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)
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.
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; … }
That’s the whole point of this: they will automatically filter that out, and this is an impotent, though well intended, gesture.
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.
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
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.
That’s what I don’t get about this. Why does anyone care? Even this Chinese company, why do they care to clone it all? It’s already all hosted and publicly available.
Apparently they aren’t respecting licenses. It’s possible to have source code publicly available on GH but have it not be truly FOSS. But that’s generally not a great idea since you’re effectively relying on the honour system for people not to take your code.
The real solution is to include a few
tiananmenSquarevariables in all the repositories. Either they exclude the entire repository or just the specific file, in either case the entire project may be unusable.It’s a new coding paradigm, I will take some time getting used to looking for libraries in the
uyghur/tianamenfolder.China filters every byte of Internet traffic in and out of the country.
It seems naive to think they can’t accomplish the same thing for a GitHub mirror.
They’re not supposed to, it’s just about blocking them from using the software :)
everyone should have stuff in their code comments, tianamen, hong kong, taiwan, uyghurs
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genius.
create a GitHub repo with Markdown articles outlining human rights abuses by the CCP
Once you have logged “China killed 100 Zillion people! End CCP now!” in Chinese GitHub, everyone in China will realize that their lives are actually very bad and they need to do a Revolution immediately.
Maybe we should consider the same for the US government instead of being afraid of the big Chinese boogeyman across the sea? Because I guarantee you the US has just as many, if not more. But China bad. 🙄
I was making a joke about abusing Chinese censorship in order to stop them cloning GitHub repos (assuming that was something you wanted to do). The joke being that the CCP suppresses information about their human rights abuses. That is not true of the US. You could absolutely make a GitHub repo detailing the crimes of the US government. Nobody will stop you.
Problem: the repo is only 1MB, while USA’s is 100GB
Tankie whataboutism strikes again.
Two things can be bad at the same time. Wild, I know.
Edit: also, the point of my joke wasn’t the human rights abuses. It is that these things are censored in China. So your comment is even more irrelevant. One could very easily create a repo outlining American crimes and put it on GitHub. But doing so in China with CCP crimes will have you sent to a Gulag
“Whataboutism” is what Americans say to profess blind faith in their exceptionalism.
I’m not American. I don’t even like America.
Hell even i’m American and don’t like America
So you have even less reason to use the racist-in-origin and logically fallacious term.
Lmao it’s literally the name of a logical fallacy. How is the term itself fallacious?
Also I harbour no racism or ill will toward the Chinese people. My girlfriend is Chinese and I care about her a lot and love learning about her culture. I just don’t abide the human rights atrocities (or censorship thereof) committed by any government.
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it’s a euphemism for “And You Are Lynching Negroes” - that’s literally what people used to say instead of whataboutism.
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It’s not the name of any logical fallacy. You’re thinking of Tu Quoque.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/03/is-whataboutism-always-a-bad-thing
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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.
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.
And under copyleft licensing, they’re allowed to do that. Both to GitHub repositories and Wikipedia.
Of course they are, it’s not like there is some kind of international jurisdiction anyway. What is bothersome is why they do it.
This seems like the most plausible explanation. Only other thing I can think of is they want to develop their own CoPilot (which I’m guessing isn’t available in China due to the U.S. AI restrictions?), and they’re just using their existing infrastructure to gather training data.
Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.
How come I live in Russia and have never seen such?
I know only of quite a few troll\counterculture projects, some, like Lurkmore, are already, well, dead, some, like Traditsiya, are not.
That, of course, if you don’t mean that Russian Wikipedia in itself has problems. Which would be true.
It’s called Ruwiki.
It was launched in June 24, 2023 as a fork of the Russian Wikipedia, and has been described by some media groups as “Putin-friendly” and “Kremlin-compliant”.
OK. Well, not sure anyone really uses that.
Open source? Or open source with a non-commercial restriction?
Why would that matter? You can fork such projects too.
Seems easier to commercialize a mirrored site?
Firewalls are already being built in america’s internet with the ban of tiktok
As an european i do not see problem with having copies of free software in places not controlled by the monopoly microsoft is morphing to.
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.
It will be funny to see folks who spent the last ten years posting “It’s not stealing, it’s copying” memes suddenly find religion because Evil Foreign People got involved.
I’m quite scared of how AI apparently pushes people in favour of significantly stricter copyrights. This is not a good trend.
This isn’t people being influenced by AI. This is Microsoft’s Godzilla battling the RIAA/MPAA’s King Kong.
The trend, to date, has been consolidation of media properties under fewer and more hegemonic distributors. And now we’re seeing a couple of economic Titans battle over the position of “Last Legitimate Music Vendor”.
It depends on the software license.
