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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[–] 0x0@programming.dev 1 points 5 months ago (3 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.

[–] passepartout@feddit.org 1 points 5 months ago (3 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.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] passepartout@feddit.org 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's called Ruwiki.

It was launched in June 24, 2023 as a fork of the Russian Wikipedia, and has been described by some media groups as "Putin-friendly" and "Kremlin-compliant".

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] passepartout@feddit.org 0 points 5 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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[–] Hello_there@fedia.io 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Open source? Or open source with a non-commercial restriction?

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why would that matter? You can fork such projects too.

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[–] romp_2_door@lemmy.world 1 points 5 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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[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago (15 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.

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 0 points 5 months ago

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

[–] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Problem: the repo is only 1MB, while USA's is 100GB

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Tankie whataboutism strikes again.

Two things can be bad at the same time. Wild, I know.

[–] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

"Whataboutism" is what Americans say to profess blind faith in their exceptionalism.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm not American. I don't even like America.

[–] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So you have even less reason to use the racist-in-origin and logically fallacious term.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Lmao it's literally the name of a logical fallacy. How is the term itself fallacious?

Also I harbour no racism or ill will toward the Chinese people. My girlfriend is Chinese and I care about her a lot and love learning about her culture. I just don't abide the human rights atrocities committed by any government.

[–] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago (9 children)
  1. it's a euphemism for "And You Are Lynching Negroes" - that's literally what people used to say instead of whataboutism.

  2. It's not the name of any logical fallacy. You're thinking of Tu Quoque.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/03/is-whataboutism-always-a-bad-thing

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's funny how much effort you're going to debating my word choice instead of the meaning and content of my rebuttal to your stupid comment. Do you have an actual point here? Are you claiming that what you were doing above wasn't whataboutism? That it's somehow a valid counterpoint to my joke about CCP censorship to say that the US also does bad things?

[–] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Your rebuttal was nothing more than a word choice. And you're still using it.

The reason you're doing this is because if you use the actual fallacy's name, rather than the US empire's "and you are lynching negros", you're more likely to see your error.

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[–] Tramort@programming.dev 0 points 5 months ago (7 children)

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 0 points 5 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.

[–] jorp@lemmy.world 0 points 5 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

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 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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[–] Colonel_Panic_@lemm.ee 0 points 5 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; ... }

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[–] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Cloned even?

Maybe they were open source projects?

[–] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If the license of the project isn’t being respected then this is a problem.

[–] Shiggles@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I’m not disagreeing, but can anyone really be surprised? IP theft is Chinese policy 101.

[–] hddsx@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

IP theft is….. less prevalent these days (or at least leas obvious)

This would be a return to the before times

[–] db2@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

Sweet summer child...

[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

GitHub owner Microsoft would never engage in IP theft of source code. They leave that to OpenAI and then rebrand it as GitHub Copilot.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 5 months ago

Training an AI on something doesn't involve copying it.

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[–] frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] kbin_space_program@kbin.run 0 points 5 months ago

Better to analyze for vulnerabilities. Particularly with a number of governments using open source software hosted on github.

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

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

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Shame they don't have anything themselves that's worth the trouble to copy back.

[–] sunzu@kbin.run 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

As China leap frogged west in solar and EV tech

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That they got from the West when CATL bought out a bankrupt US company that had developed LFP to commercial viability.

[–] IHeartBadCode@kbin.run 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don't think there's any debating this aspect.

At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn't want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don't because "reasons". We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don't because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or "it's complicated". And then there's China demonstrating at small scale that it's doable. So instead we say "oh well it wouldn't scale" or "oh well you stole all that tech" because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they'd like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can't do right now because their hands are tied.

For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I'm not going to debate it. But there's still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they're showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you're willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying "well oil interest are holding us back". No, there's only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It's a lack of will power.

Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they're false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don't because oil companies don't want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they've got right now.

We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this "oh we couldn't possibly do that here in the US" is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

I mean, great, we're all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don't get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

I mean yeah, let's call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let's not forget all the damn windows we've broken ourselves in our glass house here.

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[–] sunzu@kbin.run 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's called value investing..... Maybe our dear leader should learn how to manage national wealth instead of cutting companies and allowing a geopolitical adversary to take over tech/IP

Ie this is not a flex you think it is, it just proves my point that our dear leaders are incompetent imbiciles or worst... Bad faith actors.

No accountability leads to this sort of decision making lol

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[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

When they mirror it, does they uses a different username? If so I'm totally fine as that's just a fork, otherwise it should count as stolen. Not the project but the name and reputation of the owner.

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[–] mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 5 months ago

Well now chinese companies that use free softwware don't have an excuse to share their modifications of their software product.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 months ago

That is a good thought.

[–] crazyminner@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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

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[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (10 children)

I love how every Chinese company is called "China"

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