Censorship of GitHub

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GitHub has been the target of censorship from governments using methods ranging from local Internet service provider blocks, intermediary blocking using methods such as DNS hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks, and denial-of-service attacks on GitHub's servers from countries including China, India, Iraq, Russia, and Turkey. In all of these cases, GitHub has been eventually unblocked after backlash from users and technology businesses or compliance from GitHub.

Contents

Background

GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service and is primarily used to host the source code of software, facilitate project management, and provide distributed revision control functionality of Git, access control, wikis, and bug tracking. [1] As of June 2023, GitHub reports having over 100 million users and over 330 million repositories. [2] It offers free accounts, a pastebin service called Gist, and free website hosting under its github.io domain. The GitHub terms of service prohibits illegal use and it reserves the right to remove content at its discretion. [3] Users can fork (copy and individually develop) other projects, which GitHub does not automatically take down when served DMCA takedown notices. [4] GitHub uses HTTPS for its connections, making data more secure against interception from third parties.

China

China heavily regulates Internet traffic and has blocked many international Internet companies including Facebook and Twitter. [5] In addition, Western businesses have said that these restrictions hurt their business by reducing access to information, such as from search engines and those using VPNs. [6] In 2013, the country started blocking GitHub and it was met by protests among Chinese programmers. [7]

GreatFire, a Chinese anti-censorship organization, has attempted to circumvent the Great Firewall of China using mirror websites. However, the links to these pages were posted using GitHub which brings the risk of the site being blocked along with the mirrors. In a previous incident, HSBC bank's Chinese operation was taken offline when the Akamai network was targeted for hosting GreatFire.org websites. [8]

DNS hijacking

Blockage

Test results from viewDNS.info showing that GitHub was blocked from within China Jan 21 GitHub DNS China block.png
Test results from viewDNS.info showing that GitHub was blocked from within China

On January 21, 2013, GitHub was blocked in China using DNS hijacking. It was reported that the attack was carried out in response to political information posted on the platform. [9] Confirming the block, a spokesperson for GitHub said: "It does appear that we're at least being partly blocked by the Great Firewall of China". [lower-alpha 1] [10] The block was lifted on January 23, 2013, after an online protest on Sina Weibo. [11]

Criticism

Kai-Fu Lee brought attention to the block after posting about it on Sina Weibo. He derided the block, saying: "Blocking GitHub is unjustifiable, and will only derail the nation's programmers from the world, while bringing about a loss in competitiveness and insight." Lee's post was shared over 80,000 times. [11] However, this website is still blocked in Tibet and Xinjiang Autonomous Regions.[ citation needed ]

The Next Web called the block unfortunate, saying that "Chinese developers will have to play around with workarounds or find an alternative service when they want to work with their peers around the world." [10]

MITM attack

Attack

An example of the warning users in China received from browsers when trying to access GitHub with the self-signed certificate Jan 26 Safari GitHub China MITM.jpg
An example of the warning users in China received from browsers when trying to access GitHub with the self-signed certificate

On January 26, 2013, GitHub users in China experienced a man-in-the-middle attack in which attackers could have intercepted traffic between the site and its users in China. The mechanism of the attack was through a fake SSL certificate. [12] Users attempting to access GitHub received a warning of an invalid SSL certificate, which, due to being signed by an unknown authority, was quickly detected. [13] A spokesperson for GitHub said: "Early last week, it appeared that GitHub was being at least partially blocked by the Great Firewall of China... After a couple days, it appeared that GitHub was no longer being blocked." [12] NETRESEC performed forensics of the attack and determined that it was indeed an attack, due to the large number of router hops involved (6) and because the user submitting the packet capture was from China. [14]

This attack was performed again on March 26, 2020, on GitHub Pages and March 27, 2020, on GitHub.com. [15] [16]

Rationale

GreatFire speculated that the attack was related to a popular White House petition calling for the denial of entry to the United States of the architects of the Great Firewall of China. [13] The petition linked to a Gist containing names of 3 of the architects and their contact information. [17] GreatFire also said that since GitHub is HTTPS only, Chinese authorities can't block individual pages and have to completely block the website, which helps explain why they would have to resort to the attack. [13] InformationWeek noted the economic difficulty related to blocking GitHub: "What makes GitHub interesting from a censorship point of view is that it combines a critical business service—collaborative coding—with social interaction." [12]

