The issue I’m reporting here is the inability to use the built-in auto upgrade facility in Syncthing because the program is unable to download an updated version.
Further examination reveals that the downloads http server is refusing to serve the request. This is understood to be caused due to the client’s IP country. In the country where the issue is reported, inability to download releases from Github is a nation-wide experienced phenomenon.
Said Github downloads are usually obtained from the domain objects.githubusercontent.com over https. But the URL’s query string indicates that the data is being served from Amazon (see below for URL details).
Regardless of which source is blocking the downloads, this is, in my opinion, a case of Geographical Discrimination. And while the reasons for blocking access are very probably political in nature, the principles of FOSS inherently promote the idea of software being freely available to everyone, irrespective of their geographical location.
I hereby suggest and encourage the Syncthing project maintainers to also provide a mirror downloads server that is location-agnostic (and politics-agnostic), and enable the program updater to fallback to the mirror servers.
Additionally, as a hosting service provider owner, I offer to host this mirror free of charge for the Syncthing project for as long as possible, in order to resolve cases like this one, without incurring additional costs to the maintainers.
Diagnostics:
Syncthing checks for updates, by default, using the URL: https://upgrades.syncthing.net/meta.json
Which lists release download URLs. For example:
[
{
"tag_name": "v1.27.7",
"prerelease": false,
"assets": [
{
"url": "https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/releases/download/v1.27.7/sha1sum.txt.asc",
"name": "sha1sum.txt.asc"
},
{
"url": "https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/releases/download/v1.27.7/sha256sum.txt.asc",
"name": "sha256sum.txt.asc"
},
{
"url": "https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/releases/download/v1.27.7/syncthing-dragonfly-amd64-v1.27.7.tar.gz",
"name": "syncthing-dragonfly-amd64-v1.27.7.tar.gz"
},
{
"url": "https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/releases/download/v1.27.7/syncthing-freebsd-386-v1.27.7.tar.gz",
"name": "syncthing-freebsd-386-v1.27.7.tar.gz"
},
...
These download URLs redirect to download the resource from an address similar to this one for Windows x64:
https://objects.githubusercontent.com/github-production-release-asset-2e65be/14712850/6818ba86-a2f2-4fc2-a020-d1e5818c538c?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAVCODYLSA78PQK4ZA%2F24540509%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20240509T273127Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=36bcf71dae54540aaa8ccf35e47f4058fc027e415ef90516da5195cb89eef5f1&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&actor_id=30826047&key_id=0&repo_id=14712850&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3Dsyncthing-windows-amd64-v1.27.7.zip&response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream
From certain IP addresses, the connections time-out, and the Web GUI shows a Notice like this one:
With this error in text:
dial tcp 185.199.111.133:443: connectex: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
People over there have very long experience with the negative outcomes of US policies. (and I happen to know things)
Please feel free to get in touch with me any time.