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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4271 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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GitHub has a half decent censorship record? They usually only fold to DMCA requests (legitimate ones at that). But open to evidence of the contrary I have missed.

Cloudflare is more of a mixed bag. I used to strongly dislike them due to captchas from TOR exit nodes and VPNs, but they have a very robust censorship record, hosting "terrorist groups" and the 8chan until boards/shareholders likely twisted so hard management had their hands completely tied. They offer DDOS protections that allow sites that would otherwise be DDOS'ed to oblivion if they were self-hosted to stay up and available. How would you say they're hostile to the open web?

Doesn't GitHub scan people's projects for words like "blacklist" and threaten to blacklist them if they're not changed? I thought there was drama about that in 2020.

Iirc the same thing happened to someone whose code had something like "retards the process"

No, nothing like that happened. I think you're mixing up github's switching the default branch from 'master' to 'main' because racism slavery with the general push against mean words.

Glad to see evidence of this (can't find any), but I think we've veered close to CW territory.

https://github.com/tbreuss/dns-blacklist-check

^ Project that uses blacklist with recent commits

Oh whoops, I was reading from the comments page and didn't notice which thread this was. But turns out it was a weird isolated incident way back in 2015. I thought they'd changed their TOS to mandate that in 2020, will check later.

https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/03/github-nukes-repository-over-use-word-retard/

Off the top of my head, GitHub censored the Gamergate OP (leading to the creation of gitgud.io) after a tweet complaining about it. I also remember they censored the popular WebM converter "WebM for Retards" (which also moved to Gitgud), presumably for using the word "retard". A search finds this thread from 7 years ago mentioning they also censored C Plus Equality, which was parodying a blog post from a feminist academic calling for a feminist programming language, and ToleranUX, another parody from the same people referencing the campaign against Linus Torvalds.

There's another repo with essentially the same name, so they're not super vigilant about these as far as I can tell. These all seem to be shutdowns in light of negative media attention.

I'll revise my assessment of Github on censorship from "half-decent" to "media/percetion sensitive".

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