YHK - yet another hacker news clone

GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks

66 points hermitcrab 1 hour ago 22 comments

someonebaggy 28 minutes ago | parent

If it's your software send a DMCA. They have a legally required timeframe to process those. If it's open source, however, then you don't have any valid DMCA claim.

93po 23 minutes ago | parent

Code can be open source while the name and logos are copyrighted and still enforceable via DMCA

hnlmorg 17 minutes ago | parent

That’s not how open source works.

Open source code is still copyrighted. What the license defines is rights that people have in distributing that code. If an unofficial repository is using open source code to ship malware, and the license that software had didn’t allow that, then the unofficial repository is still breaking copyright law despite the code being open source.

joshuat 27 minutes ago | parent

Not exactly the same, but I've noticed a pretty sizable uptick in the number of spam/scam PR comments being left on GitHub (and a longer delay before they're removed after report).

Not the worst thing in the world, they're easy to spot, but I'd like to see GitHub invest more time in protecting their users from falling victim to these bad actors.

kg 26 minutes ago | parent

In the future just issue a DMCA takedown right away for cases like this, IMO.

hermitcrab 24 minutes ago | parent

Author of the post here. Github finally took the offending page down approximately 10 minutes after the post appeared on the front page of HN. Total coincidence. I'm sure!

Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.

And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.

ajmurmann 22 minutes ago | parent

It might not be a willingness issue as much as a bandwidth issue.

cyanydeez 20 minutes ago | parent

unwilling to provide proper support?

Just seems like a silly rational response to the same problem.

locknitpicker 20 minutes ago | parent

Yes,evidently bandwidth from HN unblocks takedown requests of malicious content.

ajmurmann 16 minutes ago | parent

Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies. I guarantee you that once an issue hits the HN front page, even engineers who might have totally different talks will get involved. (Never worked at GH or have talked to anyone there in years but this is how everything works pretty much everywhere)

toomuchtodo 12 minutes ago | parent

The public shaming will continue until the internal incentives improve. Make sure to drop that HN thread link into the internal task tracker y'all. Don't forget to report to journalists if the severity warrants it (Brian Krebs, 404media, etc).

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."

iAMkenough 17 minutes ago | parent

Good thing HN provided them some bandwidth to do their jobs.

post-it 15 minutes ago | parent

Bandwidth can be bought with money, of which Microsoft made an extra $133.7 billion this year.

NobodyNada 13 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like they can afford elite customer support.

ajmurmann 12 minutes ago | parent

We know that coding agents have been pushing GH to its limits. Scaling is hard - especially staff. Maybe they aren't trying to scale support but I think it's reasonable to give them the benefit of doubt here, given what we know publicly

iAMkenough 7 minutes ago | parent

That’s a self-inflicted issue they should have properly planned for.

cj 6 minutes ago | parent

You’re saying this is a problem money can’t solve?

There’s no need for benefit of the doubt when it comes to the level of support provided by tech companies.

Bad support by tech companies is a conscious profit-preserving choice.

jay73763 19 minutes ago | parent

why would anyone host commercial binary software on github or any other third party domain?

hermitcrab 13 minutes ago | parent

Pirates and crackers generally don't host stuff on their own domains. They don't want to pay for the bandwidth and they don't want to be traced.