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Comment by jjcc | Hacker News Reader

Most people might not know what kind of organization GreatFire really is because too much context is missing. I only discovered recently it's not so simple. There have been a lot of talks about the behavior of GreatFire for quite for a while but most of the talks are in Chinese. There are some in English though, to give everybody a glimpse here is an example: https://github.com/greatfire/wiki/issues/1

I have an impression is GreatFire tried to weaponize all the users of github. They succeeded.

I don't like the GFW either. But I think I'm very likely to be downvoted because the context of this incident is quite complicated. It's not easy to tell the truth especially when it's against most people's belief.

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I'm sorry, what?

Yes, it looks like Github has been pulled into a fight not entirely related to their initial mission. But that's how principle flows, you never know when the free flow of information will turn into a larger fight.

I very much hope that they, and whatever networking partners they're working with, see this through. Because it's bullying bullshit by the Chinese government, trying to make people shut up because that government doesn't like what they are saying. GitHub is a company in America, not in China, and I hope they and their partners have the principles to stand up for the right to say what you think in America. If, by the magic of technology, those statements end up readable somewhere else, so much the better.

Because if GitHub folds to this sort pressure, that pressure will just move on to the next site willing to host something that maybe the Chinese government doesn't like.

You can make your accomodationist crap sound as reasonable as you like. It still amounts to giving in to censorship, and letting other people tell you what you can and can't say. I don't admire that, not one bit.

I disagree that part of the mission of a for-profit organization includes responding to costly censorship measures from another country's government.

Github would lose significant respect by folding, but unless they're ultimately fighting the U.S. Government's censorship, they don't have a claim in this fight.

> that's how principle flows, you never know when the free flow of information will turn into a larger fight.

Sure, whenever chernevik claims you need to enter a fight, you need to take it ;)

I donno, perhaps we're just reading the page differently (And of course, all the context that's in Chinese is lost on us), but I don't really see how GreatFire is using Github in a way that's not intended, as Github is used for lots of non-code repos and AFAIK that's never even been considered an issue. I think saying that they're trying to 'weaponize' github is arguable, but regardless the idea of putting the information they have on somewhere like Github, where making copies and distributing it is extremely easy makes a lot of sense from their standpoint. In addition, Github is nice and popular, meaning lots of people will see. Wikileaks did/does similar things, like posting torrents to large encrypted masses of data on places like Facebook, where lots of people will see it. When you consider they're trying to fight censorship, their actions make sense.

I read there basically that the complains are that hosting GreatFire in GitHub might prompt this sort of reaction from the Chinese government, or might cause them to block GitHub in China. I see no other complain, at least not in English. I don't see anything that I would read as "weaponizing all users of github". At least not in the way this attack "weaponizes" Baidu Analytics users. It seems like valid use of what's essentially a programmer-oriented social network.

The personal is political. It's not possible to exist in a non-political state. It's a lot like Stallman's victim-perpetrator phrase. Nobody wants to think of themselves as either a victim or perpetrator, but here we are and wishing it away unfortunately can't make it true.

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?

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.

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.

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.

hmmmm...I wonder if creating an account and upload wikileak document would be good incentive for Github to amend its ToU.

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