AdguardFilters from AdguardTeam has been removed by GitHub | Hacker News Reader

AdguardFilters from AdguardTeam has been removed by GitHub

github.com

5 pointssimonmysun4 comments

It seems that the repo has been restored. And I suspect this commit is related: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/commit/118a2e7...

Here's an archive page of it when it was removed: http://web.archive.org/web/20240903162953/https://github.com...

> Access to this repository has been disabled by GitHub Staff due to a violation of GitHub's terms of service.

It disturbs me whenever I see a message like this that has no detail. Whenever one entity is serving as judge, jury, and executioner, there should at least be information for the community about what the condemned was charged with.

I suppose the most-charitable explanation would be an automatic process that detected a contributor committing something that matched some kind of malware signature?

I received an email at 9:22am PT this morning saying that my fork of this repository from July 2023 was violating the terms of service. So, this was not something that was added to the repository recently, and GitHub had more than enough time to resolve the issue in a less aggressive manner if they wanted to. It seems more likely like malicious action by GitHub on behalf of a copyright troll or other bad-faith entity like Google.

Here is the full text of the email I received, which contains no evidence for the alleged terms of service violation:

> Access to the raxod502/AdguardFilters repository has been disabled by GitHub staff due to a terms of service violation.

> When making content moderation decisions, we consider information from a variety of sources, including: account profile data, information contained in submitted reports/notices or discovered through our own voluntarily initiated investigations, and context around the contents of the repository.

> If you wish to regain access to the disabled content or would like to dispute that a violation occurred and can provide additional information to show that a different decision should have been reached, please review our Appeal and Reinstatement Policy and submit a request via our form.

> You may review our terms of service here: GitHub's Terms of Service

> Please feel free to Contact GitHub Support if you have any questions.

I filed support ticket 2981480 to complain about this communication.

We opened an appeal on Github and are waiting for their response.

So far we have absolutely no idea what's wrong and what is the violation they're referring to.

I'll be surprised if this is a copyright issue as Github according to their policy should've given us a prior notice so that we could file a counter-notice.

I hope this is some sort of a false positive caused by Github trying to handle the spam issue [1] lately.

[1]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/github-commen...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com