"blocking GitHub is not really a viable option" he said.
Tell that to the world's craziest democracy - India, which banned GitHub, Vimeo, Pastebin and a bunch of others in December last year.
Some bans were lifted later.
Source : http://www.zdnet.com/article/india-blocks-32-websites-includ...
Agree with this. Anyone who thinks blocking GitHub is not really a viable option has never been on the other side of the GFW.
The Chinese government will happily block any site they want to and they have little/no regard for the popularity or usefulness of the site in question, and often they will block popular foreign sites to help copycat local versions thrive.
Off the top of my head they block Facebook, Twitter and Youtube entirely and Wikipedia selectively (used to be permanently also). I can tell you they don't care about blocking GitHub.
The also have the ability to dynamically block sites based on page content rather than just entire domains, so it would be perfectly feasible for them to block just the project pages and not the entirety of GitHub.
You can't selectively block content on an SSL connection w/o having a back door to the encryption keys used to secure the connection. A man in the middle attack would be detectable unless the root certificates were compromised.
> Agree with this. Anyone who thinks blocking GitHub is not really a viable option has never been on the other side of the GFW.
Before long time ago, people hosting tons of anti Chinese government stuff on Google, especially Common Storage Service, yes people say China wouldn't dare block Google.
I think that action was somewhat different in nature, though. It's an instance of Vogon-type bureaucracy that sends blocking orders to Internet service providers without an understanding of the issues. I presume the Indian government is not actively trying to shut down VPNs that people use to access this kind of resources.
In short, I believe the Chinese government knows what it is doing, while the Indian government does not.
By the way, in my career of 25 years of professional software development, I've only once delivered something that was certified to be bug-free.
That was when the company transferred our work, and the test servers, to India. We shipped the machines, and to send them, they had to be packed on pallets. The pallets were wooden. For Indian customs bureaucracy, I had to arrange a paper called phytosanitary certificate, which states that the wood has no bugs.
Only Gist was blocked, not Github. It was a knee-jerk reaction to a court order after ISIS made a series of threats and some Indians were found to be in contact with the ISIS. All those sites were unblocked soon after.
"World's craziest democracy" - that really made me smile :)
I don't think the Indian Government's competancy in IT (and many other things) come close to that of China; but hey atleast we don't have a muzzle over our mouths (that's partly a lie).
