Why is everyone upset? This is a good thing.
Where are you seeing a privacy or security risk?
Where are you seeing a privacy or security risk?
In any case, this announcement changes nothing. If you trusted GitHub with something before that you wouldn't trust them with now, your mental model is wrong. GitHub might allow any kind of partner (customer?) to scan their private or public repos in any way they want without making it public. In other words, if you are someone this announcement is problematic to, you shouldn't have anything on GitHub in the first place.
GitHub is a private company with one dual obligation, to prolong its existence and keep increasing its profit margin.
It is not any sort of arbiter for morality - morality being an externality to its central obligation - so it cannot be relief upon to “do the right thing”.
So it is not in any position of authority that would enable it to “approve”, in the moral sense of the word. They can only “allow” for the regex to be ran and the results sent off.
For example, the “right thing” for GH would be to increase profit, while for another entity might instead be to uphold its users’ privacy.
(You may think that it’s only for public repos, so they’re already made public, but isn’t GH here facilitating an aggressive collection and summation of information, that would otherwise be much more difficult and error-prone?)
The power of approval would rather come from an elected entity that would also determine who may request that such searches are executed, and which reasons would be valid.
Otherwise, we get a William Gibson-esque megacorp cyberspace future with clear but corporate Orwellian overtones.
Isn’t this obvious?
(I’m not being snarky at all - I’m genuinely asking: isn’t this glaringly and terrifyingly obvious?)
Microsoft's mission in life is to do whatever its directors want, insofar as its shareholders don't get /too/ annoyed about this, and to not break the law. They have no actual "obligations" or "fiduciary duties" to keep increasing profits or anything like that.
This is pretty obvious; most companies stay in their industry even if it becomes irrelevant. Furniture companies rarely switch to software and software companies rarely just start selling heroin. (Except for gacha games.)
It’s super easy too: take a look at GitHub’s tokens, they all start with gh.
Well...
> Tencent
Here.
It's really the combination Tencent and Partnership that I find a problem. These things tend to lead to closer collaboration and WeChat is a huge surveillance tool.
Sure they have access to public info anyway because everyone does. Just let them scan it themselves then.
And yes I'd feel almost the same if it was Facebook.