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Comment by trynewideas | Hacker News Reader

More context: It's a successor to Vanced, a patched Android YouTube client that, among other things, disabled ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Vanced?wprov=sfla1 ReVanced apparently had patches for more apps, which seems to have contributed to the takedown.

Why are these mod projects bothering to distribute on GitHub but then try to obfuscate what they do into Discords and online subculture hangouts?

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They can use European hosts like Codeberg, yet they still use GitHub.

They really shouldn't though, it would be kind of mean to Codeberg to host potentially illegal software there.

It's really not that complicated to get a domain and host your own instance of Gitea, and it would make it a lot more resilient to takedowns, if you have the right domain registrar and instance host.

Git hosting would be a great Tor hidden service. I wonder if git can push to onion addresses...

Absolutely, you can use Tor over a local Socks5 proxy that the daemon exposes, so you can do pushes over SSH as normal. Works perfectly fine.

That's awesome. Would be cool if there was a hidden git service with monero payments for storage. I don't really know anything about the opsec necessary for such a thing.

I feel like using git for a sensitive code distribution is a poor idea. Git exposes rather a lot of information about you, from basic ones like username to a history of commits (what if you accidentally committed something revealing PII?) It's much better to simply distribute code as a tar.gz archive or something.

I mean, if you're going so far as to set up git as a tor service, it probably isn't that much more work to obfuscate or just delete user info from commits.

But I'm not sure a vcs is what you'd want anyway. It might make more sense to just host a zip of the most recent branch state instead of exposing the history

Is it illegal though? I think there are different rules out there, maybe modifying closed source apps is legal.

A european host would take it down too. Europe has copyright laws too. And they have their own versions of DMCA.

Maybe a https://njal.la/ vps would help?

Popularity I assume - people will be less hesitant to download an apk file from github, even if being on github doesn't really make it trustable in practical terms.

Presumably there are a lot of these dark projects which aren't anywhere public. We just don't hear about them

If you spend enough time in /g/ you will hear of everything.

What's /g/ anyway?

4chan's technology board.

hello /g/entleman

Why is everyone so angry on there?

Well yes, they're called "private". Often either illegal, it offends some powerful people or the creator doesn't give a shit and may just post a link on a forum as a thanks.

Respect to those who put it out in the open! A DMCA is nothing, but people have died and even went to prison for a cool gray area program.

One of the reasons why the original vanced was taken down was because it was advertised way too frequently and publicly. These projects should always be disseminated by word of mouth (hn/reddit does not count)

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