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buswolley writes:

Russia has blocked access to GitHub after finding a text file in a repository entitled 'suicide.txt'. Surely this is pretext for Russia's continuing move towards isolation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8692584

Techcrunch has Russia Blacklists, Blocks GitHub Over Pages That Refer To Suicide

Developers in Russia are putting up their feet today — that is, after they have finished stomping around in frustration for a little while. It’s emerged that Russia’s regulator RosComNadzor has blocked GitHub after the popular software and coding collaboration platform was found to be hosting content related to suicide — specifically, see this file that details 32 ways to kill yourself.

The “block” effectively amounts to an order to ISPs to restrict access to the site. And because GitHub works on HTTPS, providers can only comply by restricting access to the entire site, rather than individual pages. According to Russian blog Meduza, several leading ISPs have already complied with the order, including Beeline, MTS, MGTS and Megafon.

The block reignites the debate over how Russia’s government decides what is and what is not appropriate Internet content for people in Russia. The country’s firewall, when it was originally raised in 2012, was controversial not only because of concerns that it would be used against freedom of speech (especially in cases when that speech was critical of the state), but also because it was deemed to be too heavy-handed in how it would get implemented.