What is GitHub?

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Millions of people use GitHub to build astonishing things together. It was originally established by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett to streamline sharing code, GitHub has grown into the world’s most  immense code host. GitHub is a web-predicated Git repository hosting accommodation, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as integrating its own features.

Unlike Git, which is stringently a command-line tool, GitHub provides a web-predicated graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration. It additionally provides admittance control and various combination features such as wikis, task management, and bug tracking and feature requests for every project.

Why it was banned?

Indian Government is very anxious to keep a detailed information about all the data shared over internet by its citizens. After a series of controversial Tweets and Facebook statuses which led to arrangement of few, the government has now taken another move to block sites which lets utilizer share text/images without revealing their identity.

In Earlier days Government used to charge Section 144 of Unlawful Procedure Code which suppressed voice of people. With the progress of social media people commenced to pitch their opinions on these websites. Government is disturbed by such a liberation of speech even though they are the ones who provide us this right.

The government proactively authorized the block on the websites, including popular online implements like GitHub and SourceForge which are utilized by thousands of programmers. The court’s action was established on a complaint by the Mumbai Anti-terrorism Squad, which declared that these sites were being used to spread pro-terror messages.

The Department of Telecom has sent a circular to ISPs asking them to block 32 sites which includes github, pastebin, archive.org, vimeo, dailymotion and others.

Implications after it got banned :

It is obscure what the status of Github will be as it appears twice on the unauthorized list. Blocking these sites on marginally doubtful grounds will not facilitate those anxiety, either. It is hard to visualize how Github, for instance, is threatening the national interest of India by being party to terrorist recruitment messages. Problems accessing GitHub became very painful for India’s huge developer workforce, which additionally affected both India’s domestic and outsourced software development business sector. While others could skillfully host some pro-ISIS content, like Vimeo and DailyMotion, this type of approval is tough to justify. And since Archive.org is a project dedicated to storing and sharing as much content on the Internet as possible, it seems illogical to claim they selectively abstract extract political speech.

How It got Unblocked by the Government?

After enormous protests on the Internet, the government verbalized it had unblocked four websites – web hosting accommodation Weebly, video sites Vimeo and Dailymotion and gist.GitHub.com. Though Internet service providers had not received any notice to unblock the websites as per the sources. The sites worked on few ISPs, but not on others. GitHub wants to work with the government to identify unauthorized content and additionally to create a transparent process to restore access.

According to people accustomed with the matter, the unblocking orders, before they reach Internet service providers, go through several departments including the department of Electronics and Information Technology, Department of Telecommunications and the Indian Computer Emergency Replication Team as well as the concerned ascendant entities that ask for website or website links to be blocked. These are then sent to ISPs, who have to comply with immediately.

The government can appeal to section 69A of the Information Technology Act to block websites when it fears that the “sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, cordial relations with foreign States or public order” is under risk.

Therefore, we as a responsible citizen of the country should ensure that it should be used for the benefit of the society in large (developers in particular) rather than using it in an unlawful way which will affect the national security.