Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 279 posts

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

#131

Post by jacquesm »

FactCore wrote: post #102
simonkafan wrote: post #68

In Austria there is a law in place saying if a company has a monopoly (e.g. public transport) or a quasi-monopoly (e.g. only supermarket in a 100 miles radius) the company is required to serve any customer and is not allowed to turn any down. It is time that all countries introduce laws that prohibit online monopolies from denying access to their users without good reasons.

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I don't think GitHub has a monopoly. Git was created to be decentralized, so every developer has a "backup" of sorts on their own machine. If GitHub is truely hostile to you, taking your business elsewhere (or hosting it yourself) shouldn't be too much of a roadblock for people with sponsors like OP.

Git being decentralized or not has no bearing on GitHub/Microsoft having a de-facto monopoly here. If you want to bring a counter argument that should at least include the name GitLab.

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

#132

Post by minxomat »

ygcodes wrote: post #99
bibinou wrote: post #97

Hi Yogi, I'm guessing your Github account has been hijacked. Support won't respond to your emails because it could be the attacker impersonating you, or he could still have access to your email and get info that way. This is Standard Operating Procedure I've seen applied on stolen accounts in MMO videogames involving stolen credit cards and organized crime. Sometimes wait time was 6 months with no contact, because th…

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.com/git-rest doesn't exist.

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

#133

Post by Silhouette »

varispeed wrote: post #47
Hamcha wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you truly wish to avoid this kind of problems you should think about hosting your own platform rather than jumping to the next one. Just because the smaller players haven't done anything bad doesn't mean they wouldn't. Gitea/Gitlab are crazy easy to set-up nowadays, especially with a fully working CI/CD setup (I use Gitea+Drone and I love it, Gitlab comes with its own)

You are essentially shifting the problem from entity to entity and from one domain to another. If you self host your repository, your hosting provider can pull the plug and you essentially end up in square one. If you decide to self host, you should consider multi-cloud cross continent and cross political doctrine cluster.

If you self host your repository, your hosting provider can pull the plug

If you self-host your repository, you don't have a hosting provider. There is no-one to "pull the plug" on the server at my business's office except the people who work in the building who could literally pull the plug, and I suppose the electricity and phone companies and our ISP.

What you are talking about isn't self-hosting, it's hosting in the cloud on VMs you're renting directly. This is an intermediate step between self-hosting and using a fully hosted service like GitHub.

With cloud-hosting, you are probably still subject to the whims of your hosting service. For example, you might be subject to occasional forced restarts of a long-lived instance if your hosting service needs to restart or replace the underlying physical server.

However, in most cases, unless you're doing something illegal using their equipment or compromising their system in some way, these hosting services don't much care what you're running on your virtual box. This option is still far less risky than using a fully-hosted service, not least because you retain full control over the underlying data so there is almost nothing that can happen because of your hosting provider that a reasonable backup strategy can't fix within a relatively short amount of time.

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

#134

Post by mikikikik »

used wayback machine to dig up the most starred projects with their short descriptions. it seems the user has a couple slightly popular projects (10 to 200 stars) about gist and open source contribution tracking. so i think it's most likely a hacked account, given the interest in (extremely) short account names. the fact that they banned it without any message is disturbing. i hope to see what happens to this in a longer time period.

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

#135

Post by jlokier »

sheogorath wrote: post #18

I'm sorry to break it to you. But that's basically want you agreed to by accepting their terms of service: "GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time." https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-te…

The clause is probably there to give GitHub some level of additional power to make judgements calls it may need to make, in situations that can't be anticipated.

It provides (or may provide) a stronger legal backing for GitHub if they have to terminate service for some reasonable reason that cannot be anticipated or enumerated in advance, in other words a judgement call, where the termination of service might be challenged legally or result in a lawsuit.

There are surely situations where action rather than pussy footing would be the right thing for GitHub to do, against a vexatious user with a penchant for abusing the service and using the legal system to incur costs on GitHub while doing so.

It would be much better if the clause was not so draconian. But I'm not sure what kinds of termination clause would protect GitHub in situations where it needs the flexibility to make judgement calls.

(ps. I don't want to imply the OP's GitHub account is in this category; I'm sure it isn't. I'm talking only about why the clause may be in the ToS.)

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

#136

Post by smoe »

jedimastert wrote: post #100
d0100 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cue the "it's not a monopoly" crowd. I think we need another word for these companies that are way to big and "monopolize" certain online spaces/communities.

I think that many people confuse "de facto standard" with monopoly. There are certainly other services that can do most if not all of the things Github does, it just doesn't have the audience. Does GitHub do anything to actively prohibit the use of it's competitors?

Think for private repos gitlab has been a viable and fairly popular alternative for a long time.

I reckon for open source the "de facto standard" plays a much bigger role, because of the user expectation to find projects on Github.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

Hamcha wrote: post #26
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?

If you truly wish to avoid this kind of problems you should think about hosting your own platform rather than jumping to the next one. Just because the smaller players haven't done anything bad doesn't mean they wouldn't. Gitea/Gitlab are crazy easy to set-up nowadays, especially with a fully working CI/CD setup (I use Gitea+Drone and I love it, Gitlab comes with its own)

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by nindalf »

opqpo wrote: post #84
BillSaysThis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your assertion were true I wouldn't have needed to block long time friends who continually post opinions such as yours.

Yes, you're so right to the point that I can't keep a post without being flagged within the first couple of minutes because HN is filled with liberal SS thugs like you.

> HN is filled with liberal SS thugs like you.

Bruh, first time I'm hearing "liberal" and "SS" in the same sentence. Never thought of those folks as liberal before.

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

#139

Post by jlokier »

hundchenkatze wrote: post #81
jlokier wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great until your DNS account is blocked at the registrar for similarly opaque reasons.

Couldn't you just switch registrars?

It can be difficult if the old registrar won't cooperate.

Especially if you registered under a pseudonym, as then you can't prove legal ownership of the domain either. But even if you register under your real name, you may need a court case to compel transfer if the old registrar won't cooperate.

Post reply on HN