Microsoft is Locking Down Search for Public Code on GitHub : tech

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, I'm not sure what this article is even trying to say; this has been happening for a while now.

Like, it's shitty, but it's not even the shittiest thing Github has done. I'm more annoyed about the whole AI stuff, the fact that they have de-facto veto powers on most open source projects and that they don't let you have multiple accounts to separate your professional life from your cringe life.

Modern times are really "people should get off of X platform but don't because people don't want to move".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

they don’t let you have multiple accounts to separate your professional life from your cringe life

Can you post more on this? I found this article that seems to recommend you only use one account, but doesn't seem to suggest that they enforce it. I have like 8 GitHub accounts with a cringe/professional mix, so hopefully that's not something I need to fix. (Ironically I usually stay logged out anyway)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#3-account-requirements

Here, I'm afraid. Third bullet. Whether or not they enforce it is another matter.

Sucks because I kinda might want to contribute some things to projects that I don't want people to know professionally.

Or maybe I can just make my profile private and hope nobody goes looking too hard.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They...have an "add account" feature right in their UI though. They are obviously okay with multiple accounts. Perhaps it is an abuse thing like if they notice you sock puppeting or something.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

That's for if you have a personal account and one provided by your company.

In some cases, you may need to use multiple accounts on GitHub.com. For example, you may have a personal account for open source contributions, and your employer may also create and manage a user account for you within an enterprise.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ruh roh. Yeah I'm involved with several projects that I'd rather not trace back to my other identities, and I make a new GitHub account per job. Even if they start enforcing it I imagine it's quite hard for them to actually figure out what's all connected without amping up their identification schemes with mandatory phone numbers and etc. I guess we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh, they do.

I didn't clear my cookies/use a vpn to sign up for multiple accounts.

All registered accounts, including my main one, were locked. All secondary ones were shadowbanned. I had to message support to get restrictions on my main removed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Did they actually unlock your account?

All the horror stories I've read about this sort of thing usually end in "I tried to contact support/submit an appeal but they told me to take a hike".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Yes, they unlocked one of them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I’m not sure where they have their information from, I have 2 very unique, personal accounts on github and i’ve had zero issues.

first is my public “portfolio” page and occasional professional/corporate client connected account, it is very much an account that you would “know” my info, linkedin, keybase, etc identifiers. Then i have a personal one that I use to contribute more anonymously, which I use to further opensource projects that my clients wouldn’t want me contributing to due to conflict of interest. I’m not talking espionage levels, just modified supportive code that i have contributed to an enterprise that doesn’t support opensource initiatives (aka, they’d pay a fine if it ever came public).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They just replied with this link, which has it listed as the third bullet. I suspect they don't actually care enough to do anything, but I had no idea that it was in their ToS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

ha, good info. I wouldn’t meet that violation because my main public account is a pro account. But, you’re not alone in multiple accounts and I assume unless you’re violating other TOS, you’ll be fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Giving them money is likely the reason you still have your accounts.

Log into another free account on your machine and see what happens.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Modern times are really “people should get off of X platform but don’t because people don’t want to move”.

More like "people should get off of X platform but don't because people they regularly interact with don't want to move, and because herd mentality"

It's the same reason why people tolerate YouTube's bullshit. The audience won't switch to a platform without content, and the content creators won't switch to a platform without an audience.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean they don't let you have multiple accounts? I've had three accounts for years, and I'm not doing anything to hide the fact they're all me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

That's more likely to target farming, like 1 person with 1000 accounts that are used as bots. At least I hope so.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

(in other news it appears i have inadvertently discovered that the lemmy dialect of markdown supports {ruby|text})

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

in other news it appears i have inadvertently discovered that the lemmy dialect of markdown supports {ruby|text}

It looks like you had a stroke reading from Kbin

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Here’s how it should look (I think)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Companies are putting moats around their data (or the data they host) because AI needs data to train its models on. It is the same reason Reddit changed their API access.

I'll even wager 20 imaginary internet coins that Wikipedia will require logins to do any searching within the next year.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

I’ll even wager 20 imaginary internet coins that Wikipedia will require logins to do any searching within the next year.

I'll take that bet. Being a community-driven non-profit, Wikipedia is different.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't buy that as the reddit reason for their API change.

For a group that wants to feed AI models, web scraping reddit is barely a speed bump compared to having a nice API to use.

Reddit did what it did to force users onto their mobile app so they could better harvest user data and keep them from avoiding ads.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This made me go check on OpenRed, a reddit app for iOS that didn’t use the API (a more than likely no-no - scraping the site, essentially).

Not only is it missing from the App Store, but the dev and his subreddit were both banned.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

It’s crazy how long Reddit was such a huge part of my life and then just like that, doesn’t exist.

The only thing I miss are the videos.

Videos don’t get traction here it seems.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

In this case I don't think that's the reason. All code on github is not Microsoft's data, is open source and easily downloadable by whoever needs it to train the models.

This is an inconvenience only for humans to force them to have an account

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wow, I was not aware of this. That's a pretty big reason why I make my stuff open-source, so others can look through it and learn from it. I know, everyone who stayed on GitHub is officially Microsoft's bitch now, but I still can't fathom why this didn't make bigger waves...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Probably because like you I wasn't aware of what Microsoft was up to. Let's just hope embrace extend extinguish doesn't end up with a GitHub version of git.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They do already have GitHub Desktop, for Windows and macOS...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

In fairness though that's just a UI for git in the same vein as things like GitKraken or GitCola atm if I'm not mistaken

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

That is my understanding of it, too, yeah. In principle, I'm also okay with them providing something like this. I'm just worried that they'll eventually start adding stuff into it, which impacts Git.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This has been happening for a little while now. I've started cloning repos and using local searches instead.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And "little while" is, I think, at least a year. If not more.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think about half a year, assuming that's what they mean in this blog post: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

You're absolutely right. I was thinking about global, unscoped search. That sucks.

Searching code globally across GitHub.com already requires users to login, but starting today, we are extending that to include repository-scoped search as well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is Codeberg a good alternative if I'm gonna have my dotfiles (public) and some open-source software?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Heard only good things about Codeberg, I've only used it to access code so can't really speak to anything else.

Was recently made aware of this new part;
"Brought to you by an inclusive community under the umbrella of Codeberg e.V., a democratic non-profit organization, Forgejo can be trusted to be exclusively Free Software."

https://forgejo.org/

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