21 karma · joined March 15, 2023
GitHub username is the same as HN.
mark [at] vdm.id.au
If an at risk child’s parent is unwilling to do what they believe is the right thing by their child then they have failed the child and need to get a grip - confiscate the device or change the wifi password or sleep with the router under your pillow if you have to it’s really not that hard.
They all make use of the GitHub topic feature to be found. The most recent commit will usually be a trivial update to README.md which is done simply to maintain visibility for anyone browsing topics by recently updated. The readme will typically instruct installation by downloading the zip file rather than cloning the repo.
I assume the payload steals Claude credentials or something similar. The sheer number of repos would suggest plenty of downloads which is quite disheartening.
It would take a GitHub engineer barely minutes to implement a policy which would eradicate these repos but they don’t seem to care. I have also been unable to use the search function on GitHub for over 6 months now which is irrelevant to this discussion but it seems paying customers cannot count on Github to do even the bare minimum by them.
My concern is around the sequence of events that needed to take place for this to happen to you. Also as a former network operator I want to know how laws like the data retention act, identify and disrupt, etc play a role in these situations - ie who triggered what. I think I’ll review your comment history.
Sounds like you have handled it in about as healthy manner as one could hope. I saw that as a compliment.
In fairness, the blame for this kind of enabling attitude is mostly attributable to me locking myself out of the building and having to buzz my long suffering neighbours at all kinds of ungodly hours. Proud moments.
Also as you’ve outlined, plenty of the misinformation is targeted at Israeli citizens themselves and banning those people from the opportunity to engage outside of their bubble makes no logical or moral sense
Proceeds to link to pdf of unknown origins
Interested in hearing of there is anything obvious I’ve missed or am yet to learn that I could use to avoid these situations or handle better.