Social coding site GitHub has been blocked by censors in  China in what appears to be a much broader denial of service.

Apparently connection from China has been spotty for months, but most in the last 24 hours there have been findings of a “Complete blocking detected.”  Hacker News have also noticed that the site is coming up with the same test as BlockedInChina and GreatFirewallOfChina and this seems to indicate that the site has really miffed someone in China. The work around is to use OpenDNS although you do get some packetloss.

What is not clear is why the site should be blocked. Chinese participation and contributions to projects has been valuable over the years on both sides of the Bamboo curtain. Some seem to think it is because a couple of projects were designed to upset the elaborate Chinese censorship system.

One project suggest was an automated train ticket polling plugin while another person thinks it is because of the release of mongol, a tool that detects routers acting in the Great Firewall.