Sourceforge.net Blocked In Mainland China 279
gzipped_tar contributed a link to Moonlight Blog, which says that "SourceForge, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to be blocked in Mainland China. The current blocking may be related to the recent anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games, which will begin on 8 August. Some days before, a very popular free source code editor in SourceForge named Notepad++ start to boycott Beijing 2008. The project's developer said that the action is not against Chinese people, but against Chinese government's repression against Tibetan unrest earlier in this year. SF.net has once been banned by China in 2002. However, the ban was lifted later in 2003."
gzipped_tar adds: "As a SourceForge user in Beijing, I can confirm this first-hand. I also tried traceroute to sourceforge.net, only to find the connection being dropped at a Beijing ISP's gateway router. It appears that the projects' respective homepages are available even if they are hosted by SF, but the summary and download pages are blocked."
(As you probably know, Slashdot and Sourceforge share a corporate overlord.)
Re:How is it blocked (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in China and i'm not blocked (Score:2, Informative)
at the DNS entry?
Could you just enter the hex of the IP instead of the DNS name?
Re:Tempted to put up pro-Tibet things on my websit (Score:4, Informative)
Re:how can a text editor boycott the olympics? (Score:3, Informative)
Yea right.
There was a KDE program that had a pro us message in the about dialog that got pulled because it was too "political".
In this case it is more the author than must a project leader. IMHO it is his code and his site. If you don't like it write a better program and don't put in any politics.
Re:Sources? (Score:4, Informative)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080623/ts_nm/olympics_mosque_dc [yahoo.com]
China demolishes mosque for not supporting Olympics: group
Mon Jun 23, 3:56 AM ET
BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities in the restive far western region of Xinjiang have demolished a mosque for refusing to put up signs in support of this August's Beijing Olympics, an exiled group said on Monday.
The mosque was in Kalpin county near Aksu city in Xinjiang's rugged southwest, the World Uyghur Congress said.
The spokesman's office of the Xinjiang government said it had no immediate comment, while telephone calls to the county government went answered.
"China is forcing mosques in East Turkistan to publicize the Beijing Olympics to get the Uighur people to support the Games (but) this has been resisted by the Uighurs," World Uyghur Congress spokesman Dilxat Raxit said in an emailed statement.
Beijing says al Qaeda is working with militants in Xinjiang to use terror to establish an independent state called East Turkistan.
Oil-rich Xinjiang is home to 8 million Turkic-speaking Uighurs, many of whom resent the growing economic and cultural influence of the Han Chinese.
Dilxat Raxit added that the mosque, which had been renovated in 1998, was accused of illegally renovating the structure, carrying out illegal religious activities and illegally storing copies of the Muslim holy book the Koran.
"All the Korans in the mosque have been seized by the government and dozens of people detained," he said. "The detained Uighurs have been tortured."
The Olympic torch relay passed through Xinjiang last week under tight security, with all but carefully vetted residents banned from watching on the streets and tight controls over foreign media covering the event.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie)
(For more stories visit our multimedia website "Road to Beijing" at http://www.reuters.com/news/sports/2008olympics [reuters.com]; and see our blog at http://blogs.reuters.com/china [reuters.com])
Re:how can a text editor boycott the olympics? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How is it blocked (Score:5, Informative)
Posting from Shanghai.
There are at least a couple of methods to the GFW. One, which you mentioned, is the bi-directional RST packet method. This is typically reserved for the higher infractions, such as searching in google or yahoo for the religious group "Fa1unG 0ng" ( i can't actually spell it out, lest the RST packets disconnect me from slashdot for a while). Or sometimes, there will be something similar, like tÂbet (inverted exclamation used here for 'i' - ) in a web page - the page will load halfway, the GFW will see that and then the page will disappear with a "the connection was reset" (in firefox, of course). Different keywords are bad at different times for different people. Lack of reliable and clear No-No words keeps people unsure and reluctant to take chances, which is undoubtedly more effective than telling people exactly what they can't do. For the *most* part, domains are not blocked this way. There *are* some exceptions, like xanga.com, for whatever reason.
Second: Usually, IP blocks (or full-domain/subdomain blocks, which i think are just IP blocks) come in the form of a connection that times out, or firefox resulting in a "The server at sourceforge.net is taking too long to respond." (IE produces the same error for both the above mentioned situations). It is my belief that the method in one of the parent posts (null-route or something to that effect) is used for these type of blocks.
The reason, I guess, is that the first kind of block, where the server is sending out lots of RST packets, and has to *SCAN* the entire payload of each POST/GET, and its entire response, is very resource-heavy, and having to scan for too much stuff would be a lot more expensive than just Null-routing a bunch of IP addresses.
For the second kind of block, a proxy server works quite well (furthering my suspicion that it's actually just an IP block). For the first kind (RSTpacket kind), you need a secure connection like a VPN, or other terminal-type connection where plaintext is not so visible.