121–130 of 144 posts
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There's never been a better time to migrate your projects away from corporate control
Actually the best time expired several years ago. Also prevention is better than cure.
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Yeah I read the article and the comments on HN so I know what it's about now. I still think they (not HN) should change the title to include what secret scanning means. Edit: how about dropping the corporatese and title it "github will now scan public repos for secret WeChat tokens"?
Yea, but you don't get panic clickthru with this message.
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>, I had no idea they had a program called "secret scanning" and that it's actually beneficial. Fyi... this feature was also previously mentioned in the news for public repos: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/github-brings-free-secret-... >So I obviously assumed they're letting China scan my private repos. To clarify, it's Microsoft/Github doing the scanning of private repos on behalf of the partners. They're just f…
Yeah I read the article and the comments on HN so I know what it's about now. I still think they (not HN) should change the title to include what secret scanning means. Edit: how about dropping the corporatese and title it "github will now scan public repos for secret WeChat tokens"?
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I believe it's roughly a quote from Linus Torvalds, the creator of git who has many issues with githubs decisions. See https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/ for a start, his opinion hasn't improved over the decade.
His oppositions seems to be nitpicking and he says it is fine for hosting?
To everyone portraying this as harmless and as Wechat just looking for security breaches: Tencent itself is the security breach. Not only can Chinese ppl not sign up without providing a phone number, just to get a SIM card they now take your government ID, a picture of your face and a fingerprint! Xi is making absolutely sure that every single internet user is IDed and has their conversations tracked on apps like Wec…
It was very fascinating to see, a near total domination of WeChat everywhere and relatively very hard onboarding for new accounts. Contrary to the west where most of services seek to streamline onboarding as much as possible - I guess that becomes an anti feature when you have total monopoly and _everyone_ has a WeChat account. I think it's a very effective (and very dystopian) form of control. P.S: Signal worked without any problems for me, even on a Chinese SIM (one "trick" to go around most of the GFW was buying a HK SIM in HK. Works across china and has a lot less blocks, but for various reasons I got a China SIM too).
Brilliant title for the article. Even though I'm a paid github customer, I had no idea they had a program called "secret scanning" and that it's actually beneficial. So I obviously assumed they're letting China scan my private repos. They really need to work on wording.
Poor functionary creates political incident with humble template...sounds like a Gogol short story. "but it worked great for redirect.pizza!"
Btw I assume this recent thread was about the same feature:
Secret scanning is now available for free on public repositories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34007637 - Dec 2022 (70 comments)
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> If I was forced to pick one government to share my secrets with, it would be the Chinese, because there’s nothing they can do about it. What makes you so sure about that? I worry about China because there’s no internal checks to prevent them from doing anything . Western governments and allies have a long culture of court systems and thinking about balancing constituent needs. That is eroding and becoming more dang…
> What makes you so sure about that? I think the commenter means that China can't do much about them while living where they do (e.g. the US), whereas the US based intelligence agencies can black bag them in most of the western world. Given the Snowden revelations, I don't believe there's much accountability to what the NSA and co collect and analyze. Secret courts, CIA dark sites, Gitmo, all kinds of things that mig…
I do not condone the actions of all of the US institutions and believe many are largely unaccountable, but there is still far more accountability in our least accountable institutions than any in China. Culture within institutions, the populace at large from which institutions hire from, and the history of institutions is a very important but subtle factor that westerners take for granted and is not identical between countries.
The fact that we even call US actions war crimes is another form of accountability China lacks. China forcibly annexed Tibet. China has concentration camps in inner Mongolia. China massacred it’s own people during the Mao era and is run by the same party today. China releases dams upstream of cities and drowns its own people. China committed war crimes in its support of North Korea during the Korean War, and Vietnam in the Vietnam War. China turned hundreds of its college students into mincemeat in Tiananmen square.
These are not on the radar of most people in China the same way Gitmo and Iraq and Vietnam are in the US because the CCP has a level of unaccountability westerners do not understand. Their stranglehold on media and public perception is extreme, and they have been exerting influence on western social media like reddit, youtube, and facebook, as well as google search. They do so through virtually all corporations that want access to Chinese labor and the Chinese market.
The ramifications of this are severe. The lockdown policies that have destroyed a lot of the global economy were pushed on the world by pressure from China (and our own fear and incompetence), despite existing pandemic plans in western nations that were far more sane, more humane, and less destructive.
They were able to get us to discard our own pandemic plans from our own institutions because of the influence they have been gaining. China exerted influence over the WHO recommendations, and was very aggressive/in PR panic mode when the virus first escaped. Our own internal division is largely our own doing, but they were extremely aggressive in the early phases of the pandemic online and greatly exacerbated western problems precisely because they knew what talking points to copy and paste for maximum division and lack of consensus.
Giving them your data and more ability to influence you and people that fit your demographics online is incredibly naive and foolish, no matter how much you may dislike your own government or how valid that dislike may be.
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This is a service running on public repos, anyone can scrape this which is the problem. GitHub does the scanning and all that is forwarded is the "secret" matching their regex. Tencent then identifies the account owner and informs them about the public secret. That's all. GitHub is available in China, why shouldn't they protect their Chinese users? And the SIM card requirements have nothing to do with Tencent, have y…
Why do they notify tencent instead of the repo owner?
To everyone portraying this as harmless and as Wechat just looking for security breaches: Tencent itself is the security breach. Not only can Chinese ppl not sign up without providing a phone number, just to get a SIM card they now take your government ID, a picture of your face and a fingerprint! Xi is making absolutely sure that every single internet user is IDed and has their conversations tracked on apps like Wec…
Wait a second, the requirement of a government to get a sim card is kinda standard practice in multiple countries. Also, when it comes to privacy, US based companies must be last ones to talk, like as if China is the only bad guy who infringes upon peoples right to privacy. China is dangerous, but it's not the only dangerous thing in the room. Also, your comment doesn't make sense. If you are committing your public c…
There isn't a country in the world which does this. But the details are also not the main point, it's how extremely restricted and controlled simple access to information or forums of free expression is for people in China. Tencent has party officials working within the company. This isn't a regular business as Westerners might imagine it, it's an extended part of the CCP just like any other large corporation under Xi.
Again, people are saying it's no big deal but why would GitHub help them at all? It's not a good cause.