Submitted 4 months ago by 0x815@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://infosec.exchange/@still/112681853434505681
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Open source? Or open source with a non-commercial restriction?
Why would that matter? You can fork such projects too.
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.
I complain all the time. But that’s not the subject of this post…
Yeah exactly, fuck llms that don’t honor licenses
while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM,
Lots of people complained about that. I’ve only seen this single thread complaining about this.
nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM
What rock have you been living under??
Came here to say this. As much as I don’t like china, there is really nothing to see (apart from the source, that’s for everybody to see).
This could be illegal for git repos that do not have a open source license that allows mirroring or copying (BSD, Apache, Mit, GPL, etc.) Sometimes these repos are more “source available” and the source is only allowed to be read, not redistributed or modified. I would say that this is more of a matter for each software owner, not Microsoft.
But ultimately, this really isn’t as big of a deal as people are making.
Are you just trying to make a bad pro-China argument or have you never been online before?
I see it more as a good anti-Microsoft argument 🤷🏻♀️
Not like MS couldn’t be sued.
It may be expensive but possible.
Unlike China. Good luck suing china (or the chinese government) as a whole. Maybe you’ll get out a domestic ban but I can hardly believe that they will care and probably will continue with their operation. But now it’s not on very legal grounds.
If I look at a few implementations of an algorithm and then implement my own using those as inspiration, am I breaking copyright law and circumventing licenses?
That depends on how similar your resulting algorithm is to the sources you were “inspired” by. You’re probably fine if you’re not copying verbatim and your code just ends up looking similar because that’s how solutions are generally structured, but there absolutely are limits there.
If you’re trying to rewrite something into another license, you’ll need to be a lot more careful.
As I am a big proponent of open source, there is nothing wrong even with copying code - the point is that you should not be allowed to claim something as your own idea and definitely not to claim copyright on code that was “inspired” by someone else’s work. The easiest solution would be to forbid patents on software (and patents altogether) completely. The only purpose that FOSS licenses have is to prevent corporations from monetizing the work under the license.
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.
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.
The code needs to maintain the copyrights and authors. They are “mirroring” usernames into their own domain, with mails that dont correspond to the original authors, stealing their contributions.
That would make it plagiarism, which is a whole different matter than merelly copying that which is free to copy.
with mails that dont correspond to the original authors,
Oh! I didn’t realise this. Do you have an example?
I’m seeing this misconception in a lot of places.
Just because something is on GitHub, doesn’t mean it’s open source. It doesn’t automatically grant permission to share either.
It may not be de jure open source, but if the code is posted publicly on the internet in a way that anyone can download and modify it, it sort of becomes de facto open source (or “source available” if you prefer).
I personally don’t care if someone “steals” my code (Here’s my profile if you want to do so: github.com/ZILtoid1991 ), however it can mean some mixture of two things:
Of course it could mean totally unrelated stuff too (e.g. just your typical anti-China and/or anti-communist paranoia sells political points).
Isn’t GitHub already blocked in China?
US will try its best to block technology, including open source projects.
You can’t block open source projects from anyone. That’s the entire point of open source.
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.
It depends on the software license.
Does it though? You can still put up a fork somewhere else as long as you uphold the license right? Unless I guess in the case where the license explicitly disallows forks, but I don’t think that’s very common (can you even do that?).
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.
The only issue I see is that they make a new Chinese equivalent for GitHub where they can censor code easier (or was GitHub already blocked?), but they already censor everything anyway so there’s probably effectively no change.
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? www.chinaexpatsociety.com/…/the-chabuduo-mindset
cool
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.
Lmao
Facebook = America
Some random Chinese company: does something jenky.
Blogger: “The entirety of China is doing this jenky thing!”
All Chinese companies are the CCP. That’s how the system works.
The random Chinese company: owned by Huawei and CSDN (where CSDN is known to be the worst site known to Chinese developers where they literally costs money to let you download open source code)
Quick, someone tell Nintendo!
Someone reupload yuzu, stat!
It is not illegal is it?
If it is legal, then thank you China for the free backup.
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
Put content that is illegal in China into your code, problem solved!
If we steal IP from China does the America government give us a business loan?
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.
Yeah, though the Chinese government isn’t doing this out of the goodness of their heart, this is what open source is about.
Shame they don’t have anything themselves that’s worth the trouble to copy back.
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.
JIAN YANG!!!
Free backups.
omw to get all the homebrew stuff NIntendo got removed from github lol
God damn it, Jiaan Yang!
If it’s a public repo do they need permission?
Not saying this is good, but you can’t really argue that it’s not a natural consequence of open source.
Yeah… The main thing I see here is that China (read; government , not the people, not being racist here) will take this code, they will make improvements on it, they will NOT give back. Basically like Microsoft, but now an entire country.
Chinese government hasn’t exact had a good reputation when it comes to taking technology and not giving anything back
Oh, cool. I might finally find contributors to my projects.
And I was just asking yesterday what would you feel if someone evil used your FOSS software: lemmy.world/post/16898871
*New GitHub
I’m surprised this wasnt done already
Preparation for war.
Cloned even?
Maybe they were open source projects?
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 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 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 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 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.
Azzu@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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.bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 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.
HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 4 months ago
everyone should have stuff in their code comments, tianamen, hong kong, taiwan, uyghurs
TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 4 months ago
while (tianamen_square.exists()) {
for (size_t WinnieThePooh = 0; WinnieThePooh < uyhurs.num_oppressed(); WinnieThePooh++; ) {
cout << "Fuck the CCP";
}
}
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 4 months ago
And here I was thinking that might prevent them mirroring the repo but whatever
AsherahTheEnd@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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. 🙄
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
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.
x4740N@lemm.ee 4 months ago
50 Cent Army Repellant:
六四
1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 4 months ago
426
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Yes yes, what about the US?
HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 4 months ago
genius.
sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Problem: the repo is only 1MB, while USA’s is 100GB
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Tankie whataboutism strikes again.
Two things can be bad at the same time. Wild, I know.