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Git is great. It’s FOSS, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to a hostile corporate takeover. Take email for example. It’s an open standard, yet it’s usage is dom

by rcme 3y ago

Git is great. It’s FOSS, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to a hostile corporate takeover. Take email for example. It’s an open standard, yet it’s usage is dominated by large corporate players.

MattGaiser 3y ago
The alternative is a spam and scam mess that would kill email.
- pmlnr 3y ago
  BS. There are and were (I lament dspam) excellent spam filters, plus if you enforce greylisting barely any spam gets through.
  - elric 3y ago
    Indeed. And if we hit spammers with half the hammer that pirates have been hit with, it'd be a much smaller problem ... but for some reason, spam seems to be immune to legal action.
    - BowBun 3y ago
      Spam inflates numbers and ends up benefiting nearly everyone except the end user in the short-term: - Platforms benefit from larger activity volume, thus increasing their numbers and $$$ - FTC and other regulatory bodies get to take low-effort actions and tout the massive effects, ignoring the fact that they're slapping the ocean with a stick. - All the systems in between are charging each other for artificial traffic, resulting in a convenient ponzi-like situation. I wouldn't be surprised if large chunks of vendor (SendgridTwilio, cloud providers, etc.) revenues are from illegitimate business.
      - wpm 3y ago
        I imagine a similar thing is happening in the phone space too. Scam calls are 99% of the calls I get on my cell phone now, and probably close to that for "revenue from calls" that the providers are raking in. If I could spin up my own cell network like I could an email server and a domain, you bet that the big cell/telecom players would "blacklist" my domain for "spam" the moment they caught whiff and instantly make it almost useless, same as Gmail does.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    What about non-technical users? For my parents and siblings, using "free" online email from a major provider, like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo certainly keeps them safer than old school POP3 (download to your PC). Email can get lost, scanning attachments was poor, and spam filtering was terrible, even by major Internet providers.
    - pmlnr 3y ago
      Dude... IMAP is decades old. I used Squirrelmail webmail when gmail came out.
      - throwaway2037 3y ago
        In my pre-webmail experience, many ISPs did not offer IMAP as it requires them to keep email stored on their servers long term. The advantage of POP3: They force you to download it.
- rcme 3y ago
  You can run an LLM in your browser now. Pretty sure even a low parameter LLM is more than capable of detecting spam. And thats not even considering more specialized approaches.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  It is true that opt-in has bad UX. You can't easily "never send to spam".
jerf 3y ago
Email has the issue that it wants to be an arbitrary person-to-person communication protocol, which communicates through servers. Therefore, if I want to email you, the behavior of your server is my problem. The set of such people I may want to communicate with is large and heterogenous. Git does not have that problem. If four of my buddies want to get together and start a startup together, and I start out by simply setting up git on an SSH server, the four of us do not care that GitHub recently extended the Git protocol with a hot new feature that only works on Windows 13. We just use our git. I am not in the position of wanting to share arbitrary source code with everyone in the world. The relevant social circles are much, much smaller. I don't know that I'd say git is immune to such takeover, but it is about as resistant as it is feasible to be. The problem with GitHub isn't git. In fact, that is the least problematic aspect of all. The git repo, the branches, the tags, commit history, signatures, that's all the stuff that is not only easy to take with you, the git protocol all but stuffs them all down your throat with a "git clone". You have to ask git not to give you a fully independent copy of the whole repo. The problem with GitHub is all the other stuff; the issues, the PRs, the conversations in there, the fact you gave out so many URLs pointing to github, etc. The thing that makes me most nervous about GitHub and my Go libraries is that if GitHub does turn evil, I've got "github.com" embedded in a lot of people's source code. I've decided it's not quite worth it to host on my own domains (plus I imagine people look askance at that anyhow) but it's a long-term concern of mine.
geraldwhen 3y ago
Git lfs is a lousy hack. I wish git had better support for large binary formats.
- TOGoS 3y ago
  The sad thing is that there's not much in Git's data model[1] that makes it bad for storing large binary blobs. An alternative implementation of Git (the program), or even a future version of vanilla `git`, could handle them just fine without the lfs hack, which I agree is horrendous, by using a different on-disk format for them and/or making sparse clones easier, and thereby remain 100% compatible with every other Git repository. [1] There are some tweaks I would make, like using a standard Merkle tree hash function instead of sha1("blob "+size+"\0"+data), and a text-based encoding for commit and tree objects, but those are bike shed paint. I created a Git-like system based on these ideas that uses URNs and RDF/XML to make going 'under the hood' with a text editor a bit more pleasant than the experience with Git is, which is important because Git's tooling is far superior: https://github.com/TOGoS/ContentCouch/ https://github.com/TOGoS/ContentCouch/
- haradion 3y ago
  Shallow/sparse clones help with some of the pain points there, at least around time to clone and local repo size.
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    I’ve got Jenkins configured to heck and back. Still a hassle though, and it’s clear it’s not a full solution.
newswasboring 3y ago
I don't get it, what exactly do you think is wrong with the email landscape? Its a standard protocol everyone can use, the only restrictions being when you start using other's services. Maybe I'm just not abreast enough on this.
- LanceH 3y ago
  I you want to send email from your server, you're entirely dependent on how the other servers run by the recipients view you. So if you have a bad IP address, they might not let your email through. The procedure for establishing yourself as a legitimate sender of email and not spam varies, and would need to be resolved with the operators of every server you might ever want to send mail to. So you're running your mailing list which people have triple opted into, with confirmations and everything. Someone marks your email as spam and now everyone with a google address is bouncing. You contact google to resolve this and get a canned reply saying they've reviewed it, it's correct, and they will take no further action, and won't discuss it further. Good luck.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    How does this detract from email, the standard?
    - rcme 3y ago
      It impacts email as a standard because Google is a gatekeeper of what is supposed to be an open standard.
      - newswasboring 3y ago
        Google is a gatekeeper for it's customers. Which is quite fair I guess. You are not entitled to anyone else's inbox
        rcme 3y ago
        And Google has such a dominant position in the marketplace that your only choice is to use Google (or a handful of other large providers). That was the thesis: E-mail is an open standard dominated by large corporations.

