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Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

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Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#61

Post by rationalist »

RobotToaster wrote: post #20
zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any company that will take my money to solve GDPR issues? And by solve I mean sue the spammers? For last few years I saw they "try" to look legit, by claiming addresses are managed by some Hungarian/Spanish shell company, hoping no one will be able to afford pursuing infractions over borders.

There's probably a law against it, but I've always thought a legal company could make decent money taking cases like this in bulk for free, on the condition that they get to keep all the compensation, while the "client" still gets the satisfaction of punishing the offending party.

On the U.S., only Attorneys General can go after violators of the CAN-SPAM Act.

It needs to be modified like how individuals can go after telemarketers.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#62

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

bakugo wrote: post #25

This sounded familiar, so I checked my inbox and I did indeed receive a similar email from sanchitmonga@runanywheresdk.com earlier this month: > I came across your GitHub profile and thought you might be interested in what my team and I are building. We're developing an open source SDK that runs LLMs directly on-device. What's even more interesting is that both buildrunanywhere.org and runanywheresdk.com show a stock…

I observed the same thing and it was only when you told me the main domain that I found their website.

> Something tells me they're intentionally registering these "alternate" domains specifically for spam, to avoid tanking the email reputation of their main runanywhere.ai domain

This is a really bad look on them.

https://www.whatsmydns.net/domain-age?q=buildrunanywhere.org and https://www.whatsmydns.net/domain-age?q=runanywheresdk.com

Both these domain were registered only 36 days ago

Their main domain had been around for 6 month (216 days) tho:- https://www.whatsmydns.net/domain-age?q=runanywhere.ai

(I also couldn't see any post created by them on YC checking algolia from their website fwiw)

Seeing their star history on their product, I see some few interesting observations[0] Their star history was almost horizontal between december and february until it got vertical all of a sudden.

[0]:https://www.star-history.com/#runanywhere.ai/runanywhere.ai&...

I looked through their linkedin and found this website owned by them as well https://www.openclawpi.com/ and using the YC brand here as well. (registerered 26 days ago)

This website looks fairly AI generated to me as well and there are some bugs within the original website as well which I am now incredibly more unsure of if generated by AI or not given the similarities between the two websites UI/UX as well.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#63

Post by dagi3d »

axegon_ wrote: post #51

I've received several similar ones over the years. At this point, if I get an email from someone I don't know and it contains a link, chances are it's spam. I genuinely doubt github(or any other company for that matter) would do something about it. While I fully support GDPR, the truth is, few people are willing to take action knowing how much bureaucracy would be involved...

> how much bureaucracy would be involved... it varies from country to country, but filling a complaint on that matter is usually quite straightforward

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#64

Post by ericol »

martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

I've had more than a few instances of this over the past 2 years, and my reply is exactly the above.

"What you are doing is against Github's TOS"

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#66

Post by lyu07282 »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #13

I have been having the same experience. If you starred a GitHub repo, and they think that their product is similar, they will send you their spam. I condemn this! They should be ashamed!

After 25 years on the internet dealing with spam, it would never even occur to me to invest the energy to write a letter to the offending companies investor. But more power to them I'd say!

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#67

Post by jvwww »

neya wrote: post #16
kristoff_it wrote: post #11

I have received over the years so much spam of this kind by multiple YC-funded companies that I now reflexively send to spam any email that mentions being YC-funded, regardless of how legitimate the email is.

I don't blame you, the FOMO is real to the point even basic ChatGPT wrappers are getting funded these days, I guess.

I'm always interested to understand - what constitutes a basic ChatGPT wrapper? Is Legora, which is doing very well, a basic ChatGPT wrapper? Because if you don't view it as one, it certainly started as one.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#68

Post by lordgrenville »

darknavi wrote: post #58
lordgrenville wrote: post #55

Maybe a dumb question, but isn't this trivially solved with this .gitconfig? [user] name = lordgrenville email = +lordgrenville@users.noreply.github.com

Sure, as long as you want to rewrite all of the history of all of your public repositories.

Oh yeah, I have always had this as it was pretty clear to me that the info in the email field is public.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#69

Post by koito17 »

martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

I don't have any specific suggestions, but I do want to give thanks for implementing functionality to block pushes if the email field is *not* using an anonymized mail address.

It's one thing to offer anonymous e-mail addresses, but it's also awesome that GitHub can help prevent mistakes that would otherwise leak a user's e-mail address. I am not sure how many people try to be privacy conscious on GitHub, but I assume most users don't, so it's nice seeing this little feature exist.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#70

Post by k33n »

ls-a wrote: post #54
scottydelta wrote: post #42

YC is a proud investor in Flock, what YC Ethics thing are you talking about?

[flagged]

I can't find any website for it. Are you sure it's not just some posting category on Bookface, YC's internal social network?
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