DDoS attack

On March 26, 2015, GitHub was the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack originating from China. It targeted two anti-censorship projects: GreatFire and cn-nytimes, the latter including instructions on how to access the Chinese version of The New York Times . [18] GitHub blocked China-based IP addresses from visiting these repositories. If a visitor comes from China, the page would show "Repository unavailable because of the Chinese Internet Blacklist". Based on GitHub, they are doing this so "that our users in that jurisdiction may continue to have access to GitHub to collaborate and build software." [19] They are now having a gov-takedowns repository to record all the government requirements they could show. [20]

India

India selectively censors websites at the federal and state levels. This is enforced by the Information Technology Act, 2000, as well as licensing requirements for Internet service providers (ISPs). Critics such as Rajeev Chandrasekhar have noted the vagueness of these regulations and the Centre for Internet and Society found that ISPs tended to over-comply with takedown requests. [21]

ISP blockage

On December 17, 2014, the Indian Department of Telecom issued an order to ISPs to block 32 websites. [22] The notice was made public on December 31, 2014, and it included GitHub, GitHub's Gist, Vimeo, the Internet Archive, and various pastebin services. [23]

Direction to block Internet Website

To: All Internet Service Licensees
Under the powers conferred by Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and under the Information Technology (Procedures and Safeguards for Blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009, it has been decided to immediately block the access to the following 32 URLs:...

Department of Telecommunications [23]

The block order was confirmed on Twitter by Arvind Gupta, the national head of the ruling party BJP, and was attributed to a suggestion by India's Anti Terrorism Squad in response to content by the Islamic extremist group ISIS. Gupta also stated that websites that cooperated with the investigation were being unblocked. [24]

On January 2, 2015, the Ministry of Communications issued a statement that it will be unblocking 4 of the websites, including GitHub's Gist, and said that it will consider unblocking the remaining websites once they complied. Explaining its rationale, the ministry stated: "Many of these websites do not require any authentication for pasting any material on them... These websites were being used frequently for pasting, communicating [jihadi] content..." [25] Gulshan Rai of the CERT-In agency of the ministry said that the order came from the Mumbai Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate following an interrogation of Arif Majeed, an ISIS recruit. [26]

On January 4, 2015, a GitHub spokesperson said that some users were still having trouble accessing the site and that GitHub has attempted to reach out to the Indian government, but is still unclear about the cause of the block. They said that restoring access to the developer community in India was their top priority and that they "would like to work with the Indian government to establish a transparent process for identifying unlawful content, restore access, and ensure that GitHub continues to remain available in the future without interruption." [27]

Impact

The Times of India reported blockage for Indian users by the ISPs Vodafone, BSNL and Hathway, but it still had access using Airtel. [22] Because the order only told ISPs what to block and not how, the effectiveness of blocking access varied. The blocking was unreliable and seemed to be occurring at multiple layers, even within the same ISP. Blocking methods included IP blocking, the use of a proxy server, and DNS blocking. Methods for gaining access ranged from using an alternate DNS server to installing circumvention software. [28]

Criticism

A poster by the Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu protesting the blocks using the hashtag #GOIBlocks GOIBlocks protest poster fsftn.png
A poster by the Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu protesting the blocks using the hashtag #GOIBlocks

Regarding the blocks, TechCrunch remarked that "[the] addition of GitHub... is one of the more head-scratching decisions" and anticipated an uproar considering its importance in the tech industry. They also called it embarrassing in the context of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Make in India campaign to promote India as a destination for information technology. [29] Prasanth Sugathan of the Software Freedom and Law Center called the blocks short-sighted, saying that "If you block one website, terrorists can always use another one... Such a move only inconveniences the daily users..." Twitter users protested using the hashtag #GOIblocks and recirculated a hypocritical message by Modi from 2012 condemning blanket blocking of websites. [26] Anonymous of India also posted several threats against the government, but did not take any action. [25]

Russia

The Russian government blacklists websites that include child pornography, drug-related material, advocacy of suicide, extremist material, and other illegal content under the Russian Internet Restriction Bill to protect children. This list is maintained by Roscomnadzor, Russia's regulatory agency. [30]

ISP blockage

The block message Russian GitHub users saw when trying to access the website on December 2, 2014 Github russia block.png
The block message Russian GitHub users saw when trying to access the website on December 2, 2014

On December 2, 2014, Roscomnadzor blocked GitHub due to it hosting various copies of a suicide manual. Because GitHub uses HTTPS, which encrypts data between a user's computer and GitHub's servers, Internet service providers (ISPs) were forced to block the whole website instead of the pages involved. Complying ISPs included: Beeline, MTS, MGTS and Megafon. Maxim Ksenzov, the Deputy Head of Roscomnadzor, said in a statement that the block was due to GitHub not complying with earlier takedown requests for the manual on October 10, 2014. [31] GitHub was also momentarily blocked on October 2, 2014, until the original copy of the manual was deleted by its uploader. [32]

