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.
Describes pretty much any of the big companies. For example, I have seen numerous times people got their account locked on Google, or their app stuck in limbo at Apple, and then after post becomes viral all problems get solved.
> 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.
This also works for Google support.
> And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.
I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
It was already a problem before agents could automatically perform these actions.
And it’s not something you can really automate on their end either. At least not the judgement call on the removal. Imagine if there was a fully automated process and it inadvertently took down a legit project.
> I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.
I had several small requests for moderation (deleting and banning spammers posting spam/crypto scam issues/PRs in my repos and ones I contribute to) answered within a day earlier this year after more than a decade of never needing to request moderation. I'm not defending GH here as it's obviously unacceptable that the OP's issue took this long, but they definitely do or at least did have mods. I would guess they need a lot more of them if something this serious went unaddressed, or maybe the ones I interacted with are now gone and have not been backfilled.
Then maybe they should be growing their customer support capacity along with their business. It drives me crazy how big companies have normalized cutting those departments down to anemic proportions. Especially those where you're a paying customer.
>I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
It's malice from whoever is responsible for under-staffing. It's also malice to prioritize the squeaky wheel for optics; it's intentional to reduce the spread of the knowledge of how unresponsive they are.
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
Microsoft is not some plucky upstart company with 12 employees and an unexpectedly popular product. We do not, in fact, need to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
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)
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."
Same goes for all companies bigger than a startup. The first line of support is AI, the second line is clueless, and the third level is powerless. HN is the only way to reach a human with both ability and willingness to help
I recently found "free" version of Lossless Scaling on GitHub. The release installer is definitely malware. It took GitHub 3 days to shutdown malware distribution. Category of my ticket was malware report, not copyright infringe
If GitHub staff is still reading this thread, maybe you can take down https://screenmemory.github.io/ as well. I reported it 4 weeks ago, ticket ID 4703161
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.
There's an impersonation profile of me on Github (username happyhannob). I've reported it a while ago, received the same automated message, and no reaction otherwise. It's still online.
I guess you can't expect basic fraud prevention from a company currently building the future with AI...
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.
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.
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.
This also works for Google support.
> And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.
I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
It was already a problem before agents could automatically perform these actions.
And it’s not something you can really automate on their end either. At least not the judgement call on the removal. Imagine if there was a fully automated process and it inadvertently took down a legit project.
Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.
It is also comically understaffed. This is not because they can't find people to work - it's not given the budget necessary.
They just don't want to. Not malicious, just ignorant and disrespectful of their users.
Then maybe they should be growing their customer support capacity along with their business. It drives me crazy how big companies have normalized cutting those departments down to anemic proportions. Especially those where you're a paying customer.
It's malice from whoever is responsible for under-staffing. It's also malice to prioritize the squeaky wheel for optics; it's intentional to reduce the spread of the knowledge of how unresponsive they are.
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.
Just seems like a silly rational response to the same problem.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."
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.
There's an impersonation profile of me on Github (username happyhannob). I've reported it a while ago, received the same automated message, and no reaction otherwise. It's still online.
I guess you can't expect basic fraud prevention from a company currently building the future with AI...
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.
EDIT: e.g. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/