miguel
22.7K posts
Best headline ever! On this day in 1945 Hitler died.
In 2015, the Chinese police visited a programmer's home. They told him to stop working on his code. They told him to delete it from GitHub. He posted one final message before he obeyed: "Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this. Today they asked me to delete all the code from GitHub. I have no choice but to obey. I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing." Then he deleted the repo. Then he deleted the message. Then something happened the Chinese government did not plan for. Within hours, the code was mirrored to thousands of other GitHub accounts. Within days, it became the #1 trending repository on GitHub globally. Within weeks, every Chinese developer who could compile code had a copy. The government tried to make it disappear. The act of trying made it permanent. The project is called Shadowsocks. The programmer's username was clowwindy. He built a tiny piece of software that let anyone in China bypass the Great Firewall and reach the open internet. No subscription. No company. No account. You set up a server somewhere outside China. You connect to it. Your traffic looks like normal encrypted web browsing, so the firewall cannot tell you are using it. Why this terrified the Chinese government in 2015: → It was open source. Anyone could compile it. → It was small. The whole protocol fit in a few hundred lines of code. → It looked like normal HTTPS traffic. The Great Firewall could not distinguish it. → It required no money. No accounts. No central server to seize. → It worked on every operating system. You cannot arrest a protocol. You can only arrest the person who wrote it. So they did. And the protocol kept spreading. shadowsocks-windows: 59,300+ stars. GPLv3. Still online 11 years later. The 2015 commits the Chinese government wanted deleted are still in the history. clowwindy was forced to walk away. The code never did. But DO NOT install it. The Great Firewall has feelings too. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)
