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.)
How is it blocked (Score:3, Interesting)
at the DNS entry?
Could you just enter the hex of the IP instead of the DNS name?
Boycott China! (Score:5, Interesting)
If there are posts on Slashdot advocating for the boycott of China and the Olympics, would the government block access to Slashdot?
Yes, this is a test.
Re:How is it blocked (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen some blocking done pretty sloppily and I have used this method to get around it.
Thanks.
And in other totally unrelated news... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm in Beijing right now and it loads OK (Score:5, Interesting)
I just loaded sourceforge.net from Beijing. Admittedly I'm in a hotel, but my connection appears to otherwise be filtered like all the others I've used in China, so I don't imagine there's anything special about this case.
So, perhaps I'm just lucky, or perhaps it's not really blocked...
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:3, Interesting)
By the same token I could say that free software is a perfect capitalist market with an entry cost only proportional to the difficulty to read the code.
Anyone can bend the concepts like that.
Alright mods... (Score:1, Interesting)
who modded me troll, and WHY?
Re:I'm in Beijing right now and it loads OK (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't access it from Shanghai. However, if the Sourceforge website is being blocked, it's not from a tcp reset as is typical for most (all?) of the sites blocked by the Great Firewall. Sourceforge is just timing out so it's entirely possible this is all just paranoia. Notably, svn access is working just fine--which is to say, just as slowly as ever.
Re:how can a text editor boycott the olympics? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:*Sigh* (Score:1, Interesting)
You do not buy chinese products but you do buy US products ??? I really wonder how twisted your moral has to be, while US army is still killing civilists in two countries that it is illegaly occupaying and officialy admitting torturing enemy detainees (without even accusing them). How does this qualify being better than what china does with Tibet ????? Sorry for the rant but this kind of selective egocentric quasi morality just makes me want to climb the wall.
Tempted to put up pro-Tibet things on my website (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm tempted to put up pro-Tibet / anti-Chinese government things on my website just so they block me. Maybe it will help cut down on hacker attempts and spam email.
Spread a good message and hinder the jerks.. it's win-win if you ask me.
Re:Why would we care? (Score:5, Interesting)
The code [google.com] can be a bitch too.
Broken record, check! (Score:4, Interesting)
How often do I have to say it ? To hell with the Chinese government. They punish their own, then expect us to shake their hand and play nice ? They promised the IOC things would change for the better, then days after they secured the 2008 events, they turned around and bragged about how they were going to eliminate the Falun Gong movement, the Dalai Lama and the muslim separatists. So why the fuck are we still letting them host the olympics ? Does no one remember Moscow 1980 ?
I've boycotted Chinese IP ranges for years, and I'm boycotting the Beijing Olympics. What that country needs is a coup d'état, and the Chinese people need to know the rest of the world will take side with them when the walls fall.
Every nation is guilty of crimes against humanity, but at least the others have the decency to bow their heads and lie about it. The Chinese gov't parades around, flaunting their total disregard for equality. I don't see why we should tolerate it.
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:2, Interesting)
OSS, on the other hand, is more of the flavor of volunteerism. Or the "pro bono" work many lawyers do.
Re:How is it blocked (Score:5, Interesting)
Blocking party .. come on FREE whatsoever (Score:2, Interesting)
off the net(or even blocking
here it comes
a.) Free Tibet
b.) down with the one-party-system
c.) democracy for china
d.) back to communism
e.) Tienamen == red place of Bejing
f.) Nukes for Taiwan
g.) Nukes in Taiwan
Now
Post this on your site and you will not suffer chinise hackers
and now some terms to be blocked from the U.S.
a.) Chavez our hero
b.)
__CENSORED__
My 2cents from a Chinese perspective (Score:1, Interesting)
1. Those people who are in charge of GFW have pig heads with full load of shit, as always
2. Not a wise move for N++'s coders neither. I have to say when I saw the black flag banner in their website, I feel very uncomfortable. They said the protest is not against Chinese people but Chinese government. However the banner works in exactly opposite way. Considering how most Chinese still keep enthusiasm welcoming foreigners to Olympics after the earthquake, boycating it because of the irrelevant Tibet issue is rather annoying. The Olympics is not for Chinese government, but a carnival for our Chinese people. If you don't like Chinese government, protest something else but please don't use the Olympics.
Re:how can a text editor boycott the olympics? (Score:2, Interesting)
The interesting thing is that their homepage (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm) is very well accessible via the Beijing proxy of my company network; nicely showing the Beijing Olympics handcufs logo to every Chinese citizen who stumbles upon it.
www.sourceforge.net and Sourceforge's download pages are blocked.
Lacking culture awareness (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that China is very bad when it comes to freedom, and that the country would have been better off if the Coomunist Party hadn't turned on the revolutionary partners they had in overthrowing the Monarchy. However, China hasn't had free thought in probably a millenia or more.
You cannot use European filtered glasses and understand the Chinese mind (although there were visionaries in China during the revolution). Sure, there are many enlightened Chinese now, but life in China is still much the way it has been for over a thousand years (altough probably better for many and worse for some). Freedom is a new concept in China, not even a hundred years old. I think over all, they aren't doing too bad for a people just discovering free thought. Japan too struggles with this foreign concept. In Japan it is still often "the nail that sticks out that gets hammered down". Whereas, in many European cultures, "the nail that sticks out" often gets pulled out to see how it works (although, from what I read - the younger generation in Japan has made the transition).
So, while we should continue to pursue a path to bring China and the other freedom denying countries into the light, one should try to keep a mind on the cultural heritage and other other factors when approaching them.
In the end, free thinking will win out, because it open up many more avenues than any other mind set. Of course with free-thinking, I think you also get more crime. It's all Yin-Yang in the end. Eventually there will be a tipping point and a cascade event in China, much like I think Japan has recently undergone.
Of course, I could be totally wrong.
Re:how can a text editor boycott the olympics? (Score:2, Interesting)
why you are so high-sounding, you know the history of tibet?
Do you? Or do you just think you know it?
There are many faults in the western society that need to be addressed, but I doubt looking at those faults will help anyone in China or Tibet.
Re:How is it blocked (Score:5, Interesting)
Idea: could you split packets between "Ti" and "bet"?
Reassembling the whole TCP stream for every flow would take a heap of memory and quite a bit of CPU, so I really doubt anyone they'll try that.