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)
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.
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; … }
That’s the whole point of this: they will automatically filter that out, and this is an impotent, though well intended, gesture.
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.
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
The real solution is to include a few
tiananmenSquarevariables in all the repositories. Either they exclude the entire repository or just the specific file, in either case the entire project may be unusable.It’s a new coding paradigm, I will take some time getting used to looking for libraries in the
uyghur/tianamenfolder.China filters every byte of Internet traffic in and out of the country.
It seems naive to think they can’t accomplish the same thing for a GitHub mirror.
They’re not supposed to, it’s just about blocking them from using the software :)
So… You’re saying instead of “main”, “app”, or “core”, we should change the convention to make tiananmenSquare the entry point for apps?
Or maybe make it the filename for utils, so it’ll just break
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.
That’s what I don’t get about this. Why does anyone care? Even this Chinese company, why do they care to clone it all? It’s already all hosted and publicly available.
Apparently they aren’t respecting licenses. It’s possible to have source code publicly available on GH but have it not be truly FOSS. But that’s generally not a great idea since you’re effectively relying on the honour system for people not to take your code.
Even this Chinese company, why do they care to clone it all? It’s already all hosted and publicly available.
Until it isn’t. Perhaps they are preparing for a future war with the US and assume their access to all that code will be blocked. They want to copy it now while they have access.
Good point.
everyone should have stuff in their code comments, tianamen, hong kong, taiwan, uyghurs
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genius.
create a GitHub repo with Markdown articles outlining human rights abuses by the CCP
Once you have logged “China killed 100 Zillion people! End CCP now!” in Chinese GitHub, everyone in China will realize that their lives are actually very bad and they need to do a Revolution immediately.
And here I was thinking that might prevent them mirroring the repo but whatever
Maybe we should consider the same for the US government instead of being afraid of the big Chinese boogeyman across the sea? Because I guarantee you the US has just as many, if not more. But China bad. 🙄
I was making a joke about abusing Chinese censorship in order to stop them cloning GitHub repos (assuming that was something you wanted to do). The joke being that the CCP suppresses information about their human rights abuses. That is not true of the US. You could absolutely make a GitHub repo detailing the crimes of the US government. Nobody will stop you.
426
50 Cent Army Repellant:
六四
1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre
I always thought the term “Wumao” sounded suspiciosly like “woo Mao.”
Yes yes, what about the US?
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?
It’s a bit odd, but isn’t it equivalent to forking and putting up a fork elsewhere?
I guess I don’t see the problem.
It will be funny to see folks who spent the last ten years posting “It’s not stealing, it’s copying” memes suddenly find religion because Evil Foreign People got involved.
I’m quite scared of how AI apparently pushes people in favour of significantly stricter copyrights. This is not a good trend.
This isn’t people being influenced by AI. This is Microsoft’s Godzilla battling the RIAA/MPAA’s King Kong.
The trend, to date, has been consolidation of media properties under fewer and more hegemonic distributors. And now we’re seeing a couple of economic Titans battle over the position of “Last Legitimate Music Vendor”.
Ya, I kind of like the idea of code being put somewhere else just in case. It sucks it’s China, but I hate to see anything centralized in one company, especially if it’s a big public, good like Github and all it’s code.
The only issue I see is that they make a new Chinese equivalent for GitHub where they can censor code easier (or was GitHub already blocked?), but they already censor everything anyway so there’s probably effectively no change.
I don’t understand why this is a bad thing? Open source code is designed to be shared/distributed, and an open-source license can’t place any limits on who can use or share the code. Git was designed as a distributed, decentralized model partly for this reason (even though people ended up centralizing it on Github anyways)
They might end up using the code in a way that violates its license, but simply cloning it isn’t a problem.
I expect it’s going likely to be used to train some Chinese AI model. The race to AGI is in progress. IMO: “ideas” (code included) should be freely usable by anyone, including the people I might disagree with. But I understand the fear it induces to think that an authoritarian government will get access to AGI before a democratic one. That said I’m not entirely convinced the US is a democratic government…
PS: I’m french, and my gov is soon to be controlled by fascist pigs if it’s not already, so I’m not judging…
I expect it’s going likely to be used to train some Chinese AI model.
Even if they do that, the license for open source software doesn’t disallow it from being done.
It certainly can. Most licences require derivative works to be under the same or similar licence, and an AI based on FOSS would likely not respect those terms. It’s the same issue as AI training on music, images, and text, it’s a likely violation of copyright and thus a violation of open source licensing terms.
