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I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github. At some p
by lkrubner 8y ago
I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github.
At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.
Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
- gressquel 8y agowhat did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change. as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.
- darawk 8y ago> what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change. I think that's his point. He's saying that LinkedIn has the opportunity to do lots of interesting things, and appears to be squandering it.
- gressquel 8y agoLinkedIn is excellent as it is; its a utility to keep your CV updated and connect with professionals. We don't want FB-like functionality here, thank god.
- darawk 8y agoTo be clear, I don't have an opinion on the issue myself. I was just trying to clarify the meaning of the grandparent comment.
- paulie_a 8y agoJust spam and advertisement. That is all LinkedIn has ever been. The contact aspect is shallow at best if you don't work in HR. It's a circle jerk.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoExcellent if you like endless spam from clueless recruiters who think that Java == JavaScript...
- markovbot 8y agoLinkedIn is a massive pile of dark patterns and spam. What universe are you living in that that's "excellent" or even acceptable?
- geodel 8y agoWell, it is excellent platform for self-declared thought leaders offering groundbreaking insights about business/culture and innovation.
- markovbot 8y agoIt's a shit platform for that. Users who are attempting to read these "groundbreaking insights" are subjected to a deluge of tracking code and other malicious behavior. There are plenty of excellent platform for people to share ideas, LinkedIn is absolutely not one of them.
- ggregoire 8y agoLinkedIn is fine as it is. I found my last 3 jobs on it.
- Kiro 8y agoLinkedIn is perfect already.
- noitsnot 8y agoI think it has actually improved. They added messaging and now I can get real-time recruiter spam to ignore.
- unreal37 8y agoLinkedIn acquired Lynda and are continuing to dominate the online learning space in enterprise. Not sure what you think "happened" to LinkedIn but they're doing great.
- olivermarks 8y agoI've heard claims that Skype is no longer peer to peer but runs on msft networks/infrastructure and performance has suffered. Can anyone confirm or shed any more light on that?
- justinclift 8y agoNot sure about the performance aspect, but your mention of them changing architecture to send all data through their own servers is well known. It went from seemed like a ~reasonable security architecture, to outright enabling the monitoring and forwarding of all user conversations. Ugh.
- lucb1e 8y agoAs I also replied to a sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17222045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17222045): It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
- kkotak 8y agoAgreed about Skype. They're trying to make it like a messaging platform, and added a lot of crappy - completely unintuitive, complex UX that now make it extremely difficult to use their core features of phone calls, video calls, screen-sharing.
- sashav 8y agoAgree. And I had a similar issue with Skype.
- varjag 8y agoYes, serious chance of GitHub fading like SourceForge did.
- sametmax 8y agoMe too. I'm waiting for the official transaction to be done and i'm preparing a plan b in case i have to migrate everything. More mitigation work is just what i needed. The skype one took years, many failures, and resulting in the use of several tools instead of one. Not a win.
- the_trapper 8y agoIsn't that one of the strengths of Git? The whole decentralization means that it is ridiculously simply to take the whole shebang and migrate to another service or even just self host on a cheap VPS.
- tenken 8y agoYes but with services like Issues and Wiki built into GitHub and Gitlab ... If you made use of the extra services by the Platform Provider, then you possibly have alot of non-trivial project dependencies to move around ... like your Issue history for the project.
- sametmax 8y agoYes but you still have configurations and docs referencing the repo to change. Then find a mean to alert all interested persons. And then write a script to migrate the issues. It's not a big deal, it's just work that I don't want to do. Espacially since I love github.
- genofon 8y agoI would agree with Skype, but what actually happened with LinkedIn? I remember in pre-Microsoft times they asked me for my google email and password.. right not to log-ing with google but the email and password! I understand it's more LinkedIn's fault than Microsoft merit, but I just wanted to say, IMO there were never "good times" for LinkedIn
- lucb1e 8y ago> what actually happened with LinkedIn? It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
- _jal 8y agoIt does bug me that they pollute search results with login-required resources. Search engines should treat that as abuse, or at the very least default to freely available resources, otherwise they just become a menu without prices.
- apple4ever 8y agoGoogle should start delisting their indexes for that reason, just like they are doing for sites with popups.
- richiezc 8y agoThat's not a microsoft decision per se, my friend who was previously SEO PM at LinkedIn made this change to increase signups.
- bluepeter 8y agoAnd even worse MSFT/LinkedIn is suing a small company for spidering LinkedIn's data.
- VectorLock 8y ago>At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
- devuo 8y agoTrue in regards to Skype, although that was an acquisition that was done under Balmer's and not Satya Nadella. In regards to LinkedIn I don't see what exactly you think has went/is wrong with LinkedIn from a product perspective since it has been acquired. There's no assurance had it not been acquired that it would have the features your advisees are claiming it should have. It is still the undisputed leader in its market.
- Svip 8y agoI could make the same concern for a bunch of other companies who were to buy GitHub. Indeed, my main concern with GitHub being bought by anyone is the uncertainty of its future, and the fact that it no longer will be 'neutral' ground, so to speak. It's not in particular Microsoft that concerns me (although their embrace of Git, this seems inevitable for a company like that, considering its history), but that GitHub is now losing its appeal; it being independent from the big players.
