Move the bug tracker off MS Github

[bruceleerabbit]

Haven caters for privacy enthusiasts and those looking to use surveillance to escape surveillance, and yet the development platform is hosted by Microsoft -- a privacy abuser. To improve the credibility of the project and attract privacy-respecting developers, please consider moving away from Github.

It's particularly important to get the bug tracker off MS Github to encourage reports.

Direct practical problems with using Microsoft Github

1. A survey shows that a significant number of bug reports are withheld when the bug tracker is inside a restrictive or politically controversial walled-garden like MS Github or gitlab.com.
2. Github is Tor-hostile according to Tor project. GH has started forcing Tor users through an extra email verification step that effectively discourages bug reports:
3. MS failed to secure Github, which was breached to the tune of 500gb of private projects. Security incompetence is further showcased by an MS-imposed requirement to create and account and sign in to report an MS security bug. And for those not discouraged by that, the sign-in page is also broken. Then security was breached again in July 2020 when OAuth tokens were stolen from both Github and Gitlab.com.
4. MS suppresses democracy by blocking Github access to a project that facilitates protests in Catalonia.

Ethical problems with using Microsoft products and services

5. Microsoft harms the environment by serving the two most destructive oil companies in the world: ExxonMobil and Chevron.
   1. (#ExxonKnew) Exxon notoriously knew about climate change since 1977. They not only kept it secret from the public, but they also financed a disinformation campaign.
   2. Microsoft and Chevron were caught each paying $100k to "the Cloakroom", a project to hide bribes going from large corporations to republican politicians.
   3. Chevron's right-leaning stance is further pushed through its membership with ALEC, which doubles as a superPAC and bill mill that lobbies and writes policy for U.S. republicans.
6. Microsoft is a notorious privacy abuser:
   1. MS is a PRISM corporation prone to mass surveillance.
   2. MS supported CISPA and collaborates with the NSA.
   3. MS paid $195k to fight the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
   4. MS drug tests its employees, thus intruding on their privacy outside the workplace.
   5. MS finances other privacy abusers:
      1. In 2012 Microsoft spent $35 million on Facebook ads and in 2015 Microsoft was the third biggest spender on Facebook ads in the world.
      2. MS proxies through Accenture to make Sweden cashless. The war on cash is war on privacy.
   6. MS supplies Bing search service which gives high rankings to privacy-abusing CloudFlare websites.
   7. MS owns and operates Outlook Email and the LinkedIn social media site, both of which are exclusive walled-gardens that limit participation to those who have a phone number and the will to share it with Microsoft.
      1. MS supplies hotmail.com email service, which uses vigilante extremist org Spamhaus to force residential internet users to share all their e-mail metadata and payloads with a corporate third-party.
   8. MS unlawfully used people's images without consent to train their facial recognition products
   9. MS distributes a nonfree operating system, Microsoft Windows, which is jam-packed with malicious functionalities, including surveillance of users, DRM, censorship and a universal back door.
   10. MS was caught surreptitiously recording Xbox users and paying contractors to listen to the recordings.
   11. Dutch government commissioned a study which found Microsoft to have several GDPR violations. E.g. Office 365 violates GDPR article 5 ¶ 1.c, GDPR article 17, and stores the data outside the EEA (may also be a GDPR breach).
7. Microsoft is detrimental to human rights and democracy
   1. Microsoft finances AnyVision to produce facial recognition technology that the Israeli military uses as a weapon against the Palestinian people who they oppress in their occupation. Note that Israeli snipers murdered an unarmed civilian Palestinian medic (in breach of the Geneva Convention) then edited the video to deceive the public for PR damage control.
   2. Microsoft supports ICE in a variety of ways in the course of ICE's implementation of Trump's xenophobic border policies. Microsoft services an ICE contract worth $19.4 million dollars despite protest from employees. In addition to MS Office products, Microsoft has renewed a Github contract and also supplies cloud computing through its Azure platform.
   3. MS partnered with FedEx, an NRA-supporting ALEC member as well as JP Morgan Chase, the most evil bank in the world.
   4. MS conceals US military contracts to bias PR and dodge social accountablity. They have a much bigger piece these contracts than the rest of MACFANG, they lack Googles AI principles, and unlike Google they ignore employee protest and petitions.
8. MS is among the top 15 recipients of Trump's corporate tax breaks, a benefit of $128 billion. Microsoft sacked hundreds of employees immediately after receiving the tax breaks in February 2018.
9. MS is anti-consumer and anti-competitive
   1. MS tricked users into "upgrading" to Windows 10, which sabotages users in a variety of ways, one of which is to prevent cloud-free accounts.
   2. MS strong-armed nearly all PC manufacturers charge every buyer for an MS Windows license regardless of whether the user actually wants Windows.
   3. MS hoards software patents and uses them to fight free software.

