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Microsoft acquires Github

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#831

Post by 72deluxe »

magduf wrote: post #825
72deluxe wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not associate it with Gnome3 but I have to ask (as I am not longer a desktop Linux user), do they still rewrite every system utility every couple of releases? Back when Fedora Core was a thing, they rewrote the GUI utilities every couple of releases, without actually improving them from what I could tell. And despite installing a binary distribution, they insisted on writing these in Python with bindings to the…

I don't know, because I never used Gnome much, and have avoided Gnome3 like the plague. Fedora is very much a Gnome-centric distro, so of course it's going to be like what you say. At home, I use KDE, so of course they're not going to have system utilities binding to GTK. KDE is Qt-centric, so most stuff there is most likely in Qt-flavored C++. Xfce is GTK, but it's known to be fast (I use it at work and it's quick),…

No, they were aimed at the system utilities eg. system-* that present UIs. They weren't tied to a DE (but did use a specific windowing toolkit like GTK+); I am not talking about the control center or Kontrol system - I am talking about the system-* UI packages which were all Python written, with bindings to GTK+ and ran horribly.

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#832

Post by g-b-r »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #829
g-b-r wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll do it the day they think it's profitable for them to do so, as their public company status obliges them to do, unless their shareholders vote otherwise.

Of course. That's the point of criticizing them. So that they can see the potential profit in behaving nice.

Absolutely.

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#833

Post by g-b-r »

Totoradio wrote: post #23
codetrotter wrote: post #15

> And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future. It’s a fair point bu…

I can understand those concerns, but what can they do to convince you they have changed?

Sell the majority of their shares to other people and behave very nicely, doing things against their short and medium term interest, for 15 years.

That's about the minimum, given their track record.

In the meanwhile we can give them increasing credit, if they do behave nicely, but it's absurd to believe that they've suddenly become a good company and that they'll stay like this for the next decades. I have a hard time believing that anyone not payed by them could think so.

And by the way, they have yet to reverse the decidedly un-nice things they have done with Windows 10 in the last years. Allow everyone to disable the telemetry and to better control the updates, and then we can start the 15 years count. Oh yeah, and maybe also stop astroturfing, that's another extremely un-nice thing that they clearly started doing only recently.

There would be nothing wrong in discussing with the people, if they paid people to do so while stating in every message that they're being paid by Microsoft it would be perfectly ok, but that's very different from what they're doing now.

These things make it clear that they're still motherfuckers, just less then they used to be.

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#834

Post by tekknik »

sushisource wrote: post #580
sanbor wrote: post #422

This is a wake up call. Too many things are relying on Github right now. Microsoft was part of the PRISM program. If Microsoft shares SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks. What if in some very specific cases you download dependencies from GitHub and they give you a different version with malicious code? It's the NSA. They could be smart enough to only deploy those attacks on production servers were nobody is…

They could also do it regardless of whether or not Microsoft owns them or whatever favorite acronym authorizes them, or whatever. I've never understood why people love freaking out about this stuff. If the NSA felt like spying on you, pro tip, they're gonna be able to do it. If you care about keeping your shit secure, it shouldn't be on the internet at all.

So just roll over and become complacent? The last time a gov pushed their bounds too much a new country had to be made to stop it.

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#835

Post by leecarraher »

I will be curious to see what competitors of Microsoft, who host projects on github (google,facebook, etc) do. Where previously Github was an unbiased host for open source projects, now being under the umbrella of MS, other entities might see it as clashing with their corporate policies.

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#836

Post by Kalium »

sanbor wrote: post #804
Kalium wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. Let's not talk about potential threats. That's the language of fear, control, and paralysis. It's the language of liars and demagogues and exaggerations. Let's talk about risks and goals. The language of opportunities. An approach of `curl | bash` takes a needless amount of risk to accomplish its goals. It can do far too many things, of which it actually needs to do a small subset. It offers a lot of opportunity…

Good question. The specific problem that I'd like to tackle is sharing code as safe as possible. The happy path is that you have some code to share and I want to get it exactly as you wrote it. Right now the current issues with just using GitHub to share your code are the following: 1. GitHub app gets hacked and let's someone else do a commit (like the rails hack mentioned above). 2. GitHub employee modifies files in…

> To recap, by having a decentralized system of users and public keys, and making git validate that the commits are signed and from the right people, we could have a much more reliable way of sharing code.

I can see that you've put some thought into this. I can also see you don't generally spend most of your time thinking about security. This is not a bad thing! Most people don't!

But it does occasionally show up in sloppy thinking about system design, such as when you reflexively conflate a commit being signed by a key with a commit being from the person who is expected to own that key. It means you didn't stop and think about how to integrate rapid key revocation in case of compromise, or how to rotate keys over time.

Or how social review systems tend towards unreliability, as reviews are left by those who are not experts and users trust aggregate numbers from such. How meaningful is a 4.5-star average from five reviewers on a cryptography library, if the reviewers are five random people whose expertise you know nothing about and are ill-equipped to judge?

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#837

Post by bitmapbrother »

tw04 wrote: post #798
bitmapbrother wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know patent racketeering was a fair response to not supporting an OS with a worldwide marketshare of less than 2%.

Not supporting? You mean actively blocking? Google actively blocked windows phones devices from accessing YouTube. And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering? Talk about Torchlighting....

You must be referring to the time Microsoft reversed engineered YouTube API's and blocked ads in their unauthorized YouTube app. They had no right to reverse engineer proprietary API's, they had no right to block ads from being played and they had no right to create an app for an IP they didn't own.

>And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering?

You should look into the Microsoft vs Barnes and Noble case[1] as well as review their detailed patent racketeering practices at Groklaw. Additionally, the Chinese government made Microsoft expose all of their patents that they wouldn't allow companies they were shaking down to see and, well, they were full of old, obsolete and prior art ridden patents - be sure to look those up too.

[1]http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111111222912...

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#838

Post by erikpukinskis »

manigandham wrote: post #364
erikpukinskis wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two ways you create value for your employer: 1) creating value for their customers 2) maintaining the moat that prevents other people from creating value for their customers The former is constructive, the latter is destructive. They both contribute revenue. I haven’t done a full scale analysis of Microsoft, but the argument I would entertain is that Microsoft primarily sells tools for companies and individ…

#2 doesn't work unless you can also provide that value, so it is still constructive. You cant keep customers from using something if you have no such offering yourself to compete with.

Sure you can, why not? They will just work around deficiencies in your product as long as switching is even more painful.

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#839

Post by lawnchair_larry »

jefffoster wrote: post #497
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually can’t turn it off, and they still refuse to publish the complete list of what is collected. You need an enterprise version to disable as much as they will let you, and even then, they still force quite a bit of collection.

"This article describes all types of diagnostic data collected by Windows at the Full level (inclusive of data collected at Basic), with comprehensive examples of data we collect per each type" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/configuration/windo...

Below “Basic” is the “Security” level, which only enterprise can set. It’s a subset of Basic, but excluded from the disclosure. They refuse to say what that sends.

Re: Microsoft acquires Github

#840

Post by wangyjx »

g-b-r wrote: post #820
wangyjx wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why MS cares your private repositories? give a reason? Maybe using your code to train their programming robot, lol

This is a much more concrete possibility than people might realize: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/deep-learning-...

public repositories contain enough data to learn, private repositories only a small part
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