by rcme 3y ago

MattGaiser 3y ago

The alternative is a spam and scam mess that would kill email.

pmlnr 3y ago
BS. There are and were (I lament dspam) excellent spam filters, plus if you enforce greylisting barely any spam gets through.
- elric 3y ago
  Indeed. And if we hit spammers with half the hammer that pirates have been hit with, it'd be a much smaller problem ... but for some reason, spam seems to be immune to legal action.
  - BowBun 3y ago
    Spam inflates numbers and ends up benefiting nearly everyone except the end user in the short-term: - Platforms benefit from larger activity volume, thus increasing their numbers and $$$ - FTC and other regulatory bodies get to take low-effort actions and tout the massive effects, ignoring the fact that they're slapping the ocean with a stick. - All the systems in between are charging each other for artificial traffic, resulting in a convenient ponzi-like situation. I wouldn't be surprised if large chunks of vendor (SendgridTwilio, cloud providers, etc.) revenues are from illegitimate business.
    - wpm 3y ago
      I imagine a similar thing is happening in the phone space too. Scam calls are 99% of the calls I get on my cell phone now, and probably close to that for "revenue from calls" that the providers are raking in. If I could spin up my own cell network like I could an email server and a domain, you bet that the big cell/telecom players would "blacklist" my domain for "spam" the moment they caught whiff and instantly make it almost useless, same as Gmail does.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  What about non-technical users? For my parents and siblings, using "free" online email from a major provider, like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo certainly keeps them safer than old school POP3 (download to your PC). Email can get lost, scanning attachments was poor, and spam filtering was terrible, even by major Internet providers.
  - pmlnr 3y ago
    Dude... IMAP is decades old. I used Squirrelmail webmail when gmail came out.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      In my pre-webmail experience, many ISPs did not offer IMAP as it requires them to keep email stored on their servers long term. The advantage of POP3: They force you to download it.
rcme 3y ago
You can run an LLM in your browser now. Pretty sure even a low parameter LLM is more than capable of detecting spam. And thats not even considering more specialized approaches.
renewiltord 3y ago
It is true that opt-in has bad UX. You can't easily "never send to spam".

