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Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

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Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#241

Post by marcinzm »

finnthehuman wrote: post #67
zomglings wrote: post #13

It is ridiculous that GitHub has not even responded to your support ticket. To anyone reading from GitHub, this is making me rethink my choice of GitHub as a platform, and I'm sure the same is true for other people reading this post. Your reputation is very much at stake. To anyone reading this from Gitlab, how easy is it to migrate CI/CD off of GitHub Actions to Gitlab?

>To anyone reading from GitHub, this is making me rethink my choice of GitHub as a platform You should reconsider it no matter what; you're putting your business in someone else's hands and relying on their goodwill not to completely fuck you over. Using Github can be a tolerable risk when your company has hundreds of more-likely reasons to fail in the next month and needs every little bit of saved time it can get. B…

If you're large enough for it to matter then you're large enough to pay for Github Enterprise and have stronger contracts in place. Then you're not relying on goodwill but the cost of a lawsuit if they fuck with you.

And if you can't handle your business relying on contractually and legally defined interconnections with other entities then you really shouldn't be running a business.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#242

Post by maxlaumeister »

the_svd_doctor wrote: post #22
smoothgrammer wrote: post #17

Always do a periodic full off-site cold backup of all your GitHub repos. It's very easy to script and should compress down very small.

Is there an easy way to do that ? Some script available somewhere ?

I found that Clockfort's Github-Backup is good for downloading an account's repositories en masse. It only supports repos though, and not metadata like issues, comments, wikis, pull requests, etc.

https://github.com/clockfort/GitHub-Backup

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#243

Post by jacquesm »

thephyber wrote: post #234
jacquesm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'other side' is irrelevant. If you run a service oriented organization and are gateway to a substantial fraction of the open source projects out there you should have your customer support house in order to the point where fora such as this one are not seen as a means of last resort.

The "other side" is completely relevant. We don't yet know if this is a policy issue, a tech issue, a legal issue, a national security issue, an account takeover / hacking, etc.

It doesn't matter because clearly support has failed. There is no way a thing like a prominent github account like this one should be suspended without immediate communication with the user, which did not happen. The fact that this ends up on HN at all is the problem.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#244

Post by subins2000 »

minxomat wrote: post #132
ygcodes wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I have 2FA and MFA enabled!

Another vector is takeover requests via their name squatting policy (that's how I got my username). But those requests shouldn't be approved unless the old account really is inactive. Might have been approved by mistake. Another vector is the as of yet unfixed GitHub "ghost" bug, which I discovered and detailed here: https://github.com/git-rest/spooky Note how you can read that repo, but the account https://github.co…

does this mean that if I pass away, someone can take over my username and repos under my account ?

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#245

Post by DNied »

mako254 wrote: post #189
jacquesm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see these on a daily basis by now. Just the other day, major Youtube channel blocked, Gsuite accounts suspended without warning (after a decade of forking over cash) and so on. The only warning you will ever need is this one: Don't trust the cloud, don't trust cloud providers and make sure your mission critical path is only tied to things that you can control or that you have a 'hot' spare standing by for. Ot…

You are absolutely right - you can't just handover a kill switch for your business to a megacorp. However, there are a lot of instances where alternatives are not viable because of the same megacorps. For example, email is a major online ID and being locked out of it can be disastrous even for an individual. Ideally, you would want an email server of your own - but then the 2 major email providers simply junk the mai…

So far, only Microsoft has been a nuisance to my personal SMTP server (there's an open issue about Microsoft's dubious blacklists on GitHub, with several participants: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/microsoft-365-docs/issues/5...).

Just a little part of why I hate and mistrust that company.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#246

Post by joepie91_ »

MattGaiser wrote: post #52
catalogia wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would hiring 100+ customer support reps be a problem for Microsoft?

1. They would need to be somewhat technical, so they would not be cheap. Let's say $70,000 a piece. 2. It is a free product. Would you spend 7 million a year supporting a free product? 3. 99% of complaints would be of the nature "GitHub is broken. HELP!" and really be some person who did not set the origin before pushing.

It isn't a free product. It's a paid product with a free "introduction tier" that helps them capture the open-source ecosystem, so that when your company needs paid services, they are the obvious choice because everyone is using it already.

Basically the same deal as "educational licenses" for expensive software suites. It isn't a freebie at all; it's an investment into future customer acquisition through lock-in. That's how you're paying for it.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#247

Post by joepie91_ »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #149
jacquesm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it would, what else did you expect. Microsoft and open source have preciously little to do with each other regardless of how much lipstick they put on the pig. Selling Github to MS was a major mistake and one that we will all eventually end up regretting. This company is not friendly to open source unless it will find a way to milk it for profit, and even then only until that route is more profitable than a…

I had hoped that GitHub's culture, Nat Friedman as a CEO, and Microsoft's seeming acceptance of Open Source lately would combine to maybe prevent GitHub from turning into Microsoft SharePoint For Code. It seems that I may be wrong.

Microsoft's "acceptance of open-source" only stretches as far as it helps them survive, in an economy where "why would I buy your product when there's this open-source thing" is a question that gets asked more and more frequently. You know, the "embrace" and "extend" phases of "embrace, extend, extinguish".

This is really obvious from the parts that they choose not to open-source, such as https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/intellicode/issues/201

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#248

Post by grumpy-cowboy »

My client use paid GitHub services for the new projects they work on. But we (devs) really hate it because it slow us at lot (can't push/pull, Github Actions not working, "crash" our CI/CD server, ...) because of instability of Github servers! Their status page look like a Christmas Tree! Not a single week without issues.

I don't have control on my client decisions (not my business), but personally I'm done with GH.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#249

Post by minxomat »

subins2000 wrote: post #244
minxomat wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another vector is takeover requests via their name squatting policy (that's how I got my username). But those requests shouldn't be approved unless the old account really is inactive. Might have been approved by mistake. Another vector is the as of yet unfixed GitHub "ghost" bug, which I discovered and detailed here: https://github.com/git-rest/spooky Note how you can read that repo, but the account https://github.co…

does this mean that if I pass away, someone can take over my username and repos under my account ?

No, from my experience even a single empty repo disqualifies you from takeover. The point is to prevent name squatting, i.e. registering a name and then going nothing with it.
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