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China Censorship Programming

In China, GitHub Is a Free Speech Zone for Covid Information (wired.com) 28

As coronavirus news was increasingly trapped behind the Great Firewall, the programming platform became a refuge from censorship. It may not last long. From a report: When the coronavirus first spread through China in January, Chinese PhD student Weilei Zeng watched the pandemic unfold online from his apartment in Riverside, California. Thousands of miles from home, he frantically tried to keep up with news of the crisis, following the rare outpouring of discontent that flooded Chinese social media: lockdown diaries penned by anxious patients; video footage of overcrowded hospitals; tributes to Li Wenliang, the young doctor who was reprimanded for "rumor-mongering" when he first warned the public about the virus (and would die of Covid-19 only a month later). Then, inevitably, as Chinese censors stepped in to scrub the internet clean, Zeng would return to a link he'd visited just a few days earlier to find only the familiar 404 error message -- indicating that the page had vanished. Zeng soon discovered that these posts were not gone. Many had been preserved and quietly tucked away in an unexpected corner of the internet: GitHub, the world's largest open source software site. Founded in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2018, GitHub is popular among developers and programmers, who use the platform mostly to share and crowdsource code. Zeng often used it as a way to collaborate with his university peers on research projects. But after the pandemic hit, he stumbled on thousands of Chinese internet users repurposing GitHub as a Covid-19 archive, racing against censors to document the outbreak in the form of news articles, medical journals, and personal accounts.

One collaborative project, known as a "repository," was named #2020nCovMemory. Founded by seven volunteers from around the world, it included everything from investigative reports published by Chinese news magazine Caixin to the diary entries of Wuhan writer Fang Fang, who criticized the local government's suppression of information and initial failure to warn the public about the virus. Another repository, called Terminus2049 -- named after a planet in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series -- collected sensitive articles that were otherwise inaccessible behind China's Great Firewall, such as an interview with Ai Fen, the doctor who first discovered the virus in December. In February, Zeng joined a repository called 2020nCov_individual_archives, to crowdsource online diary entries and citizens' accounts of everyday life during the pandemic. "It made me feel much more at peace, knowing that these stories were being saved somewhere," Zeng says. On the Chinese internet, global social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are banned, and domestic platforms like WeChat and Weibo are strictly monitored. But GitHub, known to some Chinese internet users as the "last land of free speech in China," remains accessible. Chinese authorities cannot censor individual projects, because GitHub uses the HTTPS protocol, which encrypts all traffic.

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In China, GitHub Is a Free Speech Zone for Covid Information

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  • by Merk42 ( 1906718 ) on Thursday September 10, 2020 @12:43PM (#60492846)
    Good thing in glorious U.S. of A, our elected leaders would never deliberately misinform their citizens.
  • ... and routes around it.

    • ... and routes around it.

      Unfortunately, it's become obvious during the last half-decade this Slasdot meme fails once governments start fragmenting "the internet". It really only works if the Internet is allowed to function as designed - as one whole world-spanning network.

      • by Entrope ( 68843 )

        The quote originates with John Gilmore, significantly before Slashdot was a thing. (His version started "The Net interprets...")

        The effort of countries to create walled gardens is a race between the enforcers to catch new methods of flagging "problematic" material, and the users to find new ways around the filters. Putting content on Github is this week's battle in that war. It is exactly what Gilmore was referring to.

        • The effort of countries to create walled gardens is a race between the enforcers to catch new methods of flagging "problematic" material, and the users to find new ways around the filters. Putting content on Github is this week's battle in that war. It is exactly what Gilmore was referring to.

          It makes no sense to associate that with the internet. That's what humans have always tried to do when faced with censorship and other forms of oppression [wikipedia.org] - certainly way, way before the internet, and probably for as long as humans have existed.

  • You know... I personally don't like their censorship, but exploiting other providers whose purpose is not to circumvent censorship Nor even to distribute publications to the detriment of technical collaborators and software projects is pretty shitty. Because its going to get sites that never signed up to do this banned in China, and its going to hurt many innocent parties who are not involved with the content intended to be censored.

    This seems like an abuse of Github's services that will be detrimenta

    • They're already working on replacing Github [techcrunch.com]. Not easy: for comparison, think of the attempts many corporations have made to keep open source out of their companies.
      • Giving innocuous phases double meanings makes it very hard for censors to monitor. Pooh Bear (for Xi) is crude. Terrorists used weddings -- if the Bride is late the bomb has yet to arrive.

        I suspect that this already happens to a large degree in China. But I have not heard anything.

        So if somebody sends you a Wechat "Looks like nice day, let's have coffee by the park" you should be afraid. Very afraid..l..

        • Pooh Bear (for Xi) is crude

          Yeah but that one's already being censored. The fight between double-meanings and censors went for a while in China, but I think the censors are mostly winning, not sure.

        • Terrorists used weddings -- if the Bride is late the bomb has yet to arrive.

          Some terrorists used some weddings.

          I was exiting Saudi Arabia in 2013 after arriving in 2008 and risking deportation to explore Riyadh and Buraidah through a contractual dispute and meeting plenty of Yemens in Riyadh and warning Afghani's between those cities that if the frickin' King says you can buy cigarettes near a mosque, any pressure on locals to put them under the counter is a no-no.

          You're oversimplifying a failed policy of indulged aggression from a client state. The United States green-lighted

    • I'd rather have China off of GitHub anyway. It reduces several classes of problem.

  • And now that /. has outed GitHub for having this information, it will soon be blocked in China. Ban starts in 5... 4... 3...
  • "Chinese authorities cannot censor individual projects, because GitHub uses the HTTPS protocol, which encrypts all traffic." Because the Great Firewall can't MITM TLS...oh wait, it probably can. The CCP's TLS cert is already pre-installed in every major web browser.

  • They execute prisoners and send the family the bill. They round up ethnic minorities and put them into concentration camps. They build islands working on the 300 mile rule. They have a social score, that the victims don't know about (shades of the don't fly list).

    But knowing they launch rockets, knowing not only big chunks of rockets are possibly going to land in populated areas, but those big chunks have highly toxic stuff like N2O4 and HN03 around them, and they flat out don't care.

    Fuck Huawei an
  • Maybe if they blocked Github, their Great Firewall would stop working

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. - Oscar Wilde

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