Popular Anti-Censorship Tools Disappear from GitHub

Users on the “Habr” forum have noticed that several repositories containing programs and services for bypassing internet censorship have suddenly disappeared from GitHub. More than 20 profiles dedicated to anti-censorship tools have either been completely deleted or archived. Many of these tools are maintained by Chinese developers, but there is currently no reliable information linking these removals to the developers’ country of origin.

A significant number of anti-censorship tools supported by Chinese developers were deleted or archived on November 2, 2023. The following repositories were removed: Clash For Windows, Clash Core, GUI.for.Clash, clash-dashboard, Clash Chinese Patch, tpclash, CatBoxForAndroid, and Fclash. The ClashForAndroid project was also deleted from the Google Play app store. All other repositories on the list were archived.

Habr user “MiraclePtr” commented:

“This immediately brings to mind the stories of two other projects: Shadowsocks and V2Ray.

The original Shadowsocks was developed by a programmer known as ‘clowwindy.’ In 2015, clowwindy wrote on GitHub that Chinese police had visited and made an offer that couldn’t be refused, forcing him to stop working on the project and delete all source code from the repository.

Similarly, a dark story happened with the popular V2Ray project: at one point, the author stopped responding on GitHub, Twitter, and everywhere else.

It’s possible that these events will continue, so here’s a simple piece of advice: if you use any tools that might be frowned upon by certain governments, make forks of their current versions for yourself on GitHub, and ideally, save local copies of the code and binary releases.”

Over the years, Shadowsocks has become so popular that even Russian authorities have taken notice. According to the Telegram channel “ZaTelekom,” in November of this year, Shadowsocks began to be added to the list of VPN services subject to blocking in Russia.