the much more interesting part is why China is using a DDoS attack, rather than its standard approach of just blocking access in China, as it has historically done. The key is that, two years ago, China tried to block Github entirely… and Chinese programmers flipped out, pointing out that they couldn‘t do their jobs without Github. The Chinese censors were forced to back down, leading to a sort of loophole in the Great Firewall. That leads to the next question of why China doesn‘t just block access to the URLs of the two repositories it doesn‘t like? And the answer there: HTTPS.