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submitted 4 months ago by 0x815@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

GitCode, a git-hosting website operated Chongqing Open-Source Co-Creation Technology Co Ltd and with technical support from CSDN and Huawei Cloud.

It is being reported that many users' repository are being cloned and re-hosted on GitCode without explicit authorization.

There is also a thread on Ycombinator (archived link)

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[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 373 points 4 months ago

Solution: create a GitHub repo with Markdown articles outlining human rights abuses by the CCP and have a large number of GitHub users star and fork the repo.

[-] Colonel_Panic_@lemm.ee 171 points 4 months ago

You've heard of CamelCase and lowercase and intVariableName variable naming styles. Get ready for:

for (int Taiwan == 0; Taiwan < HongKong; Taiwan++) { int TianamenSquare == 0; ... }

[-] Tramort@programming.dev 87 points 4 months ago

That's the whole point of this: they will automatically filter that out, and this is an impotent, though well intended, gesture.

[-] Morphit@feddit.uk 77 points 4 months ago

How will they filter it out? If they just don't mirror anything with 'forbidden' terms, we can poison repos to prevent them being mirrored. If they try to tamper with the repo histories then they'll end up breaking a load of stuff that relies on consistent git hashes.

[-] jorp@lemmy.world 28 points 4 months ago

I feel like the effort to make such a repo and make it popular enough to be cloned and rehosted is a lot more effort than someone manually checking the results of an automated filter process.

The "effort economy" is hugely in favor of the mirroring side

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 25 points 4 months ago

Yeah I figured as much. It was mostly a joke. At the end of the day, if stuff is on GH, people can take it. It's barely even stealing. Unless the license disagrees of course but then you were putting a lot of trust in society by making it public in the first place.

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[-] Azzu@lemm.ee 23 points 4 months ago

The real solution is to include a few tiananmenSquare variables in all the repositories. Either they exclude the entire repository or just the specific file, in either case the entire project may be unusable.

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[-] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 28 points 4 months ago

everyone should have stuff in their code comments, tianamen, hong kong, taiwan, uyghurs

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[-] 0x0@programming.dev 129 points 4 months ago

The vast majority of projects on GitHub is open-source and forkable, why would that need authorization?

It's... suspicious that China's doing it en masse, but there's nothing wrong in cloning or forking a repo last i heard.

[-] passepartout@feddit.org 110 points 4 months ago

It's not about authorization. They want to build a knowledge base for when the Great Firewall gets some more filters. Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 41 points 4 months ago

And under copyleft licensing, they're allowed to do that. Both to GitHub repositories and Wikipedia.

[-] passepartout@feddit.org 38 points 4 months ago

Of course they are, it's not like there is some kind of international jurisdiction anyway. What is bothersome is why they do it.

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[-] csm10495@sh.itjust.works 89 points 4 months ago

It's a bit odd, but isn't it equivalent to forking and putting up a fork elsewhere?

I guess I don't see the problem.

[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 23 points 4 months ago

It depends on the software license.

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[-] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 85 points 4 months ago

With the obligatory "fuck everyone who disregards open source licenses", I am still slightly amused at this raising eyebrows while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM, which will help circumvent licenses & copyrights by the bazillion.

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[-] dan@upvote.au 82 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I don't understand why this is a bad thing? Open source code is designed to be shared/distributed, and an open-source license can't place any limits on who can use or share the code. Git was designed as a distributed, decentralized model partly for this reason (even though people ended up centralizing it on Github anyways)

They might end up using the code in a way that violates its license, but simply cloning it isn't a problem.

[-] BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 32 points 4 months ago

I expect it's going likely to be used to train some Chinese AI model. The race to AGI is in progress. IMO: "ideas" (code included) should be freely usable by anyone, including the people I might disagree with. But I understand the fear it induces to think that an authoritarian government will get access to AGI before a democratic one. That said I'm not entirely convinced the US is a democratic government..

PS: I'm french, and my gov is soon to be controlled by fascist pigs if it's not already, so I'm not judging...

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[-] romp_2_door@lemmy.world 76 points 4 months ago

fun to think that my shitty program is now stored in an artic vault and stored in some Chinese servers

So many bugs I never fixed and yet here we are lol

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[-] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 53 points 4 months ago

Quick, someone tell Nintendo!

[-] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 50 points 4 months ago

Someone reupload yuzu, stat!

[-] nutsack@lemmy.world 49 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I love how every Chinese company is called "China"

[-] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 4 months ago

Yeah.. That's because they are. it is required that every Chinese Company has to be owned by "tHe PeOpLe" (CCP)

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[-] callmepk@lemmy.world 44 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I think the major issue is here is that they are “mirroring” with the same username without clear indicating they are mirrors and they are modifying all the github links in Readme to GitCode. But if you want to claim your project, they want to only comment using the issue section of a project which requires account; but then you have to have a Chinese phone number to register account, and you will automatically get a Huawei Cloud account when you registering it

Edit: also some background info about the company behind GitCode from my other comment: the company behind GitCode is funded and owned by CSDN (China Software Developer Network) and the actual infrastructure and service is provided by Huawei Cloud. On the website they have written this statement in the registration page.

CSDN is mostly a platform to share posts on software development, but it is known to have a lot of issues, including:

  1. poor content and directly copied posts from other people without consent, which to a point people is considering the site a content farm; it is even a top blocked site on Kagi;
  2. All code provided there requires “coins” to download, even they are open-sourced code; it was reported multiple people in China got scammed via CSDN;
  3. You have to login to copy code on the post, and sometimes hides half the post to require you to login to read.
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[-] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 43 points 4 months ago

Put content that is illegal in China into your code, problem solved!

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[-] PanArab@lemm.ee 37 points 4 months ago

It is not illegal is it?

If it is legal, then thank you China for the free backup.

[-] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 40 points 4 months ago

I do believe it's illegal if they take a repository with a restrictive license (which includes any repository without a license), and then make it available on their own service. I think China just doesn't care.

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[-] kersplomp@programming.dev 34 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Some random Chinese company: does something jenky

Blogger: "The entire country of China is doing this jenky thing!"

[-] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 40 points 4 months ago

All Chinese companies are the CCP. That’s how the system works.

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[-] A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.com 33 points 4 months ago

GitHub are not some bastion of righteousness - they are literally owned by Microsoft. And they work hard to stop people from getting too much Open Source from them, with rate limits and the like, so essentially gate keep.

I think CSDN probably want to gatekeep their clone even harder, but in general having archives of GitHub on the Internet is a good thing.

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[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 31 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If we steal IP from China does the American government give us a business loan?

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[-] Muffi@programming.dev 27 points 4 months ago

Great! Now I know who to contact when I accidentally delete all the plaintext API keys and passwords I had stored in a public github repo.

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[-] crazyminner@lemmy.ml 25 points 4 months ago
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[-] mlg@lemmy.world 24 points 4 months ago

omw to get all the homebrew stuff NIntendo got removed from github lol

[-] Grimy@lemmy.world 24 points 4 months ago

They should definitely respect the licenses, that being said, Microsoft owns GitHub and can be a bit quick in what they ban. It also means they are beholden to US laws, which could turn anti FOSS-AI in the near future.

This is a smart move and I honestly hope more countries start doing it. It would probably lead to a better ecosystem.

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[-] simplejack@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
845 points (97.8% liked)

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