[dengnan]

For github, this is a smart move.

But, really, you can hardly negotiate with Chinese government. I'm pretty sure that they will deny this attack and re-emphasize their so-called Internet policy.

If I were github, instead of a warning message, I would redirect the workload to some Chinese government's website and let them suffer what they've created. Let's face it, they are waging a war on the Internet first.

Edit: Disclaimer: I know that my post is quite biased, especially this one. I'm not suggesting that people should wage a war to Chinese government. Please take my words just as a (biased?) sample from an ordinary Chinese citizen who is really tired of the government's censorship.

[dagw]

Let's face it, they are waging a war on the Internet first.

The two most important aspects in war are casus belli and plausible deniability. China has the latter and github lacks the former. Thus github would lose by default in any 'war' against the Chinese government.

[tedunangst]

How would github redirect the load?

[ninjaoxygen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301

[eli]

I think you are underestimating the volume of traffic. Simple generating that many 301s would be an issue. And... where would you redirect to?

[kevinchen]

Generating a 301 is certainly less work than rendering the entire user's profile page.

[spartas]

Generating a 301 is likely more work. Profile pages are simple database hits, and they may be dynamically or even statically cached (for popular pages). You're probably severely underestimating how much traffic China can produce [1].

1. http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

[true_religion]

A 301 avoids a database hit, and avoids having to go through the cache framework all together.

It just says given this URL, we return an header that tells the browser to redirect. The only thing faster would be just dropping the connection as soon as its given to you.

[orf]

A 301 is unequivocally less work in every respect.

[tracker1]

If verizon and the like can hold up traffic to/from Netflix... couldn't they just do the same for chinese traffic? Maybe redirect requests for baidu to a chinese version of google?

I'm not saying this is a great idea, just that something could be done.