this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 371 points 4 months ago (33 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 170 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; ... }

[–] [email protected] 86 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 76 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (5 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 128 points 4 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 109 points 4 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 89 points 4 months ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 4 months ago (27 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 82 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago (9 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 4 months ago (7 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 53 points 4 months ago

Quick, someone tell Nintendo!

[–] [email protected] 50 points 4 months ago

Someone reupload yuzu, stat!

[–] [email protected] 49 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I love how every Chinese company is called "China"

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago (8 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Include “Winnie the Poo” into your next oss project!

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It is not illegal is it?

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

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago (6 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Some random Chinese company: does something jenky

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

[–] [email protected] 39 points 4 months ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (7 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (5 children)
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