I read that they tried blocking github already, but had to back down because of complaints from the software engineering community there.
Basically the Chinese government is desperately trying to disconnect the Chinese people from the global internet whilst simultaneously trying to minimise the economic damage that creates. Blocking news sites doesn't do a whole lot of damage. Blocking CDNs is totally different.
This sort of thing makes me think about an HTTP extension that lets arbitrary websites promise to proxy for others. Web servers could set an "X-Will-Relay-For: wikipedia.org, github.com, facebook.com, nytimes.com" header and then browsers would be programmed to store these mappings in their local cache as you browse the web. If attempting to reach a website fails, the browser would retry via an SSLd CONNECT request via one of the cached paths, sort of a Tor-lite but aimed purely at unblocking sites rather than anonymization.
Of course there are lots of practical details to work out like traffic management, how to avoid an outage of a large website causing cascading failures etc.
Basically the Chinese government is desperately trying to disconnect the Chinese people from the global internet whilst simultaneously trying to minimise the economic damage that creates. Blocking news sites doesn't do a whole lot of damage. Blocking CDNs is totally different.
This sort of thing makes me think about an HTTP extension that lets arbitrary websites promise to proxy for others. Web servers could set an "X-Will-Relay-For: wikipedia.org, github.com, facebook.com, nytimes.com" header and then browsers would be programmed to store these mappings in their local cache as you browse the web. If attempting to reach a website fails, the browser would retry via an SSLd CONNECT request via one of the cached paths, sort of a Tor-lite but aimed purely at unblocking sites rather than anonymization.
Of course there are lots of practical details to work out like traffic management, how to avoid an outage of a large website causing cascading failures etc.