GitHub unlocked

Service Administration went to the terms of Roskomnadzor

GitHub has closed access to files for users from Russia whose contents Roskomnadzor complained about. In this regard, access to the site has been fully restored.

Due to the fact that the administration of GitHub has taken measures to remove the reserved information, access to the resource in the territory of the Russian Federation has been resumed

- Maxim Xenzov (@mksenzov) December 5, 2014

GitHub lays out all calls from Roskonadzor to a special repository . By them you can restore the picture of what happened.

The events developed as follows: on March 23 of this year, user amdf unloaded the file suicide.txt into its repository, the contents of which is a humorous list of methods of suicide. But the very next day (March 24) a decree 4138 was issued on restricting access to the site.

On its basis, on October 2 of this year, Github was first blocked . The file was later deleted, and GitHub disappeared from the Roskomnazdor registry.
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On October 21 of this year, GitHub received a new notification from the Russian regulator. It has links to 7 files with prohibited content.

The Streisand effect works: the letter lists all the problematic URLs, so using a proxy server or Opera Turbo you can easily get access to the forbidden content - you just have to disguise your real Russian IP. Judging by the name of the repositories (for example, github.com/russian-suicide/ololo ), some people deliberately went to this “trolling”.

Exactly one month later (November 21), Roskomnadzor representatives began to complain that GitHub did not respond to this warning.


On November 27, GitHub was notified about the inclusion of the resource in the list of prohibited sites.

Roskomnadzor noted the "help of the IT industry" in drawing attention to this issue, but on December 2, the data of 7 GitHub pages were transferred to telecom operators for blocking.

Blocking individual pages is physically impossible even with the help of filtering the contents of network packets (Deep Packet Inspection): the site works only over the secure HTTPS protocol, so all traffic, including URL, is encrypted. You can only block the connection with IP-addresses. Because of this, many Russians have completely lost access to the service.

To help the situation could only concession from the resource, which happened. The official position of GitHub on the incident is as follows:

In many countries, there are laws that may apply to content on GitHub. To provide access to GitHub for more than seven million of our users worldwide, it is sometimes necessary to block certain content in some regions if we receive a request from the authorities.

This week we received this request from Roskomnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Communications, Information Technologies and Mass Communications of Russia.

Since then, we have been blocked in the Russian Federation for content that is prohibited by law, and we are working to restore access. Please note that according to GitHub terms of use :

You may not use the service for any illegal activity. You are prohibited, using the service, to violate the laws of the country under whose jurisdiction you fall (including, but not limited to copyright or trademark laws).

We believe in the transparency of our activities and let the public know when it is possible, what content is blocked by GitHub and why. To this end, we published a notice from Roskomnadzor and will continue to post requests from the Russian Federation about content blocking.