- wHTL 8y ago"Consider what happened to LinkedIn" Where are you going with this? LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%. Only good things have happened at LinkedIn (I'm an employee) since the MSFT acquisition. If LinkedIn is not doing something, then it sure will consider doing it now, with the vast resources it has available to it now.
- endorphone 8y ago"LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%." I honestly don't know a single professional who still updates or cares about LinkedIn. I have no doubt that it still has the momentum from late comers and straggers, but...eh. Mind you, it was on the outs long before Microsoft bought it. Not its fault, but it just hit the no longer novel curve. "with the vast resources it has available to it now" This part is almost parody, and reeks of comical self delusion (or astroturfing). It is the rally cry of how so many of Microsoft's purchases faded to black.
- mtgx 8y agoAnd just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing. I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
- sterlind 8y agoIt's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected. Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoPerhaps modifying code is out of the question, but consider how many juicy credentials / private keys etc must be tucked away in all those private repos...
- majewsky 8y agoGitHub is already an American company. What makes you think the NSA doesn't already receive a full copy of everything on their servers?
- majewsky 8y agoYou place a surprising amount of trust in a hash algorithm with known collisions (SHA1).
- gsnedders 8y agoCollisions, yes, but preimages are the bigger concern with hostile actors in git IMO.
- tialaramex 8y agoGiven the context this is not surprising at all. A hash collision in git lets you show somebody one change, then substitute it for a different change (with the same hash) in a version others see that appears (to the first person) to be the same code. This is a very narrow opportunity. It is _probably_ viable for a very powerful adversary (such as the NSA) to successfully trick someone working with binary blobs, like firmware for a black box. You can imagine a developer who (unusually) assiduously checks the firmware they're provided to see that it works as intended, then uploads a new version to github, and the NSA trap is sprung, they substitute a modification with the same hash but different firmware that, perhaps, causes your billion dollar spy satellite to point its cameras at the sun, destroying it. But if the developer is less assiduous this was all pointless, just send the "burn spy sat" firmware to the original developer and lie. Or if the spy camera owners decide not to take this mysterious last-minute update, or they try it on their ground-based prototype first to check it works... bzzt, your hugely expensive SHA-1 trick was a waste of time. Yes, SHA-1 is broken. Nobody should use it for anything new, and things that already use it should have been migrating already _before_ the official announcement from Google et al. But, Merkle-Damgard hashes have done this before, and will do it again, and so we know how this goes. You get a collision but don't get anything else, critically you don't get second-pre-image. This means, the NSA doesn't gain a way to substitute other stuff in a repo. They can only _collide_ their own things, by carefully choosing the inputs. So a plan where you just replace the _real_ firmware can't work. Also, the nature of this MD attacks smashes up the input state, which for git will usually be source code. A mysterious anonymous contributor is surprising enough, but when their proposed patch adds dozens of bytes of what seems to be binary noise, you know something is up. That's why my example attack above involved firmware, where this might be less suspicious. So yes, Git should have transitioned off SHA-1, and a window of opportunity for bad guys does exist, but it's not the sort of gaping window you imagine.
- clu3l355 8y agoI had a pretty similar experience with skype. I lost access to my connected email account and was essentially locked out of my account forever - repeated emails to support were met with silence, alas! Then I connected my facebook account to use skype instead... then they discontinued support for that. Now it's got to a point where attempting to create a new account on the OSX desktop version just shows an error screen every time, so I'm stuck unable to use skype forever. I've moved on to other, better solutions, naturally :)
- lioeters 8y agoCould you tell us what "other, better solutions" would you recommend?
- xir78 8y agoGitHub is also used for recruiting and many other data mining purposes, so seems obvious they’d find ways to restrict the data just enough or require you pay based on how you use the data somehow. And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
- flocial 8y agoIf Github does die out will be a slow and painful one. Skype was more of a radical change to the core technology. Of course anything is possible. I'm guessing many companies paying for Github's enterprise products are more concerned about the implications of Microsoft owning the company that hosts their proprietary code.
- foolfoolz 8y agoproprietary code which is hosted on git hub enterprise is customer-run on premise, there’s no outside access
- mnm1 8y agoIf Microsoft does to github what they did to Skype, pushes will go into the wrong repo without authentication for no reason just like Skype had contacts and messages jump from one account to another for no reason. Pretty much everything they touch software wise is a disaster. I wonder if there will be ads or how exactly they will fuck it up, but I know for sure they will. Gitlab is fairly equivalent in features and much better in their pricing and plans anyway so I expect a lot of projects to move.
- bluepeter 8y agoAds like this no doubt. https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/1002879517751414784 https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/1002879517751414784
- keithnz 8y agoMicrosoft is big, with different divisions you can consider what it did with consumer apps, but you'd be better off considering what it has done with developer tools. There, Microsoft shines. So, we will just have to wait and see what they do. My guess is the main thing they will do is make it super easy to deploy to azure from the github UI.
- bluepeter 8y agoExactly. And AWS/etc integrations will be the redheaded stepchild. Remember when MSFT had all that "super cool" IE-only stuff (VBScript, weird non-standard gradients) that then became the bane of every Web developer everywhere?