If it's your software send a DMCA. They have a legally required timeframe to process those. If it's open source, however, then you don't have any valid DMCA claim.
You can have copyright open source code, which is what allows open source licenses to enforce their terms. Open source doesn't mean unlicensed or without copyright or "free to do whatever you want". There are very restrictive open source licenses.
Open source code is still copyrighted. What the license defines is rights that people have in distributing that code. If an unofficial repository is using open source code to ship malware, and the license that software had didn’t allow that, then the unofficial repository is still breaking copyright law despite the code being open source.
Um no, you have to send it about an actual copyright violation, not just because you don't like something.
It's not illegal to send an incorrect one by mistake but GitHub probably won't process it. It's illegal to send an incorrect one intentionally. Now that it's been pointed out to you that making malware isn't a copyright violation, it's intentional if you send a DMCA anyway.
Not exactly the same, but I've noticed a pretty sizable uptick in the number of spam/scam PR comments being left on GitHub (and a longer delay before they're removed after report).
Not the worst thing in the world, they're easy to spot, but I'd like to see GitHub invest more time in protecting their users from falling victim to these bad actors.
Author of the post here. Github finally took the offending page down approximately 10 minutes after the post appeared on the front page of HN. Total coincidence. I'm sure!
Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.
And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.
Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies. I guarantee you that once an issue hits the HN front page, even engineers who might have totally different talks will get involved. (Never worked at GH or have talked to anyone there in years but this is how everything works pretty much everywhere)
The public shaming will continue until the internal incentives improve. Make sure to drop that HN thread link into the internal task tracker y'all. Don't forget to report to journalists if the severity warrants it (Brian Krebs, 404media, etc).
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."
We know that coding agents have been pushing GH to its limits. Scaling is hard - especially staff. Maybe they aren't trying to scale support but I think it's reasonable to give them the benefit of doubt here, given what we know publicly
Microsoft is not some plucky upstart company with 12 employees and an unexpectedly popular product. We do not, in fact, need to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
Having "hackers" on this site giving the benefit of doubt to companies clearing hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year will never cease to stop being ironic to me...
Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.
This also works for Google support.
And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.
I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
It was already a problem before agents could automatically perform these actions.
And it’s not something you can really automate on their end either. At least not the judgement call on the removal. Imagine if there was a fully automated process and it inadvertently took down a legit project.
I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.
I had several small requests for moderation (deleting and banning spammers posting spam/crypto scam issues/PRs in my repos and ones I contribute to) answered within a day earlier this year after more than a decade of never needing to request moderation. I'm not defending GH here as it's obviously unacceptable that the OP's issue took this long, but they definitely do or at least did have mods. I would guess they need a lot more of them if something this serious went unaddressed, or maybe the ones I interacted with are now gone and have not been backfilled.
I mean.. for better or worse, this is how corporate America works. Hiring to solve a problem that's not costing them money (and solving it doesn't make money) is probably not going to happen, especially with the current state of the economy. They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works.
If we have no way to strike back, they will simply suck every drop of blood out the way you use every part of the buffalo. There is no way to escape Microsoft when they just buy everything and turn it into part of their garbage moat.
Then maybe they should be growing their customer support capacity along with their business. It drives me crazy how big companies have normalized cutting those departments down to anemic proportions. Especially those where you're a paying customer.
I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
It's malice from whoever is responsible for under-staffing. It's also malice to prioritize the squeaky wheel for optics; it's intentional to reduce the spread of the knowledge of how unresponsive they are.
Describes pretty much any of the big companies. For example, I have seen numerous times people got their account locked on Google, or their app stuck in limbo at Apple, and then after post becomes viral all problems get solved.
Apple in particular is mocked because they explicitly say (used to say?) “going to the press doesn’t help”, but they’ve shown time and again that it’s the most effective way to get them to take action.
Same goes for all companies bigger than a startup. The first line of support is AI, the second line is clueless, and the third level is powerless. HN is the only way to reach a human with both ability and willingness to help
They're generally extremely quick about this if you ping ~anyone on the security team with the offending url and a link to the real repo. There is a long ongoing game of cat & mouse against malware in repackaged things like first party windows utilities to leverage the signed binaries.
For this specific case, a DMCA would have gotten you a much faster take down. As far as I can tell it's automated. Sure, they could appeal it but then the malware nature of it would be in the crosshairs of the reviewer.
I recently found "free" version of Lossless Scaling on GitHub. The release installer is definitely malware. It took GitHub 3 days to shutdown malware distribution. Category of my ticket was malware report, not copyright infringe
If GitHub staff is still reading this thread, maybe you can take down https://screenmemory.github.io/ as well. I reported it 4 weeks ago, ticket ID 4703161
There's an impersonation profile of me on Github (username happyhannob). I've reported it a while ago, received the same automated message, and no reaction otherwise. It's still online.
I guess you can't expect basic fraud prevention from a company currently building the future with AI...
I see OP edited their post claiming getting to HN's front helped.
I think the likelihood GitHub did something within 10 minutes of a post appearing on HN's front page is approximately zero.
Nobody in GitHub Trust & Safety is sat there watching HN.