Bad alternative: gitlab.com service

The Gitlab.com SaaS is often considered an alternative to MS Github, but it's even worse--

for many reasons

* Sexist treatment toward saleswomen who are [told to wear](https://web.archive.org/web/20200309145121/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/06/gitlab_sales_women/) dresses, heels, etc. * Hosted by Google. * [Proxied](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/01/16/gitlab-changes-to-cloudflare/) through privacy abuser CloudFlare. * [tracking](https://social.privacytools.io/@darylsun/103015834654172174) * Hostile treatment of Tor users trying to register. * Hostile treatment of new users who attempt to register with a `@spamgourmet.com` forwarding email address to track spam and to protect their more sensitive internal email address. * Hostile treatment of Tor users *after* they've established an account and have proven to be a non-spammer.

Regarding the last bullet, I was simply trying to edit an existing message that I already posted and was forced to solve a CAPTCHA (attached). There are several problems with this:

• CAPTCHAs break robots and robots are not necessarily malicious. E.g. I could have had a robot correcting a widespread misspelling error in all my posts.
• CAPTCHAs put humans to work for machines when it is machines that should work for humans.
• CAPTCHAs are defeated. Spammers find it economical to use third-world sweat shop labor for CAPTCHAs while legitimate users have this burden of broken CAPTCHAs.
• The reCAPTCHA puzzle requires a connection to Google
  1. Google's reCAPTCHAs compromise security as a consequence of surveillance capitalism that entails collection of IP address, browser print.
     • anonymity is compromised.
     • (speculative) could Google push malicious j/s that intercepts user registration information?
  2. Users are forced to execute non-free javascript (recaptcha/api.js).
  3. The reCAPTCHA requires a GUI, thus denying service to users of text-based clients.
  4. CAPTCHAs put humans to work for machines when it is machines who should be working for humans. PRISM corp Google Inc. benefits financially from the puzzle solving work, giving Google an opportunity to collect data, abuse it, and profit from it. E.g. Google can track which of their logged-in users are visiting the page presenting the CAPTCHA.
  5. The reCAPTCHAs are often broken. This amounts to a denial of service.
     • E.g.1: the CAPTCHA server itself refuses to give the puzzle saying there is too much activity.
     • E.g.2:
       
  6. The CAPTCHAs are often unsolvable.
     • E.g.1: the CAPTCHA puzzle is broken by ambiguity (is one pixel in a grid cell of a pole holding a street sign considered a street sign?)
     • E.g.2: the puzzle is expressed in a language the viewer doesn't understand.
  7. (note: for a brief moment gitlab.com switched to hCAPTCHA by Intuition Machines, Inc. but now they're back to Google's reCAPTCHA)
  8. Network neutrality abuse: there is an access inequality whereby users logged into Google accounts are given more favorable treatment the CAPTCHA (but then they take on more privacy abuse). Tor users are given extra harsh treatment.

There's nothing wrong with self-hosting an instance running Gitlab CE or using the Gitlab instance of another party.