Ya, I kind of like the idea of code being put somewhere else just in case. It sucks it’s China, but I hate to see anything centralized in one company, especially if it’s a big public, good like Github and all it’s code.
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
The great thing about China is that it’s got lots of people eager to fix those bugs
You haven’t worked with a lot of Chinese engineers, have you? https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-mindset
I love how they reinvent a universal experience as uniquely Chinese
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.
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…
I expect it’s going likely to be used to train some Chinese AI model.
Even if they do that, the license for open source software doesn’t disallow it from being done.
But china bad and scary.
Someone reupload yuzu, stat!
Quick, someone tell Nintendo!
I love how every Chinese company is called “China”
Yeah… That’s because they are. it is required that every Chinese Company has to be owned by “tHe PeOpLe” (CCP)
Gotta disguise being a capitalist country somehow.
Capitalism is when the public owns the things. And Communism is when a handful of private individuals owns the things.
So what’s it called when the government is a handful of private individuals, as opposed to representing the public?
Oligarchy or aristocracy, and that’s Russia. And the US at this point lol.
The Aristocrats
Lmao
Facebook = America
Some random Chinese company: does something jenky
Blogger: “The entire country of China is doing this jenky thing!”
All Chinese companies are the CCP. That’s how the system works.
And all US companies follow US laws and crazy people say they do the bidding of CIA/NSA/FBI- which they do, to a degree.
Yea they would have to do their bidding if the government came knocking with subpoenas.
Funny how you say something similar and we have such different karma for it.
Might be because of our approaches?
Your’s comes across as a sort of whatabout that nobody asked for and mine is just a statement of fact related to what you mentioned.
It’s not inaccurate to say that the Chinese government has a tighter leash on all business in their country than the US has in theirs though.
And they have been!
Put content that is illegal in China into your code, problem solved!
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AbstractBaseWinnieThePoohFactory
Free backups.
Yeah, why not. They are not cloning developers, yet. :)
JIAN YANG!!!
Ehrlich Bachman, this is your mom and you, you are not my baby.
you’re a fat, and a poor
I burn the garbage
Eric, is a refrigerator running?
This is Mike Hunt - and he’s a rich.
omw to get all the homebrew stuff NIntendo got removed from github lol
Shame they don’t have anything themselves that’s worth the trouble to copy back.
Aren’t Alibaba and Huawei huge on opensource?
Let’s dismiss all chinese contributors to open source projects with AI, javascript, PHP and so on.
As China leap frogged west in solar and EV tech
That they got from the West when CATL bought out a bankrupt US company that had developed LFP to commercial viability.
I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.
China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.
At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.
Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.
The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.
For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.
Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.
We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.
I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?
I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.
Just my take but:
Like them or not (and IMV they are a serious threat), China’s system enforces a strategic view, long term, more like a 100yr plan.
We don’t. It’s by election cycle or quarterly earnings report.
These things all make more sense if you see them impassionately, and without an ethical filter, from a long term POV.
China will do what’s best for China in the long term. Irrespective of ‘politics’ that are like ripples upon a rising tide.
I absolutely do not discredit the scaling they’ve done in the manufacturing process, but if there’s one thing China does well, it’s scale manufacturing. That’s usually because they have much lower safety and quality standards, and might bring them up later on. But what they don’t seem to have, at least in these industries, is innovation in the underlying technology to any appreciable extent.
But hooboy, can they pump out solar panels and batteries when they’re taken off the leash.
And abso-fucking-lutely, we in Western countries continuously shoot ourselves in the foot with short-term thinking. There was a time it seemed when there were plans like the New Deal where thought was given to decades down the road. Today, the longest term outlook you see if 4 years. And that’s common across the board, I wouldn’t even place that just at the feet of the US. It’s a damn shame, and it’s the reason the middle class is getting hammered for the last 40 years. But we do know how to R&D, just now we can’t get build a manufacturing base without some grifter taking all the subsidies and shipping them offshore.
Now I’m depressed.
That’s called value investing… Maybe our dear leader should learn how to manage national wealth instead of cutting companies and allowing a geopolitical adversary to take over tech/IP
Ie this is not a flex you think it is, it just proves my point that our dear leaders are incompetent imbiciles or worst… Bad faith actors.
No accountability leads to this sort of decision making lol
Bad faith, for sure, made very clear in the last 20 years.
I’ve seen what’s inside the speed controllers and battery monitoring circuitry for Chinese EVs. I don’t think I want to be anywhere near them.
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.
I think projects like this are good, but I really don’t want governments to create their own version of XYZ for the sake of creating clones of XYZ. I’m scared that all this will do is fragment an almost-universal collection of open-source projects into regional variants for no real reason.
“Governments” arent doing this. Its some company
In China, they’re the same picture.
Hey look, more crazy postings