Training on it is probably fine, but generating code from the model is likely a whole host of licence violations.
Most licences require derivative works to be under the same or similar licence
Some, but probably not most. This is mostly an issue with “viral” licenses like GPL, which restrict the license of derivative works. Permissive licenses like the MIT license are very common and don’t restrict this.
MIT does say that “all copies or substantial portions of the Software” need to come with the license attached, but code generated by an AI is arguably not a “substantial portion” of the software.
code generated by an AI is arguably not a “substantial portion” of the software
How do you verify that though?
And does the model need to include all of the licenses? Surely the “all copies or substantial portions” would apply to LLMs, since they literally include the source in the model as a derivative work. That’s fine if it’s for personal use (fair use laws apply), but if you’re going to distribute it (e.g. as a centralized LLM), then you need to be very careful about how licenses are used, applied, and distributed.
So I absolutely do believe that building a broadly used model is a violation of copyright, and that’s true whether it’s under an open source license or not.
By comparing it to the original work.
And how will you know what original work(s) to compare it to?
I agree with you, and don’t really have any answers :)
I’m seeing this misconception in a lot of places.
Just because something is on GitHub, doesn’t mean it’s open source. It doesn’t automatically grant permission to share either.
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Correct, you are allowed to click the “fork” button and nothing else. You’re still not allowed to download, use, modify, compile or redistribute the code in any way that doesn’t involve the “fork” button.
It may not be de jure open source, but if the code is posted publicly on the internet in a way that anyone can download and modify it, it sort of becomes de facto open source (or “source available” if you prefer).
Please don’t muddy the water with terms like this. Something is open source if and only if it has an open source license.
I personally don’t care if someone “steals” my code (Here’s my profile if you want to do so: https://github.com/ZILtoid1991 ), however it can mean some mixture of two things:
- China is getting ready for war, which will mean the US will try its best to block technology, including open source projects.
- China is planning to block GitHub due to it being able to host information the Chinese government might not like.
Of course it could mean totally unrelated stuff too (e.g. just your typical anti-China and/or anti-communist paranoia sells political points).
Isn’t GitHub already blocked in China?
It is
US will try its best to block technology, including open source projects.
You can’t block open source projects from anyone. That’s the entire point of open source. For a license to be considered open-source, it must not have any limitations as to who can use it.
You can’t block open source projects from anyone.
I think they were referring to blocking GitHub from public access. In the event of a world war I could easily see Microsoft obeying the order to shut down GitHub.
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
The great thing about China is that it’s got lots of people eager to fix those bugs
You haven’t worked with a lot of Chinese engineers, have you? https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-mindset
I love how they reinvent a universal experience as uniquely Chinese
They stole half assing it dumb the West!
Just discovered I was Chinese all this time!
Not as bad as you make it out to be, and I actually worked in the US with more Chinese engineers than US engineers.
I didn’t down vote you. I’m not saying all Chinese engineers are bad, I’m just saying a lot are bad or don’t care enough about details just execution as fast and with as little effort as possible.
With the obligatory “fuck everyone who disregards open source licenses”, I am still slightly amused at this raising eyebrows while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM, which will help circumvent licenses & copyrights by the bazillion.
while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM,
Lots of people complained about that. I’ve only seen this single thread complaining about this.
I complain all the time. But that’s not the subject of this post…
Yeah exactly, fuck llms that don’t honor licenses
Came here to say this. As much as I don’t like china, there is really nothing to see (apart from the source, that’s for everybody to see).
This could be illegal for git repos that do not have a open source license that allows mirroring or copying (BSD, Apache, Mit, GPL, etc.) Sometimes these repos are more “source available” and the source is only allowed to be read, not redistributed or modified. I would say that this is more of a matter for each individual copyright holder, not Microsoft.
But ultimately I agree, this really isn’t as big of a deal as people are making.
edit: changed some wording to be clearer
China is a sovereign entity. I’m pretty sure they can decide foreign licensing laws don’t apply there.
China is a soverign state and they should make their own laws. However, China has promised repeatably that they will take IP concerns more strictly (trade deal with Trump in 2020 is one example of this promise). It seems of this moment they still use the World Intellectual Property Organization for inspiration for their IP laws. At one point, China did not acknowledge IP rights at all but chose to acknowledge them in order to secure foreign business trade. Being consistent is good for business; especially when it comes to international business.