Banned content

The manual in question was posted on March 23, 2014, and details 31 methods of suicide in Russian. [lower-alpha 3] It was added to a repository for a software library used for working with Windows filesystems and was forked by several users. [33] The original copy was deleted by the owner on October 2, 2014, after numerous GitHub users complained because of a block by Roscomnadzor. [lower-alpha 4] [33] [34]

TechCrunch remarked that the manual seemed to be written as satire and includes methods such as "biting your tongue", "joining the military" or "getting a good gun" from a policeman. [35] The takedown targeted the manual and its copies, as well as a reposted blog entry about suicide. [36]

Response

GitHub complied and blocked access to the content within Russia saying that they were working to get reinstated. Citing its terms of service, GitHub elaborated that "you must not, in the use of the Service, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright or trademark laws)." [35] GitHub also created an official repository titled "roskomnadzor" for the purpose of posting takedown notices from the regulator. (It was later moved to "gov-takedowns" after a request from China on June 9, 2016 [37] ) In the readme of the repository, GitHub states that they are concerned about Internet censorship and believe in transparency to document the potential for chilling effects. They also warn that the presence of a notice is only for documentation and that GitHub does not pass any judgement on their validity. [38]

Turkey

Network measurements by Turkey Blocks confirming the time at which GitHub was blocked October 9, 2016 GitHub Turkey block.jpg
Network measurements by Turkey Blocks confirming the time at which GitHub was blocked

On October 8, 2016, following the leak of emails of Turkish Minister Berat Albayrak by RedHack, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) ordered ISPs to block several file sharing websites, including Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive. [39] The censorship monitoring watchdog Turkey Blocks observed that GitHub was blocked the following morning, and associated administrative orders were subsequently posted by the BTK stating that access had been officially restricted. [40] Software that depended on GitHub reported errors, such as Font Awesome and Homebrew. Participants in Startup Istanbul week also complained about the unavailability of infrastructure. The #GitHub hashtag became one of Twitter's top trends in Turkey. According to The Daily Dot , RedHack purposefully spread the emails using multiple services, expecting Turkey to block them so that the Streisand effect could be utilized. GitHub was unblocked 18 hours later. [41]

Notes

  1. The Next Web and GreatFire both claim that it was fully blocked however. [10]
  2. The text of the page consists of 4 reasons why the website breaks laws under the Russian Federation, and why therefore, the contents of the website are blocked.
  3. The manual itself seems to be a translation of a text originating on Usenet.
  4. However, because the original was forked, and Git keeps a history of changes, the file was still accessible on GitHub.

Related Research Articles

China censors both the publishing and viewing of online material. Many controversial events are censored from news coverage, preventing many Chinese citizens from knowing about the actions of their government, and severely restricting freedom of the press. China's censorship includes the complete blockage of various websites, apps, video games, inspiring the policy's nickname, the "Great Firewall of China", which blocks websites. Methods used to block websites and pages include DNS spoofing, blocking access to IP addresses, analyzing and filtering URLs, packet inspection, and resetting connections.

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.

The Great Firewall is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. If the keywords or sensitive words appear in the TCP packets, access will be closed. If one link is closed, more links from the same machine will be blocked by the Great Firewall. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations.

Internet censorship in Australia is enforced by both the country's criminal law as well as voluntarily enacted by internet service providers. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has the power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within Australia, and maintain a blocklist of overseas websites which is then provided for use in filtering software. The restrictions focus primarily on child pornography, sexual violence, and other illegal activities, compiled as a result of a consumer complaints process.

Cyveillance is an American cybersecurity company founded in 1997, based in Reston, Virginia. The company provides cybersecurity services including brand protection, social media monitoring and threat investigation, analysis, and response services. Its Cyveillance Intelligence Center subscription-based product monitors for information leaks; phishing and malware attacks and other online fraud schemes; sale of stolen credit and debit card numbers; threats to executives and events; counterfeiting; and trademark and brand abuse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship in India</span> Overview of Internet censorship in India

Internet censorship in India is done by both central and state governments. DNS filtering and educating service users in suggested usages is an active strategy and government policy to regulate and block access to Internet content on a large scale. Measures for removing content at the request of content creators through court orders have also become more common in recent years. Initiating a mass surveillance government project like Golden Shield Project is an alternative that has been discussed over the years by government bodies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship</span> Legal control of the internet

Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains but exceptionally may extend to all Internet resources located outside the jurisdiction of the censoring state. Internet censorship may also put restrictions on what information can be made internet accessible. Organizations providing internet access – such as schools and libraries – may choose to preclude access to material that they consider undesirable, offensive, age-inappropriate or even illegal, and regard this as ethical behaviour rather than censorship. Individuals and organizations may engage in self-censorship of material they publish, for moral, religious, or business reasons, to conform to societal norms, political views, due to intimidation, or out of fear of legal or other consequences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roskomnadzor</span> Russian government agency

The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, abbreviated as Roskomnadzor (RKN), is the Russian federal executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling and censoring Russian mass media. Its areas of responsibility include electronic media, mass communications, information technology and telecommunications, supervising compliance with the law, protecting the confidentiality of personal data being processed, and organizing the work of the radio-frequency service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GitHub</span> Hosting service for software projects

GitHub, Inc. is an AI-powered developer platform that allows developers to create, store, and manage their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

Widespread censorship of Wikipedia has occurred in countries including China, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. Some instances of these are examples of widespread internet censorship in general that includes Wikipedia content. Others are indicative of measures to prevent the viewing of specific content deemed offensive. The length of different blocks have varied from hours to years. When Wikipedia ran on the HTTP protocol, governments were able to block specific articles. However, in 2011 Wikipedia began running on both HTTP and HTTPS, and in 2015 switched over to solely HTTPS. Since then, the only censorship options have been to block the entire site for a particular language or prosecute editors, which has resulted in some countries dropping their bans and others expanding their bans to the entire site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship in Russia</span>

In Russia, internet censorship is enforced on the basis of several laws and through several mechanisms. Since 2012, Russia maintains a centralized internet blacklist maintained by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VPN blocking</span>

VPN blocking is a technique used to block the encrypted protocol tunneling communications methods used by virtual private network (VPN) systems. Often used by large organizations such as national governments or corporations, it can act as a tool for computer security or Internet censorship by preventing the use of VPNs to bypass network firewall systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Network sovereignty</span> Effort to create boundaries on a network

In internet governance, network sovereignty, also called digital sovereignty or cyber sovereignty, is the effort of a governing entity, such as a state, to create boundaries on a network and then exert a form of control, often in the form of law enforcement over such boundaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lantern (software)</span> Internet censorship circumvention software

Lantern is a free internet censorship circumvention tool that operates in some of the most extreme censorship environments, such as China, Iran, and Russia. It uses wide variety of protocols and techniques that obfuscate network traffic and/or co-mingle traffic with protocols censors are reluctant to block. It also uses domain fronting. It is not an anonymity tool like Tor.

The precise number of websites blocked in the United Kingdom is unknown. Blocking techniques vary from one Internet service provider (ISP) to another with some sites or specific URLs blocked by some ISPs and not others. Websites and services are blocked using a combination of data feeds from private content-control technology companies, government agencies, NGOs, court orders in conjunction with the service administrators who may or may not have the power to unblock, additionally block, appeal or recategorise blocked content.

The Great Cannon of China is an Internet attack tool that is used by the Chinese government to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks on websites by performing a man-in-the-middle attack on large amounts of web traffic and injecting code which causes the end-user's web browsers to flood traffic to targeted websites. According to the researchers at the Citizen Lab, the International Computer Science Institute, and Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, who coined the term, the Great Cannon hijacks foreign web traffic intended for Chinese websites and re-purposes them to flood targeted web servers with enormous amounts of traffic in an attempt to disrupt their operations. While it is co-located with the Great Firewall, the Great Cannon is "a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design."

GreatFire (GreatFire.org) is a website that monitors the status of websites censored by the Great Firewall of China and helps Chinese Internet users circumvent the censorship and blockage of websites in China. Through an investigation by the Associated Press, the website was found receiving funds from the United States government through its Open Technology Fund under Radio Free Asia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shadowsocks</span> Free and open-source encrypted proxy project

Shadowsocks is a free and open-source encryption protocol project, widely used in China to circumvent Internet censorship. It was created in 2012 by a Chinese programmer named "clowwindy", and multiple implementations of the protocol have been made available since. Shadowsocks is not a proxy on its own, but (typically) is the client software to help connect to a third-party SOCKS5 proxy, which is similar to a Secure Shell (SSH) tunnel. Once connected, internet traffic can then be directed through the proxy. Unlike an SSH tunnel, shadowsocks can also proxy User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic.

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