An executive or communications professional who might have heard it got on HN, or seen it appear in a tool monitoring Microsoft and GitHub's mentions across the internet, and who then flagged the post, Trust & Safety would probably spend *more than 10 minutes* noticing the email or Teams message, then trying to find the right ticket internally. Then after locating the ticket you still have to investigate the facts, discuss, and click buttons to ban/delete the user.
It's (much) more likely this sat in a queue until someone got to it and the timing of it being on HN is a complete coincidence.
It’s not a coincidence if they had already found the problem, wrote up the solution, primed it for action, and then it sat in some “management queue” for essentially forever, until someone called someone with a go.
These kinds of imitation attacks seem to be getting more common. It’s not just random malware anymore — some of them are getting surprisingly polished and even use the real product name and logo.
Interesting (and a bit sad) how visibility on HN seems to speed things up on GitHub’s side.
If it's your software send a DMCA. They have a legally required timeframe to process those. If it's open source, however, then you don't have any valid DMCA claim.
Code can be open source while the name and logos are copyrighted and still enforceable via DMCA
Which project copyrighted its name and logo?
You're thinking of trademarks. Different body of law.
EDIT: e.g. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/
You can have copyright open source code, which is what allows open source licenses to enforce their terms. Open source doesn't mean unlicensed or without copyright or "free to do whatever you want". There are very restrictive open source licenses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright
That’s not how open source works.
Open source code is still copyrighted. What the license defines is rights that people have in distributing that code. If an unofficial repository is using open source code to ship malware, and the license that software had didn’t allow that, then the unofficial repository is still breaking copyright law despite the code being open source.
Also open source license doesn't grant use of trademarks, but I'm not sure that means DMCA applies.
There's no open source license that prohibits derivative works that are malware.
i think it's in the spirit of it, which is enough for a DMCA lol
Um no, you have to send it about an actual copyright violation, not just because you don't like something.
It's not illegal to send an incorrect one by mistake but GitHub probably won't process it. It's illegal to send an incorrect one intentionally. Now that it's been pointed out to you that making malware isn't a copyright violation, it's intentional if you send a DMCA anyway.
Not exactly the same, but I've noticed a pretty sizable uptick in the number of spam/scam PR comments being left on GitHub (and a longer delay before they're removed after report).
Not the worst thing in the world, they're easy to spot, but I'd like to see GitHub invest more time in protecting their users from falling victim to these bad actors.
In the future just issue a DMCA takedown right away for cases like this, IMO.
Author of the post here. Github finally took the offending page down approximately 10 minutes after the post appeared on the front page of HN. Total coincidence. I'm sure!
Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.
And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.
It might not be a willingness issue as much as a bandwidth issue.
unwilling to provide proper support?
Just seems like a silly rational response to the same problem.
Yes,evidently bandwidth from HN unblocks takedown requests of malicious content.
Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies. I guarantee you that once an issue hits the HN front page, even engineers who might have totally different talks will get involved. (Never worked at GH or have talked to anyone there in years but this is how everything works pretty much everywhere)
The public shaming will continue until the internal incentives improve. Make sure to drop that HN thread link into the internal task tracker y'all. Don't forget to report to journalists if the severity warrants it (Brian Krebs, 404media, etc).
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."
Good thing HN provided them some bandwidth to do their jobs.
Bandwidth can be bought with money, of which Microsoft made an extra $133.7 billion this year.
Sounds like they can afford elite customer support.
We know that coding agents have been pushing GH to its limits. Scaling is hard - especially staff. Maybe they aren't trying to scale support but I think it's reasonable to give them the benefit of doubt here, given what we know publicly
That’s a self-inflicted issue they should have properly planned for.
You’re saying this is a problem money can’t solve?
There’s no need for benefit of the doubt when it comes to the level of support provided by tech companies.
Bad support by tech companies is a conscious profit-preserving choice.
Microsoft is not some plucky upstart company with 12 employees and an unexpectedly popular product. We do not, in fact, need to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
They aren't trying to scale support. If anything, they are trying to throw AI at the problem. The support team is understaffed and overwhelmed.
Having "hackers" on this site giving the benefit of doubt to companies clearing hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year will never cease to stop being ironic to me...
On the site run by a VC firm? Why is that a shock? Besides, hacker does not mean being a kneejerking reactionary against corporations.
Never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft is elite.
They have to dump all that free cash into data centers, sorry
This also works for Google support.
I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
It was already a problem before agents could automatically perform these actions.
And it’s not something you can really automate on their end either. At least not the judgement call on the removal. Imagine if there was a fully automated process and it inadvertently took down a legit project.
Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.
Can you provide evidence of these claims?
I mean we are in the thread of evidence right now?
GitHub support is full of amazing, hard working people.
It is also comically understaffed. This is not because they can't find people to work - it's not given the budget necessary.
They might be amazing and hard working, but that doesn’t free them from the yoke of policy and script
I had several small requests for moderation (deleting and banning spammers posting spam/crypto scam issues/PRs in my repos and ones I contribute to) answered within a day earlier this year after more than a decade of never needing to request moderation. I'm not defending GH here as it's obviously unacceptable that the OP's issue took this long, but they definitely do or at least did have mods. I would guess they need a lot more of them if something this serious went unaddressed, or maybe the ones I interacted with are now gone and have not been backfilled.