Decent alternatives

1. self-hosting (Gogs, Gitea, Gitlab CE, etc.)
   1. (+) avoids the "shake-up" problem of shrinking the community each time the project moves (there is no risk that the privacy factors would later take a negative turn).
2. Bitbucket
   1. (-) dodgy j/s up the yin yang that clusterfucks uMatrix
   2. (-) has some relationship with Netlify, who uses AWS
   3. (-) non-free software?
3. Launchpad
4. notabug.org ("NAB") (privacy policy). Based on a liberated fork of gogs.
   1. (+) supports Tor (although the onion web UI is currently disabled in response to attack, so the onion site only accepts git connections)
   2. (+) supports SSH keys and SSH over Tor
   3. (+) no CAPTCHAs
   4. (+) registration very non-intrusive, and not controlling about where you get your email
   5. (-) noteworthy drawback unrelated to privacy: e-voting non-existent.
   6. (-) noteworthy drawback unrelated to privacy: NAB doesn't associate PGP keys to users, so PGP signed commits may be unavailable or more manual work needed.
   7. (-) IRC support channel is dead.
5. Codeberg. Runs on Gitea, which is a Gogs fork.
   1. (+) web UI works on Tor (probably SSH as well)
   2. (+) supports SSH and GPG keys
   3. (+) registration very non-intrusive, and not controlling about where you get your email
   4. (+) functions without any j/s, and the javascript that exists is all 1st-party
   5. (+) supports e-voting
   6. (-) logins don't work from all Ungoogled Chromium installations
   7. (-) no onion address
6. yerbamate.dev
7. git.openprivacy.ca
8. git.nixnet.xyz
9. git.sr.ht
10. framagit.org: Gitlab CE instance
11. git.jami.net: Gitlab CE instance, perhaps dedicated to jami
12. sourcehut.org
13. http://dweb.happybeing.com/blog/post/002-safegit-decentralised-git-on-safe-network/

[xloem]

@bruceleerabbit, my reply is totally off-topic for this project, but your issue submission is so wonderful here. Is the information on your post collected somewhere central? I was wondering if you were aware of any issue and PR systems that store the issue and PR information inside_a_git_repository for easy migration, preservation, and history review?

[xloem]

https://github.com/quorumcontrol/dgit
https://scuttlebot.io/apis/community/git-ssb.html

[bruceleerabbit]

@bruceleerabbit, my reply is totally off-topic for this project, but your issue submission is so wonderful here. Is the information on your post collected somewhere central?

No, I just keep a .md file as a template, then I try to custom tailor each bug report for the project at hand. This is because some ppl get quite angry & hostile when an exact copy goes around, and allege that a bot is in play, etc.

I was wondering if you were aware of any issue and PR systems that store the issue and PR information inside_a_git_repository for easy migration, preservation, and history review?

I don't off the top of my head but I know there has been chatter about that. I think there is a system being worked on that embeds the issues in git, but I don't think I kept a record of it.

Sorry for the slow reply. I rarely login to github. The email challenge is a hassle.

(edit) i was replying in sequence.. looks like you may have found it.

[xloem]

The two I added were for your list.

During the youtube-dl dmca fiasco we found a number of bug management systems that store bugs inside git. Unfortunately that discussion looks mostly lost now. The major candidate was git-bug which is wirtten in go. https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug . One written in python was bugseverywhere https://gitlab.com/bugseverywhere/bugseverywhere . There were a number of others =/

EDIT: storing bugs inside git preserves them better over migrations and archives, and helps provide a history of dialogue. Do you have a way to collaborate outside github?

[bruceleerabbit]

Do you have a way to collaborate outside github?

I'll let you know if I come up with something. i know schestowitz keeps a list of GH projects to target for this effort.

BTW, I heard this is a way to backup GH issues, which could be a precursor to migration => https://github-backup.branchable.com/

[xloem]

Thanks. During the youtube-dl event somebody also made a gitea instance in onionland, although I haven't really visited it: http://githidep2hynhdmutuv7n2tei4iie2c7lyqz5fes3r5zzoxe5dshtxyd.onion/

schestowitz has no activity or contact information for me, same for you?

[bruceleerabbit]

@xloem

Thanks. During the youtube-dl event somebody also made a gitea instance in onionland, although I haven't really visited it: http://githidep2hynhdmutuv7n2tei4iie2c7lyqz5fes3r5zzoxe5dshtxyd.onion/

That link is dead.

schestowitz has no activity or contact information for me, same for you?

He's easy to reach on freenode in '#techrights'.

Here is a collaboration venue:

https://git.sdf.org/humanacollaborator/humanacollabora/src/branch/master/github.md

there is an issue tracker there.

[xloem]

That link is dead.

So it is now.

there is an issue tracker there.

I opened an issue.