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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

#71

Post by yawaramin »

cloudhead wrote: post #63

We'll hopefully have a real alternative to these centralized platforms when Radicle[0] gets closer to core feature parity with GitHub. For many, this will be sometime this year, for others it might take another year or two. It's really scary to have a single platform be able to take away what is essentially your portfolio, resume, social profile, webhost (github pages) and collaboration platform all in one go, with n…

Note that defunkt's GH profile is still viewable. All the repos are still there. So the portfolio didn't go anywhere.

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

#72

Post by piotrkaminski »

yawaramin wrote: post #70
piotrkaminski wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes you're using a consumer Gmail account, I guess? If so, yeah, you're SOL. But I think as long as you have your owns domain you should be fine, even if you hook it up to Google Workspace for email, since you can always switch it to another provider. (And yeah, I realize this is not something civilians are likely to be able to figure out / do...)

For the people who know how to do that, they are just not going to use SSO in the first place. They will just use email+password+OTP.

Not necessarily. Speaking for myself, I like the convenience of SSO, and I generally trust Google to keep my account secured more than a random web site (if they even offer OTP!). As long as I know there's an escape hatch.

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

#73

Post by Mountain_Skies »

petercooper wrote: post #52

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.

The tech industry has a very strong belief that if they have to explain anything they do with rule enforcement, it will permit bad people to manipulate the process to avoid being punished for being bad people (as defined by the tech industry). The solution is to put everyone in constant fear of somehow angering something in a tech company (human or algorithm) so they'll reduce themselves down to a very narrow set of behaviors that probably won't (but aren't guaranteed not to) upset the enforcers (human or algorithm) of secret rules. Don't like it? Go build your own tech industry.

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

#74

Post by Mountain_Skies »

Xeamek wrote: post #46

The automatization of moderation is legitimately one of the scariest problems with modern internet, but because it's abuse and mistakes inherently affect tiny minority, nobody cares. And obviously companies will fallback to automated tools rather then pay for human reviewers. I don't really know how this should be dealt with. ...or maybe it shouldn't. And we should just accept that random minority will have their liv…

"Automation" also is a good way of hiding manual human moderation that is done for reasons beyond those they're willing to admit to publicly.

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

#75

Post by sieabahlpark »

piotrkaminski wrote: post #72
yawaramin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the people who know how to do that, they are just not going to use SSO in the first place. They will just use email+password+OTP.

Not necessarily. Speaking for myself, I like the convenience of SSO, and I generally trust Google to keep my account secured more than a random web site (if they even offer OTP!). As long as I know there's an escape hatch.

[dead]

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

#76

Post by brw »

piotrkaminski wrote: post #72
yawaramin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the people who know how to do that, they are just not going to use SSO in the first place. They will just use email+password+OTP.

Not necessarily. Speaking for myself, I like the convenience of SSO, and I generally trust Google to keep my account secured more than a random web site (if they even offer OTP!). As long as I know there's an escape hatch.

Same here. I have my own domain set as the main email address of my personal Google account (I have in fact deleted the Gmail one altogether, as I noticed that otherwise some websites would still pick the Gmail address over the custom domain one when using SSO). Not many people seem to know you can do this without Google Workspace, or that you can have a Google account without a Gmail address.

If I ever lose access to my Google account I can just set a password through the "forgot my password" feature (I've noticed this is often also the only way to set a password if you create an account through SSO with some websites, but it does work). The convenience of SSO with an escape hatch as you say.

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

#78

Post by wg0 »

I think EU should put legislation hammer here.

That - you can't ban an account unless providing clear, direct and irrefutable evidence of serious nature such as pornography, hate speech or terrorism etc.

This should be applicable to every online service provider.

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

#79

Post by FooBarWidget »

andrewstuart wrote: post #41

Here's a term you need to start saying to management of your company: "software supply chain risk". github just became a business risk and a software supply chain risk. I recently worked for a very large company that was 100% all in on github. And now its clear that in an instant and single developer or perhaps the entire organisation can be finished as far as github goes. Any CTO would now be negligent to have an or…

Okay but usually businesses deal with this not by having no dependencies and doing everything themselves. Instead they establish business relationships that ensure they do have a recourse, such as through contractual obligations.

Likewise, if the concern is that Github automatically bans you without a recourse, then my preferred solution is that they do introduce recourse. This could even be a paid option: I think it's entirely reasonable for them to ask an administration fee for the appeal process, just to cover the costs of having a human look at what's going on and providing a good explanation.

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

#80

Post by ummonk »

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?

Depends whether they have an email-centric or SAML-account-centric auth model.
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