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Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

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Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#51

Post by jenadine »

ForHackernews wrote: post #12
SirMaster wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me guess, we need a fediverse solution or source code now?

Git is already a distributed VCS. Just host someplace other than Github, honestly.

Putting the source somewhere else: easy, git push and change the URL in your doc.

Moving all the issues: hopefully someone must have done a script to fetch the issue and convert them.

Moving your CI: just rewrite your GitHub action away from these horrible yaml command. This is just going to be a bit more expensive than the 100% free GitHub plan.

Getting the community of millions of user that can report issues, propose PR and star your repository. Good luck with that.

The network effect of the community is the barrier to the change. Unless you do proprietary software, then you don't care.

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#52

Post by petercooper »

Judging by some of the reactions on this thread, GitHub would do well to make an official post explaining the situation, as well as the processes and mitigations in place for users affected by such suspensions. Regardless of the technicalities behind making backups or the decentralized nature of git, GitHub is a trusted service and needs to maintain that trust.

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#53

Post by JohnFen »

BadHumans wrote: post #26
bee_rider wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git seems to work pretty well p2p without the hub.

If you don't need to collaborate with people sure it does. Everything works well until you need to collaborate.

There are numerous collaboration tools aside from Github that can be used, though.

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#54

Post by BadHumans »

JohnFen wrote: post #53
BadHumans wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't need to collaborate with people sure it does. Everything works well until you need to collaborate.

There are numerous collaboration tools aside from Github that can be used, though.

If the project, company, or specific person you want to work with is using Github, you're using Github.

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#55

Post by yodon »

JohnFen wrote: post #50
simonw wrote: post #14

This is one of my nightmares... I have 800+ repos on GitHub and I dread the thought of some weird machine learning algorithm somewhere deciding that my account should be banned. A lot of the stuff I care about on there is backed up elsewhere, but not everything. I even have a tool for this: https://datasette.io/tools/github-to-sqlite - which exports issues, issue comments etc to a SQLite database via the GitHub API.…

> This is one of my nightmares... I have 800+ repos on GitHub This is one of the reasons I don't use Github: I am deeply uncomfortable putting so much power over me in their (or most companies') hands. Even if they're entirely trustworthy and reliable right now, any company is just an acquisition away from that no longer being the case.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft getting acquired is a considerably lower probability event than the other risks you're mitigating. If not, you might want to assess your risk tolerance.

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#56

Post by JohnFen »

yodon wrote: post #55
JohnFen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one of my nightmares... I have 800+ repos on GitHub This is one of the reasons I don't use Github: I am deeply uncomfortable putting so much power over me in their (or most companies') hands. Even if they're entirely trustworthy and reliable right now, any company is just an acquisition away from that no longer being the case.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft getting acquired is a considerably lower probability event than the other risks you're mitigating. If not, you might want to assess your risk tolerance.

Acquisition was just an example, and true, it's not likely with Microsoft. More likely glitches with Microsoft are that it sells Github, or there's a change in management priorities or personnel.

I was really addressing the larger case of depending too much on any company for this sort of thing, not Github specifically.

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#57

Post by yodon »

JohnFen wrote: post #56
yodon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft getting acquired is a considerably lower probability event than the other risks you're mitigating. If not, you might want to assess your risk tolerance.

Acquisition was just an example, and true, it's not likely with Microsoft. More likely glitches with Microsoft are that it sells Github, or there's a change in management priorities or personnel. I was really addressing the larger case of depending too much on any company for this sort of thing, not Github specifically.

It's a tradeoff between concentrating your risks in a very low-risk-probability monoculture or distributing your risks across a large statistical sample of (generally) much higher risk individual providers (smaller companies shut down or get acquired at much higher rates, and are frequently still high value targets for attackers even though they have much smaller budgets to spend on security and defense).

Distributing your risk among a large number of vendors is not necessarily better, and even if it's "just backups" can still multiply your risk of ideally non-public information getting disclosed.

Denial of service risks exist but are rare and, for example with the myriad complaints about "stripe is evil" tend to trace back to "account in question was doing something a rational unaffiliated observer would predict as a likely account cancellation driver for stripe." We don't know the circumstances here. If the circumstances were benign, it will likely be corrected, if not benign, we may never know the details.

EDIT ADDED (since HN is rate limiting this): self-hosting doesn't eliminate risks, it just changes them. You still face denial of service risks from loss of power, fire, natural disaster, theft, component failures, etc. If there were a zero risk path, everyone would take it.

We tend to prefer risks we feel we have "control over" (eg. Self-hosting), but at the incident rates of most other corporate hosting risks you're into the territory of an earthquake took out both your house and your rented storage locker.

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#58

Post by piotrkaminski »

calrain wrote: post #36

This is why I never use any OAuth/SAML authentication from places like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook when registering with a site. Always use email address and password (with 2FA where possible) to ensure you have ultimate control over your base account. If Google chose to just ban my account, the downstream ramifications of me losing access to linked sites that use that account for auth would be very damaging.

Wouldn't any sane SSO implementation let you recover and switch to a password simply by proving ownership of the email address via a challenge email?

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#59

Post by sauwan »

piotrkaminski wrote: post #58
calrain wrote: post #36

This is why I never use any OAuth/SAML authentication from places like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook when registering with a site. Always use email address and password (with 2FA where possible) to ensure you have ultimate control over your base account. If Google chose to just ban my account, the downstream ramifications of me losing access to linked sites that use that account for auth would be very damaging.

Wouldn't any sane SSO implementation let you recover and switch to a password simply by proving ownership of the email address via a challenge email?

>If Google chose to just ban my account

Re: Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

#60

Post by JohnFen »

yodon wrote: post #57
JohnFen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acquisition was just an example, and true, it's not likely with Microsoft. More likely glitches with Microsoft are that it sells Github, or there's a change in management priorities or personnel. I was really addressing the larger case of depending too much on any company for this sort of thing, not Github specifically.

It's a tradeoff between concentrating your risks in a very low-risk-probability monoculture or distributing your risks across a large statistical sample of (generally) much higher risk individual providers (smaller companies shut down or get acquired at much higher rates, and are frequently still high value targets for attackers even though they have much smaller budgets to spend on security and defense). Distributin…

A third way is to run essential services yourself rather than relying on other companies. This is my preference.

EDIT to reply: " self-hosting doesn't eliminate risks, it just changes them."

Absolutely true, but from my observations over the past couple of decades, the overall risks are lower with with self-hosting than with having someone else do it. The tradeoff is that self-hosting is more work. What's right for you depends on your particular needs.

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