Github has made it impossible to create an account when using a VPN and a privacy browser with fully spoofed hardware identifiers. (Use Firefox or Firefox-based Privacy Browser, VPN, install Canvasblocker to test this.) I create an account with Google or Apple (both requiring hardware identifiers and numbers and birthdates) or I can use an email. When I use an email, it comes back with this horrible test, and even if I do it completely correctly, it tells me after I didn’t do the test right, gaslighting me with a picture of what I chose (which I didn’t choose) and showing me the correct picture (which I did choose and it claims I didn’t select).
It’s fucking bullshit and it’s more corporate control of open source software. For people who have their discussion or issue tracker, I can’t even participate without hardware identifiers likely linked to me some other way and phone numbers. It’s fucking bullshit. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, FUCK YOU!!!
I am so tired of this bullshit. I just want to post an issue about a piece of software. You don’t need my fingerprint, hardware or personal, or biometric shit. This is a slippery slope. Fuck them.
I really hope more developers just get the fuck off Github. Honestly, if you are developing privacy-oriented software and using github, there’s a mistmatch and it’s bullshit, and I know it’s time consuming and annoying to move, but please do. This is fucking bullshit and it’s not like it’s going to become LESS annoying over time. FUCK THIS.
Why stop there? Git’s UX on the command line is awful, so adopt a better tool & your hosting will automatically be somewhere better.
It’s the same story for basically anything MS touches.
Codeberg for the win.
What about GitLab? When Microsoft bought GitHub, people got angry, and migrated their code to GitLab. When that happened, GitLab was all over the headlines for a while, but I haven’t read much about it ever since.
Gitlab has a horrible UI when you have a smaller screen or lower end device, and I heard also not really great server-side performance compared to forgejo and gitea.
Also, the gitlab.com instance randomly blocks people or demands their credit card data.
They seem to be going for IPO so codeberg it is.
Tell me how you really feel 😅
They also own Visual Studio Code, control VSCode, and effectively control the VSCodium soft fork.
They decided they wanted to own software development and here we are ;/
Fuck ms
Did something happen with Codium or do you just mean in general due to controlling extension marketplace, access to their closed source ones etc.
Edit: missed your other comment, never mind
This is why you use Emacs, Kate, Neovim and so on. Never understood how anyone could use a software as confusing as VSCode.
VSCode (well codium actually) actually felt quite nifty until Micro$lop started EEEing it by blocking the app store (there are workarounds for that) and then blocking their C extension from being installed in non-vanilla VSCode (pin it to the previous version).
But all in all, vim with cscope is my bare minimum.It feels like people are just punching themselves in the face.
Yes, Microsoft has taken over a lot of projects which made coding easy. So either you submit to Microsoft’s control or you spend the time to learn to use the alternatives.
Emacs is basically older than computers, stable and has a huge amount of support and plug-ins. Nvim is newer, but vi/vim have existed since before electrons learned to jump bandgaps and has a similarly deep level of community expertise/support.
If you’re just starting off, your school is likely deep in Micrsoft’s sphere of influence so you probably learned VS Code/Visual Studio. Moving to Emacs or Nvim is much harder than it would be if you had learned them in the first place, but believe me (a random stranger on the Internet wouldn’t lie to you!) it is worth the time to learn.
Centralized platforms for multiple uses and a huge tool ecosystem. That is it. It is simply much much much easier to set up and get a consistent experience.
Embedded coding (as an example) has an extremely scattered ecosystem of vendor-run IDE forks which are usually a pretty bad experience.
Their commandline documentation is often complete trash so instead of fixing that, they just make a simple plugin for vscode and they have a cross-compatible IDE that already works with all of their customers’ favorite plugins with very little work.
Also, code-server. There is no other IDE that has an experience like that as far as I know.
Any recommendations on a good general use IDE? I’ve enjoyed Geany a bit here and there myself but honestly I’m just using vim for most things these days. CLI is just so quick and efficient for most use cases, but I still hold out hope for something different.
I don’t have any general recommendations. IMO most of them disappoint, because most of them don’t understand the languages they support very well. It was Microsoft that invented Language Server Protocol and almost every editor adopted. I’m not very impressed by it, and it seems to be stagnant.
AFAIK the best example of an IDE having a deep understanding of its language is DrRacket, which is specific to Racket. The best one that I’ve actually used is JetBrains’s IDEs, enough so that I pay money for it.
This YT video is specifically about a Clojure IDE by one of its developers, but it explains some general shortcoming of a lot of code editors, and why IDEs that understand their language(s) well can be so powerful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOi8V4qsdVY
I keep Zed and, ideally Lapce, on my system and use them where possible. VsCode is my backup.
