Missing from this heartfelt plea is any indication of what code you were working on before the ban, or why you are so certain it was a result of credit card activities. We only get your side of the story - what does Github support actually tell you?

Regardless, hopefully a valuable lesson in mirroring public contributions to other source control systems (Gitlab, Codeberg, etc.) is learned.

As far as code goes, I never contributed to anything even remotely malicious. I worked primarily on obscure scraping problems related to Puppeteer and Playwright. I built some libraries for that I published on NPM, but at no point did I ever contribute or use GitHub in any capacity for anything malicious. I am a hundred percent certain of this, and this is why I am inclined to the other explanation which seems to make more sense. I would love to get their side of the story. The problem is the rules prohibit creating a new account to discuss the old account being banned without warning. So this sort of kneecaps any potential conversation. Nonetheless, I have broken the rules, I guess, and created a new account and tried to establish some contact, but my ticket doesn't get any responses and based on my research it doesn't seem like it will.

Point taken about mirroring to Codeberg (or sr.ht), and this is something I was already planning on doing in terms of migration. At the same time, if there was any way to restore my GitHub, that would certainly simplify all of my next steps.

More than my own repos, I'm mainly concerned about my contributions to others. I've gotten hired twice just by someone contacting me from an issue that I had fixed on a GitHub discussion and that's no longer there.

My ideal resolution would be just to get an idea of what happened, what caused the ban, so I can avoid that in the future, and me taking my time to go through GitHub's terms of service so that I do understand what I'm agreeing to. I'll own it- when I was 14 I did not carefully read the terms of service agreement, which was updated who knows how many times since then. This was a long time ago.

I would even be willing to freeze my GitHub in its current state, restoring it but not allowing any further activity on it. I just want the record of to be able to say, "Hey, I fixed this issue in node-tar" or "I fixed this issue in Puppeteer Extra". Note: Edited OP to include my SO.

This reads like victim-blaming.

I had that initial reaction too, but he's right. I mean, I fucked up. I didn't read the Terms of Service evidently, and I'm suffering for that. What I do know for sure though is that I never, under any circumstances, contributed to anything malicous. That is: malware, cryptominers, and their ilk.

As a developer who's still early in their career, my hope is that someone will see this, understand the existential weight of having all that work disappear, and be sympathetic to a request for a second chance.

If I’ve understood your comments, I get the impression your business practices entail scraping. Often but not always, scraping for money happens in an adversarial context.

If that’s the case, your adversaries are incentivized to employ counter-measures and/or simply make your life difficult in general. It could be as straight-forward as a letter to the platform from in-house legal with reference to DCMA or similar. Or to put it another way, if you are scraping sites people will pay you to scrape, even if you aren’t on questionable legal ground there’s a non-trivial chance the scraping is making the targets unhappy.

It is important to establish facts and a narrative before asserting who the victim actually is.

Hah I get it. A lot of times there turns out to be something big left out, but this passes the smell check for me.

Not surprising. Asymmetrically-powerful personal technology is a threat to the State's monopoly of force and power. Same reason for US juristictions banning hardware "hacking" devices, firearms manufacturing, 3D printing - hell, even building and maintaining a PC is becoming untenable. The writing is on the wall for what is next.

This. Can't have a hand grenade. A peasant might take the whole entry team with them if they had one of those.

Binary explosive materials are freely available at your local general store.

So are Molotov’s.

> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?

The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals, so that one may be under "own control"? This is the essential value proposition with Linux and it's no wonder many prefer the comforting institution of proprietary prisons^Wsystems.

>Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals

extremely bizarre comparison given that 90% of people spend their time on the web which is utterly agnostic as to what operating system you're on.

The reality of Linux in 2025 isn't that you have to live like Tom Hanks in Cast Away and talk to a football as your best friend, it's that maybe you have to spend a few hours learning how the OS works. Almost your entire Steam Library runs on Linux courtesy of Valve and a lot of ambitious individuals.

If people are too lazy to invest even the tiniest bit of personal effort into trying out new things that's one thing, but at least be honest about it instead of giving me the "I don't want to live in the jungle" spiel. Don't be the tech equivalent of the person who runs around telling everyone they can't get into shape without a million dollars and a personal trainer

Not everything that runs on windows is proprietary I use a lot of open source software on Windows myself. Windows is also a lot easier to configure to run exactly the way I wanted to run and to be the OS I need it to be. It's extremely customizable and easy to control. It's also modifiable in many many more ways.

You are using subjective claims to back an objective assertion…

Windows is strictly quite a bit less configurable than Linux. You likely just know Windows better?

>Windows is strictly quite a bit less configurable than Linux.

