GitHub-Road

Opening github.com in a browser within mainland China often means an endless loading circle, a timeout, or a reset connection. The root cause is that ISPs throttle GitHub at the TLS/SNI layer on a per-IP basis, and the set of blocked IPs rotates over time, so a static hosts entry is bound to go stale within days.

GitHub-Road takes a no-proxy, zero-cost approach. It verifies each candidate IP through a two-step check: a TLS handshake (with an 8-second hard timeout, TLS 1.2, and certificate domain validation) followed by a real HTTPS request that must return HTTP 200. The winning address is written atomically to the local hosts file while preserving other entries, and DNS is refreshed. A scheduled task re-runs the whole process every 30 minutes, so a newly blocked IP is swapped out within half an hour at most; if every candidate fails, the script comments out the hosts entry and falls back to normal resolution instead of pinning a dead address.

It is aimed at individual Windows users in mainland China who simply need a browser that can reach github.com without running or paying for a proxy. Known gaps include gist.github.com, codeload archive downloads, and SSH on port 22, none of which can be fixed at the hosts layer. If a tool such as Watt Toolkit or Steam++ is also rewriting hosts entries, the two will overwrite each other, and one must be disabled first.