844
China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report
(infosec.exchange)
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
844 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59979 readers
2290 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Even if there was jurisdiction, anyone in the world is entitled to do it by the very licenses these works are released under.
Hopefully they follow the rest of the stipulations of the licenses, such as the common one about keeping the license as such and contributing the changes back.
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.
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.
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.