VPN sellers who can be behind this particular blockade, maybe even bribing the censors. See the comments here, ssh is enough.

yes of course but that requires to have an always on computer to connect to...

See tummybug's message here: ssh -D to setup a local socks proxy is far easier.

I really suspect the sellers of VPN are involved. Managing to DOS the site that the professionals use, those that are able to use VPN too and are more probae to pay.

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