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Comment by RA_Fisher | Hacker News Reader

Assuming this is the Chinese government, what's their end game here? They must believe that GitHub will bow to their will and remove Greatfire or block it from China. Permanently? That seems incredibly naive. Also, have they not considered the Streisand effect? Also, assuming they see Baidu as effectively a state asset, why poison that brand for such a temporary gain? It doesn't make sense.

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  They must believe that GitHub will bow to their will 
  [...] That seems incredibly naive.

Plenty of technology companies would. Of course, they would call it "complying with local laws in all countries in which we operate".

The only way to find out if Github is such a company is a few months of successful attacks.

That's true. I remember being incredibly disappointed in Google when they agreed to censor search results for China. Here's to hoping that GitHub is willing to stand up to this bully.

Censor but supply notice that they were censoring. And when China hacked into gmail, they left the country rather than continue to comply with their laws.

I would be less inclined to oblige in the face of threats and actual attacks. Especially when done so publicly. I imagine companies like Facebook we quicker to oblige through actual negotiation and some sort of "business diplomacy."

>Of course, they would call it "complying with local laws in all countries in which we operate".

If 'I was following orders.' isn't an excuse when you are in the military where disobeying orders can get you jailed if not killed, then no one should accept such reasoning when the pentalty is merely being unable to do business in an area.

Maybe torturing / killing people under orders is not the same as restricting access to information.

Yeah, the information restriction is much more severe in the big picture.

You think the people who did this should be executed by hanging?

Wat?

Its not just Github though. There are a bunch of other companies who will take away the message that you don't mess with the Chinese gov't.

Github is powerful and funded enough that they won't succumb. Its all the smaller websites who might male changes because of this.

I wouldn't say they are powerful, but they are a subculture and subcultures can turn on a dime.

they got 100 Million in VC funding and are the epicenter of modern software development. That's kinda powerful.

GitHub was banned in Russia for less than a day and had started to comply with totally braindead removal requests. Why China would need months of attacks to make them do so?

did you get "complying with local laws in all countries in which we operate" from Cloudflare ?

They must believe that GitHub will bow to their will and remove Greatfire or block it from China. Permanently?

Well, yes? Extraterritorial law enforcement works fine for the US, they're quite happy to shut down gambling, copyright infringement, and so on regardless of where you are in the world.

In this case, it's git. It's inherently distributed. It's fairly easy to force Chinese users onto a local equivalent and block all those suspicious outgoing https/ssh connections to github.

Sure, but the power differential is much more balanced in this case it would seem. The U.S. government has a history of giving asylum to Chinese dissidents. I'm not sure that forcing users onto a local equivalent would work, it's not git that's the scarce and valuable resource here, it's GitHub. It's the collaboration, being part of the conversation on PRs and Issues, etc. It's currently the center of the web development universe. Greatfire is a brilliant poison pill. I guess we'll have to wait and watch carefully to understand the end game. My prediction is that GitHub continues to mount a defense long enough for U.S. authorities to get involved and at that point the DDoS will stop. I'm either missing something huge (it's not China), or it's an incredibly naive attempt that will fail: just today's blip.

This particular content was hosted on github not because of git per se, but because github is an easy way to host some content and CN cannot block the whole github domain because the tech sector in CN relies too much on github.com, hence it would create a damage to a growing economic sector.

Github has been known to remove files and repositories simply because employees don't like them, despite them not actually breaking any ToS. They've also been known to block access to files/repos to users in certain countries. I wouldn't be surprised if attacks on those repos would cause it to get removed.

> Github has been known to remove files and repositories simply because employees don't like them, despite them not actually breaking any ToS.

Do you have any source on that?

Sure. The two most popular examples are the C Plus Equality repo and the Operation Disrespectful Nod repo, which were a satirical programming language and a Gamergate resource list for contacting advertisers, respectively.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/14/1618239/github-takes...

https://pipedot.org/story/2014-10-04/github-staff-jake-boxer...

Wait so Jake Boxer responding on Twitter to Nexxy is considered proof that he removed it? I don't think that holds up.

It's not proof that _he_ necessarily removed it, but considering it wasn't brought down by the actual repo maintainer, and that any repos created to replace it by other users at the time were taken down as well, it's a safe assumption that someone at GH did.

There's several more sources regarding this, but I'm on a terrible mobile connection at the moment. Googling around will get you a bit more info for the story.

All the sources I've seen just show the tweets and then go on to say how he went rogue and removed the repository. Seems like a really weak argument.

Github is a private company, and they have every right to remove misogynist content if they don't want to be associated with it.

Way to completely miss the point and spin it in a different direction.

The US's tech prestige was damaged by the revelations that of mass US spying. One could ask "Why did the US poison their branch for such temporary gain?"

Countries are different beasts.

GitHub was blocked completely by GFW. But many developers in China complained, because GitHub is too important. Now it becomes available again. I think they choose Baidu just because its scripts are widely used.

> Streisand effect

An American concept. Foreign to Chinese Legalism. Do note that "Free Speech" doesn't exist over there as a concept.

> Do note that "Free Speech" doesn't exist over there as a concept.

I think you're rather overstating that.

自由言論 - that's free speech in Chinese

no. It's 言论自由, or 言論自由 in traditional Chinese.

> Do note that "Free Speech" doesn't exist over there as a concept.

1. Free speech as a right isn't critical to the Streisand effect, and

2. "Free speech" as a concept certainly exists in China. The formal orientation of the government with respect to the concept (and quite possibly the public perception of the value of the concept) is very different than in Western liberal democracies, but the concept certainly exists, just as the concept of, say, "theocracy" exists in most places, even the places that don't practice it.

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