If i recall right, it's abuse of this that got the farcical/satirical "c plus equality" project drummed out of nearly every code hosting site. The name and email pulls in a Gravatar, the same one probably used on many other sites, with the result that it amounts to a really convincing forgery.
Linus Torvalds did not commit this
131–140 of 198 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
Society isn't a group of people trying to get over on each other, but the small minority who thinks like you have given cause to authoritarians to treat all of us like we are you. It's a real shame you have to destroy to be happy, but at least you're proud of the fact that you want the world to be a shithole. We all need our pride!
[deleted]
Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zooming back in, do you disagree with the mechanism I described, by which your cheating hurts people?
[deleted]
If everyone drives a car, people on average are better off. If everyone cheats, people on average are worse off. That's a very different tradeoff.
Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#134Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really, this only becomes a problem when services like GitHub link the name up, making it look more legitimate than it is. If they enforced authentication as that user before providing the linking it would be better (perhaps allowing approval of the linking if posted by a different user). Currently it's trivial to make it look like any GitHub user is an actual committer to some sort of egregious or controversial proj…
I disagree, the real problem here is people thinking that somehow any github repository can be a trusted source. If you work on Linux, you know that the one and only source of truth is the repo that comes from Linus himself, not anything coming from github.
Linus doesn't distribute anything himself; you can either have the copy hosted by Github, or the one hosted by a Californian nonprofit called the Linux Kernel Organization, Inc.
Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
If everyone drives a car, people on average are better off. If everyone cheats, people on average are worse off. That's a very different tradeoff.
[deleted]
In a ten-player game, (a) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 20 for yourself is one kind of selfish tradeoff; and (b) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 5 for yourself is another kind of selfish tradeoff; and (c) giving one utilon to everyone else while gaining 10 for yourself is also a kind of selfishness.
Cheating is (b), driving is (a). (You seem to be arguing that driving is (b) - I disagree, but it's beside the point.) Capitalism mostly tries to encourage (c). We put some selfishness to work, yes; but we harness the selfishness of Henry Ford, and we punish the selfishness of Bernie Madoff.
Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#137This is more of a problem with GitHub than git. Remember, it's not that hard to host your own git repo. There's no need to use GitHub.
This has nothing to do with GitHub. The commit author field in Git is like the “From” field of an email; you can put whatever you want in it.
I think it does. Github is an open system, whereas if you host your own Git server you can ensure that only trusted people have commit access to it.
Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
In a ten-player game, (a) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 20 for yourself is one kind of selfish tradeoff; and (b) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 5 for yourself is another kind of selfish tradeoff; and (c) giving one utilon to everyone else while gaining 10 for yourself is also a kind of selfishness. Cheating is (b), driving is (a). (You seem to be arguing that driving is (b) -…
[deleted]
Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#139It's a github 'social' issue , not really a git issue. It might also be a legal issue (identity theft). And i'm a bit surprised github let people impersonate others through their 'social' features.
It is really not possible for github to track the origin of commits. For example, consider a fork. If you pull some commits from the original and then push them to your fork then that would look just like this. The only thing I can think of is that it may be possible to track commits if everyone would sign them as they were created, but that would require all users to change, so I don't see how that can happen.
An idea that doesn't require signing is tracking commits internally.
If you push a commit made by you, Github can tag that as "trusted" (since you, the GH user, are vouching for your own commits). Then anyone who pulls them into their repo (even offline) and pushes it to their GH account would still have those commits tagged, since GH could match the hash with the ones it already knew about.
For the most part, this would solve the problem, since people usually upload the commits to their own GH fork and then issue a PR.
Re: Linus Torvalds did not commit this
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, Github's authenticated push logs will tell you that. However, Github won't make those public, because they consider user identification private info. (Or at least they won't provide those push logs to the Apache Software Foundation, which is how I know this.)
They won't even give it to the owner of the repo in question?
They will not. For instance, the ASF cannot get the push logs for all the repositories under " rel="nofollow">https://github.com/apache>.