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Earlier this month, thousands of software developers in China woke up to find that their open-source code hosted on Gitee, a state-backed Chinese competitor to the international code repository platform GitHub, had been locked and hidden from public view.

Gitee released a statement later that day explaining that the locked code was being manually reviewed, as all open-source code would need to be before being published from then on. The company didnt have a choice, it wrote. Gitee didnt respond to MIT Technology Review, but it is widely assumed that the Chinese government had imposed yet another bit of heavy-handed censorship.

For the open-source software community in China, which celebrates transparency and global collaboration, the move has come as a shock. Code was supposed to be apolitical. Ultimately, these developers fear it could discourage people from contributing to open-source projects, and Chinas software industry will suffer as a result.Read the full story.

Zeyi Yang

The must-reads

Ive combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Americas children are more anxious than everAnd it runs deeper than the pandemic. (NYT $)+ The relentless stream of bad news is making us all feel bad. (Wired $)+ How to mend your broken pandemic brain. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Digital surveillance programs make immigrants feel like prisonersTheyre touted as a more humane alternative to detention, but ankle tags carry stigma and stoke anxiety. (Coda Story)+ The CIA and US military are spending huge amounts of money on metaverse projects. (The Intercept)

3 The Wikipedia editor exposing the predatory world of cryptomaniaThat doesnt mean shes reveling in its current implosion. (WP $)+ Six months into the crypto crash, investors are making the same mistakes. (Motherboard)+ Fraudsters are using a deepfake of Elon Musk to steal crypto. (Motherboard) + This crypto reality dating show sounds like a parody of itself. (Input Mag)

4 A new ancestry-predicting DNA tool is solving missing-people mysteries But experts are wary that DNA phenotyping could further fuel racial discrimination in policing. (NYT $)+ Our museums are a treasure trove of genomic data. (Ars Technica)

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The Download: Open source censorship in China, and US kids are more anxious than ever - MIT Technology Review