I wish I could agree, but I just can't: the OP may be correct, depending on which Linux desktop environment he's talking about.

*My* Linux is indeed much more configurable than Windows, but I'm using KDE. However, that's only promoted by a few distros like openSUSE. Most users are going to get GNOME shoved in their faces whether they like it or not, and no, GNOME is *NOT* more configurable than Windows. GNOME needs to be used exactly as the GNOME devs want you to use it, because otherwise it'll just break on the next update. For many users who are not Linux experts, and perhaps use Linux at work where their IT departments only allow them to use GNOME, they think GNOME==Linux because that's what most distros push so strongly, so I can see why OP would make such a claim.

I think there are two factors that lead people to make statements like that. The first is a given: they're talking about configuring it as a user, not a developer. Obviously Linux can do whatever you want it to do if you build your own distro from source. But additionally, while Linux is also substantially configurable in userland, those configurations might not actually cover the cases people need. You can, for example, pick between GNOME, KDE, etc -- which, on a pedantic level, is "objectively" more customizable than Windows, where you have exactly one option. Yet, if the settings within all of the off-the-shelf GUI shells do not serve the use cases the settings of the single option on Windows does, users will have every reason to assert that, on a practical level, the degree of customizability is inferior and not sufficient for them.

The idea that KDE is not objectively more configurable, in every way, than Windows, is lunacy.

However, GNOME is completely the opposite; doing anything differently requires installing special extensions, which break every time an update happens. The devs do not want you changing it from their One True Vision for how a desktop should work (which, apparently, is almost identical to a tablet).

People who aren't Linux experts or long-time users may not even know about KDE, Xfce, etc., and just think that GNOME is the only way to use Linux. Most distros push it very strongly, and even in corporate environments it's pushed hard. My company uses Linux, but the IT department only supports GNOME; luckily I'm able to install KDE but I'm basically a reneage by doing so.

So if we're comparing Windows (which has only one DE, the Windows one), to GNOME (which for many users is synonymous with Linux), I'd say he's right: Windows is much more configurable and easy to customize.

Why the Linux world has gone this way, I honestly have no idea. It almost seems like a conspiracy.

Have not used Instagram in a decade - sincerely curious why would a physical address be part of the leaked data? Are users actually required or voluntarily provide this information to Facecrook?

My guess is that it might a couple things:

1. There's a map feature where users can assign their location to a photo that was taken. I suppose this could qualify as 'physical address'.

2. Businesses often have their physical addresses as part of their profile.

You can order things from Shops within the application. I am not an Instagram user so whether this is the only feature that records your address or not, I can't say.

I use Facebook with the email address that I use for many things, like online shops. Some years ago FB allowed "check what data we have on you" and I learnt that these online shops upload their customer data to FB, so they can target us in the ads they put on FB. Among others, it matches using email... so I'm guessing Zuck has my home address too.

But anyway, I have Instagram and WhatsApp on my phone. They probably can also see my location (or the SSID of networks around me) and figure out where I live.

Most people are incredible naive and willingly provide that information to Facebook/Meta. They even provide real names and videos and pictures of themselves and their relatives to these websites!

Sometimes Meta decides you are not real or your name is not real and block your account.

They will ask for a ID, then a video, then an ID, then a photo, then an ID, ...

After an undefined number of iterations, they made decide you are real enough, until ...

> block your account.

I would consider this as a favor.

No mention of any security review, or even testing. Reason enough to stay away from such tools.

Good point.

On the desktop. Laptop/mobile devices still significantly suffer under Linux compared to proprietary operating systems. The author even admits: "Tried getting Linux on my laptop over Christmas. Didn’t work." We have a lot more work remaining to claim any sort of victory.

Been running Linux Mint on this ThinkPad A485 for 1.5 yrs, problem-free. There is no feature that doesn't work. Even the media keys and stuff like the wifi-toggle function key work. Still, yeah, there are some things that are perennial problems for open source OSes, particularly wifi. Nice presentation on the topic: "All types of wireless in Linux are terrible and why the vendors should feel bad" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwIFz9na2lE

May I ask how long the battery lasts under lid suspension? And how quickly does wifi connect after wake? These two issues alone drove me begrudgingly to macOS.

Ooh, actually it's almost always plugged in so I couldn't tell you how long it will last asleep with the lid closed :\ Wifi reconnecting after wake is indiscernible to me because by the time I type in my password to unlock the machine, I'm online. I'm totally guessing but I imagine a big factor is simply the wifi card itself and its respective level of support in Linux. I would also say that wifi management has improved a lot in the past handful of years. I often forget I'm even using Linux because it's so easy to use and problem-free for me -- but again there's always that caveat that some machines have better-supported components than others lol

I had no trouble running Ubuntu on my ASUS Vivobook 4 years ago.