In 1980, China became a member of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). As of at least 2023, China’s view is that WIPO should be the primary international forum for IP rule-making. - Wikipedia
China has never been consistent. Doing business there is all about relations with the CCP. This is a perfect example of how an authoritarian regime differs from a liberal regime. One is bound by it’s promises and rules and the other binds it’s rules to it’s needs.
nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM
What rock have you been living under??
If I look at a few implementations of an algorithm and then implement my own using those as inspiration, am I breaking copyright law and circumventing licenses?
That depends on how similar your resulting algorithm is to the sources you were “inspired” by. You’re probably fine if you’re not copying verbatim and your code just ends up looking similar because that’s how solutions are generally structured, but there absolutely are limits there.
If you’re trying to rewrite something into another license, you’ll need to be a lot more careful.
As I am a big proponent of open source, there is nothing wrong even with copying code - the point is that you should not be allowed to claim something as your own idea and definitely not to claim copyright on code that was “inspired” by someone else’s work. The easiest solution would be to forbid patents on software (and patents altogether) completely. The only purpose that FOSS licenses have is to prevent corporations from monetizing the work under the license.
Well let’s say there’s an algorithm to find length of longest palindrome with a set of letters. I look at 20 different implementations. Some people use hashmaps, some don’t. Some do it recursively, some don’t. Etc
I consider all of them and create my own. I decide to implement myself both recursive and hash map but also add certain novel elements.
Am I copying code? Am I breaking copyright? Can I claim I wrote it? Or do I have to give credit to all 20 people?
As for forbidding patents on software, I agree entirely. Would be a net positive for the world. You should be able to inspect all software that runs on your computer. Of course that’s a bit idealistic and pipe-dreamy.
again, I don’t have a problem with copying code - but I as a developer know whether I took enough of someone else’s algorithm so that I should mention the original authorship :) My only problem with circumventing licenses is when people put more restrictive licenses on plagiarized code.
And - I guess - in conclusion, if someone makes a license too free, so that putting a restrictive (commercial) license or patent on plagiarized / derived work, that is also something I don’t want to see.
Are you just trying to make a bad pro-China argument or have you never been online before?
I see it more as a good anti-Microsoft argument 🤷🏻♀️
“Why does no one say murder is bad unless China is murdering”
Isn’t a good anti-murder argument
“Why does no one say murder is bad unless China is murdering”
I can not fathom how you absolutely nailed the essence of my comment, yet misunderstood it (and - arguably - your own example) so fundamentally.
Let me try to help, once:
“Why do most people not complain about murder when Microsoft is doing it, but when China is doing it, the very justified outrage can be heard?”
❤️
I cannot fathom how you absolutely nailed the essence of my comment, yet misunderstood it (and - arguably - your own example) so fundamentally.
People do criticize Microsoft for using open source data to train LLMs, just like people criticize murder
Hence the query about having never been on the internet before
Quick, someone tell Nintendo!
Someone reupload yuzu, stat!
Put content that is illegal in China into your code, problem solved!
Include “Winnie the Poo” into your next oss project!
AbstractBaseWinnieThePoohFactory
The phrase Tiananmen Square massacre in each file.
Actually that happened 😂 they accidentally “mirrored” some activists’ repository and got blocked temporarily
I think the major issue is here is that they are “mirroring” with the same username without clear indicating they are mirrors and they are modifying all the github links in Readme to GitCode. But if you want to claim your project, they want to only comment using the issue section of a project which requires account; but then you have to have a Chinese phone number to register account, and you will automatically get a Huawei Cloud account when you registering it
Edit: also some background info about the company behind GitCode from my other comment: the company behind GitCode is funded and owned by CSDN (China Software Developer Network) and the actual infrastructure and service is provided by Huawei Cloud. On the website they have written this statement in the registration page.
CSDN is mostly a platform to share posts on software development, but it is known to have a lot of issues, including:
- poor content and directly copied posts from other people without consent, which to a point people is considering the site a content farm; it is even a top blocked site on Kagi;
- All code provided there requires “coins” to download, even they are open-sourced code; it was reported multiple people in China got scammed via CSDN;
- You have to login to copy code on the post, and sometimes hides half the post to require you to login to read.
- All code provided there requires “coins” to download, even they are open-sourced code; it was reported multiple people in China got scammed via CSDN;
- You have to login to copy code on the post, and sometimes hides half the post to require you to login to read.
Oh fuck! Capitalism with beastly grin strikes back.
I love how every Chinese company is called “China”
Yeah… That’s because they are. it is required that every Chinese Company has to be owned by “tHe PeOpLe” (CCP)
Gotta disguise being a capitalist country somehow.
