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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

I am banned from GitHub because I didn't want to give them my phone number. They ignored a legally binding GDPR request to delete all my data. I haven't got around to suing them yet.

Recently I also got "rate limited" after opening about three web pages.

Microsoft can do something to you, and that is to arbitrarily deny you access after you've built a dependence on it, and then make you jump through hoops to get access back.

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> Recently I also got "rate limited" after opening about three web pages.

People who haven’t used it logged out recently may be surprised to find that they have, for some time, made the site effectively unusable without an account. Doing one search and clicking a couple results gets you temporarily blocked. It’s effectively an account-required website now.

Thanks. I didn’t realize that. Migrating repos tonight.

I have never noticed that and am rarely logged in.

Weird. Maybe it just hates my last two ISPs (Google Fiber, Frontier).

The usual way I notice I'm not logged in is by getting blocked after interacting with ~3 different parts of the site within a minute. If I search, click a single repo, and stay in that repo without using search, it seems to go OK, but if I interact with search and then a couple repos, or search again, temp-banned.

I made a search index for github repo [1] because it takes quite some time for github to load the repositories page (which is the page to allow searching),

And sometimes even using the exact repo name in Google search, I cannot see the corresponding (non-popular) repo.

[1] https://res-index.hkit.cc

They no longer allow sorting by number of stars in the search without being logged in either.

Stars can be bought, they aren't very reliable.

Just opened a private window to try this, I did one search and clicked on four results, then a second search and got a 429 error. That is wild. I guess it's an anti-scraper measure?

Given the occasional articles that crop up showing the sheer volume of badly-behaved (presumably) AI scraper bots this makes all kinds of sense.

I can't find it now, but sometime in the past week or so I saw something that (IIRC) related to the BBC (?) blocking a ton of badly-behaved obvious scraper traffic that was using Meta (?) user-agents but wasn't coming from the ASNs that Meta uses. The graphs looked like this ended up reducing their sustained traffic load by about 80%.

Items where I'm doubting my recall (since I didn't find anything relevant doing some quick searches) are marked with (?)

I was pretty flabbergasted when I realized that if not logged in, I could no longer search a repository for code references.

You're really going to make me clone a project locally to do a search. I just end up using google to search github. It's so stupid.

Or, log in?

There is a huge irony in me logging in to this website to posit the question to you: why?

At least you had the choice. Many potential contributors live in countries to which GitHub does not support SMS verification but still requires it. So there's a second tier of effectively blocked countries besides the officially sanctioned ones.

When did they ask you for a phone number? Last github account I set up back at the end of February didn't ask for one and does the mandatory 2fa step using a code sent via email.

This might be a country-dependant thing.

They nagged me for a year for a phone number, threatening lockout. I finally gave in, so they almost immediately started nagging me to disable SMS 2FA because it is insecure.

You don't need a Github account to `git clone https://github.com/some/repo`

This is kind of a weird hill to die on, but you’re well within your rights, so you do you.

However, it is clearly not correct to say that you were banned from GitHub. It’s like saying “I was banned from Google because I refuse to use computing devices.”

Not really a ban, just self flagellation, which, again, whatever works for you.

Give me your social security number or you may not reply to my comments. If you don't give me your social security number, choosing instead to die on this weird hill, it's not correct to say you're banned - you're merely self-flagellating.

A phone number given to a generally reputable company is hardly equivalent to giving a rando your social security number.

I mean, obviously you disagree with them being generally reputable, but you must realize that’s not a broad opinion, and they are certainly better at preventing data breaches than the average company that stores phone numbers.

Sincerely though, I hope you get your GDPR request sorted.

> generally reputable company

Are you talking about Microsoft here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft#Controversies

Hence the qualifier “generally”. I’m not saying they’re above reproach, but I am saying that companies that care far less about data security already have my phone number, such as most/all of my utilities - including my phone company. And those aren’t realistically optional.

> companies that care far less about data security already have my phone number ... including my phone company.

Far less than these?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40592789

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Privacy...

This is unlikely.

The bar is a lot lower than you think.

Tell me more. Meanwhile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43993076

> but I am saying that companies that care far less about data security already have my phone number

Not mine and it sucks that this means I'm not welcome as FireFox contributor anymore unless I move countries just to register a monthly contract for a dedicated GitHub-accepted SIM card.

Once you trigger phone-number verification requirement your account is globally shadowbanned and support blocked pending SMS code verification. Aside from the privacy issue it's completely blocking people in the several countries (beyond the ones offially totally banned due to sanctions) to which GitHub won't even try to SMS/call.

Remember that registering a second account would be violating GitHub ToS.

It looks like patches still get submitted to another system, and github is only used indirectly for version control.

> sucks that this means I'm not welcome as FireFox contributor anymore

Nothing has changed regarding being a contributor. Bugzilla, Phabricator, Lando. You don't really interact with GH other than read-only needs as code search. (Which, funnily, is currently the most rate-limited thing on the whole of GH ;D) — but luckily as long as there's the Hg mirror, Searchfox continues to being used for that as well.

This seems like a poor argument. I don't like much either having the obligation to give GitHub my phone number, but it's not the same thing as a social security number, now is it ? Would you argue otherwise ?

Not US but phone number is arguably worse: You can't legally get one without tying it to govt ID anymore and tends to be tied to your current physical location.

And is commonly used for authentication codes, and like Social Security Number, it is PII that should be default-deny.

Github seems to have no legit need for a user's phone number. Since there's not even a way to tell them to go pound sand, I'd say opting out of disclosing sensitive information they don't need by not signing in/up and equating their unreasonable demand with a ban is respectable.

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