Sponsors, Copilot, Azure, Codespaces, npm, Teams, Outlook, LinkedIn. Heck Microsoft also has massive control in Rust too.
This is why I use Zed as an alternative with the added upside that Zed runs about 500x better than VSCode
+1 for Zed, switched to it and it is significantly more responsive. it also ACTUALLY supports Wayland instead of some cursed chromium ozone abomination
What do you mean about VSCodium? Obviously it’s just a differently compiled version of Microsoft’s text editor, but what does Microsoft have to do with it, otherwise?
“Otherwise” is doing Herculean lifting here when the code is nearly 100% Microsoft. The way they control it is by changing VSCode’s code, which is then dutifully incorporated into VSCodium, with the exception of telemetry code.
VSCodium has never promoted itself as anything more than a compilation of VSCode’s base with telemetry disabled and proprietary components, naturally, not included. It has never promised anything else than that. Of course the changes are “dutifully incorporated” into Codium. It’s not a point of that project to be different. Your first remark made it seem like Microsoft has somehow infiltrated the VSCodium project and changed what it does.
it’s effectively the same as chrome vs chromium. google/microsoft invests the resources to develop it, and someone simply comes and forks it without the closed source parts or telemetry.
which is fine, but means they still get to dictate how the software works. the best real world example i have is chrome and adblockers, or google-made web “standards”.
Yeah. Your example: How many forks of Chome/Chromium have rejected Google’s Manifest v3 changes? Zero, because they’re all soft forks and don’t have the resources to hard fork.
Didn’t Vivaldi? I don’t really use them cause I mostly avoid non-FOSS software, but I seem to remember them announcing they’d be keeping support.
Both Edge and Brave still support Manifest V2.
You dont need hardware verifications with vscode, nor an account, it works with a vpn, u can disable copilot.
Those aren’t the types of control I alluded to, as you can see upthread.
Agree completely, these shenanigans are a big reason I’m on a selfhosting rampage at the minute. Speaking of, does anyone have favourite self-hosted alternatives?
Ty for link
I’ve been enjoying using FreshRSS, RecipeSage, Kavita (ebook library/reader) and Flatnotes. My server OS is OpenMediaVault which i’ve been very happy with.
Seconding this. I recommend OMV if you’re new or inexperienced with Linux and self hosting. I started my server when it was a gaming PC running Windows and OMV has felt like an easy transition for me.
But Docker is all but required in my opinion. I like working with Docker Compose files and I keep OMV on a separate drive in case I want to move to pure Debian or other distro.
Been that way for a long time. They rejected me years ago. Much like Google, MS is in the ad business, and they want your personal details to sell to advertisers. Letting you sign up with fake account is contrary to their interests.
It infuriates me to no end that so many FOSS devs are still using Github. No one fucking cares about privacy or sovereignty until it personally fucks them.
No need for that massive pile of shit
Btw, CanvasBlocker actually doesn’t do much more than default Firefox nowadays but breaks more things.
Tangential to the main point you’re going for: when you say fingerprint or biometrics I think you’re referring to passkeys.
Passkeys don’t share any of your fingerprint or other biometric identifiers with anyone.https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/passkeys-and-privacy
One of the major design criteria of their creation was to be an increase in security without sacrificing privacy. It’s made them more finicky to get working but there’s a very good reason they’re very popular with security professionals.
They are not referring to passkeys. They’re referring to deterministic algorithms for uniquely labeling a particular device or person, despite any privacy enhancing features that device or person employed. It can be as simple as sampling various hardware specs, hashing the result, and using that as an ID for the person. So, if you switch browsers, they know it’s still you. More complex techniques exist, obviously.
I know how device fingerprinting works, thank you though.
You don’t need my fingerprint, hardware or personal, or biometric shit.
To me that sounds like hardware identifiers, but also quite specifically the things passkeys use. Hence I mentioned it as aside from their main point, which was “don’t track me”, because the biometrics GitHub or any website is going to ask you to use can’t be used for that.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. As far as I am aware, passkeys issue a one-time-token derived from a private key stored on the device. You can only access the private key via your devices own security (i.e., typically biometric). GitHub can only access the resulting one-time token, and it can verify that the token was derived from the private key using some cryptography. So, agreed. It’s not much different from a tracking perspective than just tracking password-based logins.
Though, I got the impression OP was talking about something else. Maybe I misunderstood them.
That’s close enough for a privacy perspective. There’s also limitations on domains that can request the auth, specifically ”only the one the credential is for", and there’s a different key per domain and user typically.