jerf 3y ago

Email has the issue that it wants to be an arbitrary person-to-person communication protocol, which communicates through servers. Therefore, if I want to email you, the behavior of your server is my problem. The set of such people I may want to communicate with is large and heterogenous. Git does not have that problem. If four of my buddies want to get together and start a startup together, and I start out by simply setting up git on an SSH server, the four of us do not care that GitHub recently extended the Git protocol with a hot new feature that only works on Windows 13. We just use our git. I am not in the position of wanting to share arbitrary source code with everyone in the world. The relevant social circles are much, much smaller. I don't know that I'd say git is immune to such takeover, but it is about as resistant as it is feasible to be. The problem with GitHub isn't git. In fact, that is the least problematic aspect of all. The git repo, the branches, the tags, commit history, signatures, that's all the stuff that is not only easy to take with you, the git protocol all but stuffs them all down your throat with a "git clone". You have to ask git not to give you a fully independent copy of the whole repo. The problem with GitHub is all the other stuff; the issues, the PRs, the conversations in there, the fact you gave out so many URLs pointing to github, etc. The thing that makes me most nervous about GitHub and my Go libraries is that if GitHub does turn evil, I've got "github.com" embedded in a lot of people's source code. I've decided it's not quite worth it to host on my own domains (plus I imagine people look askance at that anyhow) but it's a long-term concern of mine.

geraldwhen 3y ago

Git lfs is a lousy hack. I wish git had better support for large binary formats.

TOGoS 3y ago
The sad thing is that there's not much in Git's data model[1] that makes it bad for storing large binary blobs. An alternative implementation of Git (the program), or even a future version of vanilla `git`, could handle them just fine without the lfs hack, which I agree is horrendous, by using a different on-disk format for them and/or making sparse clones easier, and thereby remain 100% compatible with every other Git repository. [1] There are some tweaks I would make, like using a standard Merkle tree hash function instead of sha1("blob "+size+"\0"+data), and a text-based encoding for commit and tree objects, but those are bike shed paint. I created a Git-like system based on these ideas that uses URNs and RDF/XML to make going 'under the hood' with a text editor a bit more pleasant than the experience with Git is, which is important because Git's tooling is far superior: https://github.com/TOGoS/ContentCouch/ https://github.com/TOGoS/ContentCouch/
haradion 3y ago
Shallow/sparse clones help with some of the pain points there, at least around time to clone and local repo size.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  I’ve got Jenkins configured to heck and back. Still a hassle though, and it’s clear it’s not a full solution.

newswasboring 3y ago

I don't get it, what exactly do you think is wrong with the email landscape? Its a standard protocol everyone can use, the only restrictions being when you start using other's services. Maybe I'm just not abreast enough on this.

LanceH 3y ago
I you want to send email from your server, you're entirely dependent on how the other servers run by the recipients view you. So if you have a bad IP address, they might not let your email through. The procedure for establishing yourself as a legitimate sender of email and not spam varies, and would need to be resolved with the operators of every server you might ever want to send mail to. So you're running your mailing list which people have triple opted into, with confirmations and everything. Someone marks your email as spam and now everyone with a google address is bouncing. You contact google to resolve this and get a canned reply saying they've reviewed it, it's correct, and they will take no further action, and won't discuss it further. Good luck.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  How does this detract from email, the standard?
  - rcme 3y ago
    It impacts email as a standard because Google is a gatekeeper of what is supposed to be an open standard.
    - newswasboring 3y ago
      Google is a gatekeeper for it's customers. Which is quite fair I guess. You are not entitled to anyone else's inbox
      - rcme 3y ago
        And Google has such a dominant position in the marketplace that your only choice is to use Google (or a handful of other large providers). That was the thesis: E-mail is an open standard dominated by large corporations.