Raw.githubusercontent.com blocked in China between ~2019-10-30 and ~2019-11-07

Internet censorship all around the world China
1

I saw some reports that the domain raw.githubusercontent.com (but not github.com) is blocked in China since about October 30.

raw.githubusercontent.com is (or was) used for downloads of e.g. prebuilt binaries from GitHub. It probably affects the distribution of a number of circumvention systems.

Here you can see Lantern updating links:

I don’t see any mention of the blocking at https://www.githubstatus.com/ (archive). However I just now tried downloading a file (https://github.com/getlantern/lantern/releases/download/5.6.4/update_linux_386.bz2) and it used an S3 URL (https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/1380117/87603580-fbc1-11e9-9bc4-18fc78456f13). I’m not sure if it used to work like that or not.

2

I tried just now https://github.com/TheTorProject/gettorbrowser/raw/d284209de15ad6c7bf5f9a1e4c9684d3d1d89f5e/tor-browser-linux32-8.5.5_ca.tar.xz, and it currently redirects to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheTorProject/gettorbrowser/d284209de15ad6c7bf5f9a1e4c9684d3d1d89f5e/tor-browser-linux32-8.5.5_ca.tar.xz. So raw.githubusercontent.com appears to still be used.

3

I saw a report on IRC that raw.githubusercontent.com is now unblocked in China, and the Greatfire test confirms it. 4 Nov was blocked, there were no tests 5–9 Nov, and 10 Nov was unblocked.