India blocks GitHub, after lobbying done by copyright trolls
Site Blocking Fallout Keeps GitHub Unusable for Some Indians * TorrentFreak
Who cares if nobody can work, the important is that those illegal streams are blocked
Remember when India blocked the official website for VLC?
Its still blocked including newgrounds.com. I have to use VPN to play Geometry Dash because sound of custom level are hosted on newground.
Here a List of site which I can't access without VPN
Lol wtf
At what point can we all just acknowledge that copyright law has become a public nuisance in its current form
Copyright, Patent Laws, holding back human progress for a century.
I've always thought that China's complete disregard for IP is one of their greatest strengths tbh
Probably never, since it benefits large corporations
The ONE thing I might have in common with the hexbear people is thinking China has the right ideas when it comes to copyright. Copyright and trademarks only serve to hinder innovation.
The fediverse can't reach source forges fast enough...
Git really should be married with bittorrent for large files. At the moment it's GFS which requires large central storage, which doesn't really fit with git. Should be maglinks.
Or IPFS. The issue in this context is that bittorrent would treat each version as a unique collection of files and you can't combine seeding of redundant files. IPFS has much better means to handle updates.
Git LFS exists, not sure how it works technically, but it's what the AI people use for AI model VCS.
VPN time for indians
Oh fun fact, Govt also issued an order stating that VPN providers who won't log information of users, can't function in India.
The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.
Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.
It's kind of funny, but it's also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.
Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?
Self-hosted Gitea. 🌈
It is block? I think it was my Internet issue. Fuck. I hate this type of bullshit. But I can download some file from raw url?
The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don't live in India, so I don't know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It's the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn't affected?
Let India cripple its own economy.
I read that Linux usage is much higher in India (I think ~13% vs 5% in the US, though the statistics are probably outdated). I am totally ignorant when it comes to India, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm wondering if the rise of Linux users has something to do with the government trying to limit access to Github.
Indian here.
Most government organisations in India have shifted to using linux (primarily ubuntu) because they didn't want to pay hefty license fees to microsoft and to buy new PCs, since almost all of their computers either ran Windows 7 or XP.
The other way round. Government is pro Ubuntu/Linux.
No it doesn't.
Guess Gitlab is about to get a shot in the arm from india.
Again? Hadn't this happened before?
Wait, you guys aren't europeen yet?!
I would block even more services from Microsoft, why not. Go to other git sources.
Good news. Hopefully this will help to finally break the de facto monopoly of Microsoft's GitHub and bring the distributed aspect of Git - away from gatekeeper platforms - back into the foreground.
Based
..but this will realistically just spawn some new mirrors and proxies because the vast amount of projects hosted there definitely won't ever move away.
Anyway, I am doing my part! (With my irrelevant profile)
When is it supposed to kick in? Because it sure hasn't been done yet.
Edit: Blatant misinformation
the main problems of those blocking orders, worldwide, not only in india, is that while blocks are immediate and done with no supervision directly in the hands of the copyright trolls, unblocks are slow and need 100+ approvals
It's exactly how reporting shithead users online is like.
You report a stupid asshole, takes a long ass time to be dealt with.
They report you - record time.
Its been like this for a long time. I still find it difficult to access raw.github. the reversal is not proper as far as I can say.
Edit: checked now, still can't.
Based on the other comments, they blocked the raw url.
But the headline 'India blocks github" is incorrect at all levels