It’s also implemented in a way where if the user doesn’t choose to disclose their account to the service, the service can’t know.Caring about privacy and caring about the details of a security protocol are distinct. You’d be surprised how many people who care about privacy are deeply wary of passkeys because of the biometric factor, which is unfortunate because the way it authenticates is a lot harder to track across domains by design.
I understood they had a lot of concerns, one of which was biometrics via passkeys since GitHub was a very early adopter due to the supply chain risk they pose.
Passkeys seem to be advertised in ways that puts people off (edit: not saying that makes them bad):
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TPMs, Secure Enclaves, etc. are deeply closed-source and security by obscurity. Until there is an open TPM implementation available, many users may prefer not to rely on them. It seems like KeepassXC allows circumventing TPM for Passkeys, but most people probably don’t know that.
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Too much “trust me bro, my cloud is safe” advertising from big Passkey advocates like Google to try to get people to use their invasive services.
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A classic hardware key may be indistinguishable from a normal password being entered. But Google has announced they want to push passkeys against user’s wishes here: “Is opting-into passkey mandatory? No, […]. However, over time, as users become more accustomed to passkeys, we might limit where we allow passwords to be used because they’re less secure than passkeys.” Again, not a great look.
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Collecting biometric data is always dangerous, too many attack vectors during processing. I’m aware that Passkeys can be used without that, but many people may be put off by that push.
I think that’s why Passkeys have poor adoption among privacy advocates, even though most problems seem fixable.
Caring about privacy and caring about the details of a security protocol are distinct. You’d be surprised how many people who care about privacy are deeply wary of passkeys because of the biometric factor, which is unfortunat
I’m not seeing anything that’s not a great look about requiring strong authentication for access to sensitive portions of a users account. What you’re saying is akin to calling it a bad look that they force users to use complex passwords against user wishes.
I’m not sure what “trust me bro, my cloud is safe” has to do with anything. Passkeys live on your device. There are ways of facilitating device to device migrations of the keys if you want. You don’t need to use them to use passkeys. And at least on Android you don’t need to even use Google to manage the keys.
Most semiconductors are closed source. The processor, ram, and radio are also more than likely closed. The software interfaces to all of them have open specification and implementation. There’s like, six for Linux. Microsoft open sourced theirs.
Tpms are not security through obscurity. They are obscure, but that’s not a critical component to their security model.What they do isn’t really what “collecting biometrics” implies. They’re storing key points in a hashed fashion that allows similarities to be compared. Even if it wasn’t encrypted in a non-exportable way you still can’t do anything with it beyond checking for a similarity score.
You’ve done a good job explaining what I said previously: there’s sometimes a disjoint between privacy and security concern, and so sometimes people don’t understand something about security.
I wasn’t arguing against Passkeys, just pointing out how they are often perceived.
I was definitely arguing against TPMs, however. https://gist.github.com/osy/45e612345376a65c56d0678834535166 https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated https://www.elevenforum.com/t/tpm-2-0-is-a-must-they-said-it-will-improve-windows-security-they-said.13222/ https://scispace.com/pdf/tpm-2-0-uefi-and-their-impact-on-security-and-users-freedom-2e1ldhodqq.pdf https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html (But Passkeys apparently don’t need them, see my KeepassXC mention before.)
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If you want a cloud alternative to GitHub run by a non-profit and hosted outside of the U.S.
If you want to get your data out of the cloud entirely, or at least under a VPS you control, self host your own git repo (Using the same software as Codeberg)
/<deleted by creator/>
Done, thanks for the links. 👍
Bro literallly posted a photo of a pile of shit, lmaoo
I can’t figure out if Free software projects don’t know or don’t care that GitHub is run by Microslop.
I’ve wanted to for a while, but this post gave me the final nudge I needed to just buckle down and try selfhosting my own. Forgejo was incredibly easy to set up and my buddies and I are already successfully collaborating on a project that I’ve moved over from Github. So thanks for making your rant post, you made a difference
Git is a DECENTRALIZED version control system. It doesn’t even need a server. So for someone so privacy focused to be using VPN software etc this is kind of a weird rant to go on.
You can literally store or self host a git repo anywhere in any form.
Can you email a patch to a project hosted on the Github?
So what’s stopping you?
How would they post an issue as described in the post?
Git is a version control system, not an issue tracker.
If you want issue tracking then you can use a system like forgejo or if you don’t want to self-host and are okay with risking creating a new centralized service which will eventually betray everything they stood for, you can use Codeberg.org (which is just a forgejo instance).
I wonder how this potential diaspora of repos from Github may affect some package distributions that are merely pointing the application to be compiled like is the case in some AUR application. Will it generate quite a lot of overhead for AUR maintainers?