Capitalism is when the public owns the things. And Communism is when a handful of private individuals owns the things.
So what’s it called when the government is a handful of private individuals, as opposed to representing the public?
Oligarchy or aristocracy, and that’s Russia. And the US at this point lol.
The Aristocrats
Badum tish!
Lmao
Facebook = America
It is not illegal is it?
If it is legal, then thank you China for the free backup.
I do believe it’s illegal if they take a repository with a restrictive license (which includes any repository without a license), and then make it available on their own service. I think China just doesn’t care.
If it’s hosted in a public repo, anyone can clone it, that’s very much part of most git flows.
What you can do with the software, how you can use it, that’s another matter, based on the licence.
That of course assumes China will respect the copyright…
Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.
You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?
Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.
Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.
Illegal according to who?
The US? Why would China care, they are their own country with their own laws.
International courts? Who is enforcing those judgments?
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It’s not about laws at this level but about whether it is worth to do vs possible repercussions
Again, what repercussions? Who will enforce an ICC judgement against the CCP? Laws aside, what possible actions could be taken? I guess sanctions but that’s unlikely over something like this.
You can buy pirated software or pre-cracked consoles in stores there. They don’t care.
Shame they don’t have anything themselves that’s worth the trouble to copy back.
Aren’t Alibaba and Huawei huge on opensource?
As China leap frogged west in solar and EV tech
That they got from the West when CATL bought out a bankrupt US company that had developed LFP to commercial viability.
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.
Just my take but:
Like them or not (and IMV they are a serious threat), China’s system enforces a strategic view, long term, more like a 100yr plan.
We don’t. It’s by election cycle or quarterly earnings report.
These things all make more sense if you see them impassionately, and without an ethical filter, from a long term POV.
China will do what’s best for China in the long term. Irrespective of ‘politics’ that are like ripples upon a rising tide.
I absolutely do not discredit the scaling they’ve done in the manufacturing process, but if there’s one thing China does well, it’s scale manufacturing. That’s usually because they have much lower safety and quality standards, and might bring them up later on. But what they don’t seem to have, at least in these industries, is innovation in the underlying technology to any appreciable extent.
But hooboy, can they pump out solar panels and batteries when they’re taken off the leash.
And abso-fucking-lutely, we in Western countries continuously shoot ourselves in the foot with short-term thinking. There was a time it seemed when there were plans like the New Deal where thought was given to decades down the road. Today, the longest term outlook you see if 4 years. And that’s common across the board, I wouldn’t even place that just at the feet of the US. It’s a damn shame, and it’s the reason the middle class is getting hammered for the last 40 years. But we do know how to R&D, just now we can’t get build a manufacturing base without some grifter taking all the subsidies and shipping them offshore.
Now I’m depressed.
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
Bad faith, for sure, made very clear in the last 20 years.
I’ve seen what’s inside the speed controllers and battery monitoring circuitry for Chinese EVs. I don’t think I want to be anywhere near them.
Some random Chinese company: does something jenky
Blogger: “The entire country of China is doing this jenky thing!”
All Chinese companies are the CCP. That’s how the system works.
And all US companies follow US laws and crazy people say they do the bidding of CIA/NSA/FBI- which they do, to a degree.
Yea they would have to do their bidding if the government came knocking with subpoenas.
And they have been!
Funny how you say something similar and we have such different karma for it.
Might be because of our approaches?
Your’s comes across as a sort of whatabout that nobody asked for and mine is just a statement of fact related to what you mentioned.
It’s not inaccurate to say that the Chinese government has a tighter leash on all business in their country than the US has in theirs though.
The random Chinese company: owned by Huawei and CSDN (where CSDN is known to be the worst site known to Chinese developers where they literally costs money to let you download open source code)
Edit: i think my original is a bit unclear, so this is a more detailed info: the company is funded and owned by CSDN (China Software Developer Network) and the actual infrastructure and service is provided by Huawei Cloud. On the website they have written this statement in the registration page.
CSDN is mostly a platform to share posts on software development, but it is known to have a lot of issues, including:
- poor content and directly copied posts from other people without consent, which to a point people is considering the site a content farm; it is even a top blocked site on Kagi;
- All code provided there requires “coins” to download, even they are open-sourced code; it was reported multiple people in China got scammed via CSDN;
- You have to login to copy code on the post, and sometimes hides half the post to require you to login to read.
Great! Now I know who to contact when I accidentally delete all the plaintext API keys and passwords I had stored in a public github repo.
