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China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report
(infosec.exchange)
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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The vast majority of projects on GitHub is open-source and forkable, why would that need authorization?
It's... suspicious that China's doing it en masse, but there's nothing wrong in cloning or forking a repo last i heard.
It's not about authorization. They want to build a knowledge base for when the Great Firewall gets some more filters. Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.
And under copyleft licensing, they're allowed to do that. Both to GitHub repositories and Wikipedia.
Of course they are, it's not like there is some kind of international jurisdiction anyway. What is bothersome is why they do it.
Even if there was jurisdiction, anyone in the world is entitled to do it by the very licenses these works are released under.
Hopefully they follow the rest of the stipulations of the licenses, such as the common one about keeping the license as such and contributing the changes back.
This seems like the most plausible explanation. Only other thing I can think of is they want to develop their own CoPilot (which I'm guessing isn't available in China due to the U.S. AI restrictions?), and they're just using their existing infrastructure to gather training data.
How come I live in Russia and have never seen such?
I know only of quite a few troll\counterculture projects, some, like Lurkmore, are already, well, dead, some, like Traditsiya, are not.
That, of course, if you don't mean that Russian Wikipedia in itself has problems. Which would be true.
It's called Ruwiki.
OK. Well, not sure anyone really uses that.