> It’s not legal to be denied jobs based on health.

There is a vast gap between what is not legal and what is actually actionable in a court of law, which is well known to a large power nexus.

If somebody pisses on your shoe every day, do you just try to reason with them from scratch on the 10th day? Would you introduce yourself first, and inquire as to the reason why they are assuming the position?

I don't understand this perception that it is sacrilegious to look at somebody's posting history to discern any patterns in their behaviour.

No one appears to be pissing on shoes, but a public urination analogy may be fitting here. Should the alleged offender be reprimanded for their obvious behavior, or have their past bladder expressions deeply scrutinized first?

Have you actually read the account history? Elon himself would be proud.

Not when the account’s entire purpose is to political troll or glaze a particular Internet celebrity. That kind of bad faith belongs on Reddit.

Schrödinger's comment: you wouldn't know an account's purpose if you did not first trawl its history.

Let be honest, you'd only bother trawling if you already had significant suspicion.

This suspicion is likely an unconscious bias.

Because we live in a world where people are paid to spread FUD and disinformation especially related to political topics. Meanwhile one only has so much time to address arbitrary arguments. If it looks like the argument is being made for disingenuous purposes then engaging with it is probably a waste of your time.

> Would you care to provide an example of such a product

Go to a pharmacy and look at the shelves and you will find such products. All made by companies looking for a profit.

Or just look everywhere around you, and you will see things made by corporation for their profit, which you have purchased to enrich your own life.

A pharmacy is a terrible example, as medicine is grossly overpriced for exactly the reason you state. The "users" may be getting "enriched" but the pharmacy is profiting a substantial order of magnitude more.

How could any pharmaceutical seller profit more than a patient whose life is saved by medicine?

There is no profit that is larger than your survival and your health. It's not even comparable. How can you value money above your own life?

Besides, most life saving and health saving medicine is cheap, so it doesn't matter if some revolutionary committee thinks they are "overpriced".

It's literally everything that people in relatively free markets buy.

Microsoft Windows is a great example that people will get really angry about, but like bubble gum also enriches the producer, seller and buyer.

Those are not great examples.

Bubble gum puts the buyer in a worse dental health situation.

Windows is a monopoly that controls the desktop market and the buyer would have been better off with a richer market with a variety of options.

You could have said cigarettes. They provide the same pleasure benefits as gum with unhealthy outcomes for the buyer.

You are making the mistake of asserting that the buyer exactly shares your values.

With Windows, I didn't assert that it was the value maximizing case, merely that it benefits both parties. Which it does, mostly likely to the advantage of the buyers.

By the same logic, an inmate in prison is benefiting from incarceration because they are receiving food and housing. Obviously, the costs of being imprisoned is greater than any "enrichment" from it, and this is exactly the case with Windows and almost all technology.

I would you my statement about relatively free markets addresses that.

Businesses that expand their licensing agreements with Microsoft aren't doing it because they are being coerced.

"Free" market coercion is probably the only reason companies like Microsoft are still in business.

It’s concerning that this was even a question!!!

I mean… you don’t need to look very hard. Smart phones? Google Maps?

Is your life not enhanced by these products?

Not really. The provide convenience, sure, but fundamentally all technology creates dependence and limits freedom by influencing behavior in subtle ways, while disproportionately benefiting the technology owner/operator.

How does, say, refrigeration create dependence and limit freedom?

What are we “supposed” to be like?

You are part of the demographic I described.

Cool. Got anything interesting to say to us, besides expressing your disbelief at our mere existence?

ChatGPT

This "enrichment" is wildly asymmetrical to users, however.

For sure I get much much more value out of it than I pay

That is not the asymmetrical power dynamic described between you and technology.

“Power dynamic” yet another metaphysical concern

Concern for metaphysics is shared by many great thinkers, including Aristotle and Kant, so your unwillingness to even apprehend it is disappointing.

next time you buy shampoo from the store, please do think about Aristotle and Kant

> It’s just cut, fried and salted potato right? My morning omelette is more highly processed.

Both the omelette and chips are highly processed foods - not the real food you should be eating for optimal health.

Eggs olive oil and vegetables aren’t real food I should be eating for optimal hwaltg? What is then?

Whole fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds: the type of stuff our evolutionary biology is actually adapted to thrive on. If you cannot access the human food niche as a result of where you live, then grains, starches, rice and beans are all an adequate addition or even substitute.

This is proof that even people with the wrong information can end up eating the right foods.