14 DAY TRIAL // Strong evidence shows that the DDOS attack GitHub was under for the past few days was carried out by the Chinese government trying to intimidate the service and have them take down clones of two projects that allow Chinese users to bypass the country's firewall.
As GreatFire is reporting, the two projects at the core of this issue are ShadowSocks and GoAgent.
ShadowSocks is a secure Socsk5 proxy that allows users to hide their Internet traffic, just like a VPN.
GoAgent is a Python script that uses the Google App Engine to create a tunnel and circumvent China's GFW (Great FireWall).
Both projects had been taken down by their authors prior to the DDOS attack.
What sparked the controversy is a post (deleted in the meantime) by ShadowSocks' creator, a Chinese developer known under the name of clowwindy.
Intimidation tactics by the Chinese government
Apparently, Chinese police showed up at his house and told him to stop working on the ShadowSocks project and delete the source code.
clowwindy complied with the request, but in response to his revelation, the GitHub community started to clone his project so that the source code would live on.
Even if there was no ominous announcement from GoAgent's creator, the same thing happened to his project's source code, the community stepping in and continuing to developed the tool, even if he deleted the original project.
Soon after, the DDOS attack started, which many developers have noticed and discussed on Hacker News.
There was no connection to Chinese authorities at first, but as more details have come out, this seems to fit right in with China's operating mode.
China was previously accused of DDOSing GitHub in March. At that time, Chinese authorities asked GitHub to take down the repositories of two anti-censorship programs.
As in the said incident, the Chinese government may be pushing GitHub to take down the clones as well. This time around, GitHub seems to have better DDOS mitigation services in place, the attack being easily repelled.
