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Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Interesting project but I didn't see any information regarding data collection and retention on your site. Granted that's unlikely to come up but in theory I would imagine someone could subpoena your for information regarding who that person was that created the PR, no?

Also curious how this does with, say, updating a PR.

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Yeah, adding a privacy/retention policy would be a good idea.

Under the hood its pretty simple (and open source), just an AWS lambda squashing the commits and stripping metadata before pushing to Github. Potentially you could tie the commit to an IP address, but I'm not logging any of that info.

I'm not really sure how I can prove that the code I'm running is the code you'll find on GH though.

>I'm not really sure how I can prove that the code I'm running is the code you'll find on GH though.

I think this attestation is something Amazon (and other cloud providers) could offer in the future - they're the only ones who can really prove it.

"I, Amazon AWS, do solemnly declare that the code running on {service} is {git hash}"

yeah, I guess thats how Docker does it. Automated builds tied to a github repo.

That lets you trust the image. Trusting software which is actually running somewhere seems harder.

Only issue with that aspect is if they still allow configuration (I mean they'd sorta have to) and what if you could exploit a testing configuration to do whatever activity you want to hide? You could get the badge from AWS but still do what you wanted.

Honestly not sure there is a good solution for that.

You could always have a script which strips down things to only necessary configuration values for production and then generates a tarball that could be verified. It seems like it would be possible to get down to a subset of settings that could take on any value while still allowing you to trust the service. Of course, if the settings don't have to be secret, they could also just be baked in as well.

https://zeit.co/now has a way to get the source, by going to /_src on a deployment. It's turned off by default for paid accounts, but can be turned on. It also has a way to get it from the API, along with the URL of the deployment. Glitch comes to mind, too.

Why? Personally I see those policies as a joke with zero credibility or recourse

Depends where you choose to reside, they are enforceable in e.g. Europe

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