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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  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.

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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.

>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?

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."

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

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