Chinese Government Appears To Be Blocking GitHub Via DNS 61
An anonymous reader writes "Reports are coming in that the social coding site GitHub has been blocked in China. While the service has seen blocks in the country before, this appears to be a much broader denial of service, affecting most, if not all users in the world's most populous country online and offline. GitHub released a statement saying: 'GitHub is still investigating, but it does appear that we’re at least being partly blocked by the Great Firewall of China. We’re looking into it, and will update with more information when we have it.'"
QUESTION: How's a downmod justifiable (Score:0, Informative)
The source article proves me correct by this quote from its content:
"Did a traceroute and this reveals an expected result. It is really the DNS which returns a wrong value â(TM)59.24.3.173â instead of the expected â(TM)207.97.227.239â, so it looks like a dns poisoning attempt or some other dns issue. Editing your /etc/hosts file or using opendns can help in this case." - FROM -> http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/01/21/the-chinese-government-appears-to-have-completely-blocked-github-via-dns/ [thenextweb.com]
* See subject-line above...
APK
P.S.=> This really takes the cake... lol!
... apk
maybe it's because of the Spring Festival homerush (Score:5, Informative)
Usual totalitarian bashing aside, this may actually be the real reason:
Back ground info: Spring Festival is coming (this year it's Feb. 10th), which calls for all people to go home to unite with their family. And this makes the train tickets very difficult to obtain and the beginning and ending the holidays. The railway ministry in China has build an online train-ticket buying/reserving system (12306.cn) a couple years back and it is now well known when new tickets would be available online, and they sell out within minutes.
A while ago some Chinese programmer wrote a (naive) browser plugin to automate the ticket reserving operation. A few factors contributed to this plugin causing a lot of extra strain on the already burdened 12306.cn site: it would poll the site repeatedly if the service was not available; as it relies on some Javascript hosted on GitHub and it tries to load that repeatedly as well; the plugin is packaged in some binary distribution of a couple Chinese re-branded browsers which brags about it's ability to "help you grab the ticket".
As a result, it brought down GitHub a couple weeks ago (when the grabbing of this years tickets begin), and the ticket sellout windows went from minutes to seconds.
The railway ministry is pissed and claim that this practice is "illegal" or "immoral" and should be banned. Blocking Github could just be the attempt at blocking that "ticket assistant" plugin: No Github, no plugin.
refernce: http://www.techinasia.com/china-railway-ministry-asks-kingsoft-shut-browser-addon/ [techinasia.com]