I mean.. for better or worse, this is how corporate America works. Hiring to solve a problem that's not costing them money (and solving it doesn't make money) is probably not going to happen, especially with the current state of the economy. They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works.
how does anyone expect to solve AI alignment when we can't even solve corporate alignment
Life sure ain't perfect.. not much you can do about that sometimes.
If we have no way to strike back, they will simply suck every drop of blood out the way you use every part of the buffalo. There is no way to escape Microsoft when they just buy everything and turn it into part of their garbage moat.
It is a problem they could solve if they want to. They have billions of profits per quarter.
They just don't want to. Not malicious, just ignorant and disrespectful of their users.
I’m sure they are swamped with such requests
Then maybe they should be growing their customer support capacity along with their business. It drives me crazy how big companies have normalized cutting those departments down to anemic proportions. Especially those where you're a paying customer.
It's malice from whoever is responsible for under-staffing. It's also malice to prioritize the squeaky wheel for optics; it's intentional to reduce the spread of the knowledge of how unresponsive they are.
YouTube already does it autonomously with seemingly no legal consequences for them because you agree to it in their tos
Handling these requests at whatever scale they operate is their responsibility.
Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to take on all of their customers.
Just send DMCA if you want their attention, they act harshly and quickly. Even when it's false one.
https://marksgray.com/intellectual-property-law/how-fraudule...
Fraud
Do the ends justify the means?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism
Describes pretty much any of the big companies. For example, I have seen numerous times people got their account locked on Google, or their app stuck in limbo at Apple, and then after post becomes viral all problems get solved.
Apple in particular is mocked because they explicitly say (used to say?) “going to the press doesn’t help”, but they’ve shown time and again that it’s the most effective way to get them to take action.
Same goes for all companies bigger than a startup. The first line of support is AI, the second line is clueless, and the third level is powerless. HN is the only way to reach a human with both ability and willingness to help
This was not my experience at all. Someone on the bitchat android commented with a virus, reported it and was taken down 2 hours later
They're generally extremely quick about this if you ping ~anyone on the security team with the offending url and a link to the real repo. There is a long ongoing game of cat & mouse against malware in repackaged things like first party windows utilities to leverage the signed binaries.
Hacker News saves the day once again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
For this specific case, a DMCA would have gotten you a much faster take down. As far as I can tell it's automated. Sure, they could appeal it but then the malware nature of it would be in the crosshairs of the reviewer.
Not excusing their slow response, though.
why would anyone host commercial binary software on github or any other third party domain?
Pirates and crackers generally don't host stuff on their own domains. They don't want to pay for the bandwidth and they don't want to be traced.
I think they’re alluding to OP not hosting their own downloads.
I am the OP. I host my own downloads on my own domain and nowhere else. Only the malicious imitation is hosted on Github.
They’re presumably too busy with keeping availability above nine sixes
I recently found "free" version of Lossless Scaling on GitHub. The release installer is definitely malware. It took GitHub 3 days to shutdown malware distribution. Category of my ticket was malware report, not copyright infringe
Author here. I initially reported it as an imitation. A few days later I added evidence that it was malware.
I found a page that serving e-books I've purchased on github. It is a bit bad feeling
What do you know. Apple’s “never run to the media it never helps anything” rule works just as well with GitHub.
If GitHub staff is still reading this thread, maybe you can take down https://screenmemory.github.io/ as well. I reported it 4 weeks ago, ticket ID 4703161
Welcome to the club!
There's an impersonation profile of me on Github (username happyhannob). I've reported it a while ago, received the same automated message, and no reaction otherwise. It's still online.
I guess you can't expect basic fraud prevention from a company currently building the future with AI...
Three weeks? Try almost three years:
https://lowendbox.com/blog/will-github-ever-remove-this-null...
I see OP edited their post claiming getting to HN's front helped.
I think the likelihood GitHub did something within 10 minutes of a post appearing on HN's front page is approximately zero.
Nobody in GitHub Trust & Safety is sat there watching HN.
An executive or communications professional who might have heard it got on HN, or seen it appear in a tool monitoring Microsoft and GitHub's mentions across the internet, and who then flagged the post, Trust & Safety would probably spend *more than 10 minutes* noticing the email or Teams message, then trying to find the right ticket internally. Then after locating the ticket you still have to investigate the facts, discuss, and click buttons to ban/delete the user.
It's (much) more likely this sat in a queue until someone got to it and the timing of it being on HN is a complete coincidence.
It's a hell of a coincidence.
It’s not a coincidence if they had already found the problem, wrote up the solution, primed it for action, and then it sat in some “management queue” for essentially forever, until someone called someone with a go.
Seems like they don't even care
These kinds of imitation attacks seem to be getting more common. It’s not just random malware anymore — some of them are getting surprisingly polished and even use the real product name and logo. Interesting (and a bit sad) how visibility on HN seems to speed things up on GitHub’s side.