845
China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report
(infosec.exchange)
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
845 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
58123 readers
4835 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Solution: create a GitHub repo with Markdown articles outlining human rights abuses by the CCP and have a large number of GitHub users star and fork the repo.
You've heard of CamelCase and lowercase and intVariableName variable naming styles. Get ready for:
for (int Taiwan == 0; Taiwan < HongKong; Taiwan++) { int TianamenSquare == 0; ... }
That's the whole point of this: they will automatically filter that out, and this is an impotent, though well intended, gesture.
How will they filter it out? If they just don't mirror anything with 'forbidden' terms, we can poison repos to prevent them being mirrored. If they try to tamper with the repo histories then they'll end up breaking a load of stuff that relies on consistent git hashes.
I feel like the effort to make such a repo and make it popular enough to be cloned and rehosted is a lot more effort than someone manually checking the results of an automated filter process.
The "effort economy" is hugely in favor of the mirroring side
Yeah I figured as much. It was mostly a joke. At the end of the day, if stuff is on GH, people can take it. It's barely even stealing. Unless the license disagrees of course but then you were putting a lot of trust in society by making it public in the first place.
That’s what I don’t get about this. Why does anyone care? Even this Chinese company, why do they care to clone it all? It’s already all hosted and publicly available.
Apparently they aren't respecting licenses. It's possible to have source code publicly available on GH but have it not be truly FOSS. But that's generally not a great idea since you're effectively relying on the honour system for people not to take your code.
Until it isn't. Perhaps they are preparing for a future war with the US and assume their access to all that code will be blocked. They want to copy it now while they have access.
Good point.
The real solution is to include a few
tiananmenSquarevariables in all the repositories. Either they exclude the entire repository or just the specific file, in either case the entire project may be unusable.It's a new coding paradigm, I will take some time getting used to looking for libraries in the
uyghur/tianamenfolder.So... You're saying instead of "main", "app", or "core", we should change the convention to make tiananmenSquare the entry point for apps?
Or maybe make it the filename for utils, so it'll just break
For example.
But honestly I was more joking. The thing that makes most projects useful is the developers developing it, and they can't clone that
China filters every byte of Internet traffic in and out of the country.
It seems naive to think they can't accomplish the same thing for a GitHub mirror.
They're not supposed to, it's just about blocking them from using the software :)
everyone should have stuff in their code comments, tianamen, hong kong, taiwan, uyghurs
genius.
Once you have logged "China killed 100 Zillion people! End CCP now!" in Chinese GitHub, everyone in China will realize that their lives are actually very bad and they need to do a Revolution immediately.
And here I was thinking that might prevent them mirroring the repo but whatever
Maybe we should consider the same for the US government instead of being afraid of the big Chinese boogeyman across the sea? Because I guarantee you the US has just as many, if not more. But China bad. 🙄
I was making a joke about abusing Chinese censorship in order to stop them cloning GitHub repos (assuming that was something you wanted to do). The joke being that the CCP suppresses information about their human rights abuses. That is not true of the US. You could absolutely make a GitHub repo detailing the crimes of the US government. Nobody will stop you.
Tell that to Julian Assange
Is that what you think got him in trouble?
yes. he published us crimes in iraq/afghanistan.
50 Cent Army Repellant:
六四
1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre
I always thought the term "Wumao" sounded suspiciosly like "woo Mao."
426
Yes yes, what about the US?
Tankie whataboutism strikes again.
Two things can be bad at the same time. Wild, I know.
Edit: also, the point of my joke wasn't the human rights abuses. It is that these things are censored in China. So your comment is even more irrelevant. One could very easily create a repo outlining American crimes and put it on GitHub. But doing so in China with CCP crimes will have you sent to a Gulag
I'm not American. I don't even like America.
Hell even i'm American and don't like America
Lmao it's literally the name of a logical fallacy. How is the term itself fallacious?
Also I harbour no racism or ill will toward the Chinese people. My girlfriend is Chinese and I care about her a lot and love learning about her culture. I just don't abide the human rights atrocities (or censorship thereof) committed by any government.
It's funny how much effort you're going to debating my word choice instead of the meaning and content of my rebuttal to your stupid comment. Do you have an actual point here? Are you claiming that what you were doing above wasn't whataboutism? That it's somehow a valid counterpoint to my joke about CCP censorship to say that the US also does bad things?
Hahahahahahahaha, oh man, how much you spend on a psychologist every month?
Also, what you're doing is called sophistry, specifically moving the goal posts (which predates the US by about 1000 years).
You later move on to attacking the person, rather than the argument (more sophistry).
You should probably educate yourself lest you expose the clown inside.
What an effortless Troll
I can think of ways you could please me 🚀🤤
lol who do you think was saying this, and how is "whataboutism" in any way of a euphemism for it? Did you even bother to read the article you linked?
America didn't drop anything because they weren't saying it in the first place, the Soviets were. America also aren't the ones that coined a new phrase for it, British royalists were, who probably had no knowledge of the Russian phrase. All of this was explained in the article you linked.