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Since yesterday a lot of users in Europe found their workflows failing due to Github seemingly randomly throwing HTTP/401 on git clone/git pull when interacting with public repos without authentication.

It was now confirmed by staff member that this indeed is intentional and no further steps are planned at this point.

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[-] droopy4096@lemmy.ca 7 points 5 days ago

AI bot problem is real and there is no good solution to it. Look, I very much dislike GitHub for various reasons BUT currently there is no good way to throttle AI bots that literally trash web. They are like that geeky classmate who can never hold his liquors: it's nice having them around for some answers, but they ramble a lot and shit/puke in random places of the house making it unlivable.

[-] somegeek@programming.dev 8 points 5 days ago

They are the ones who created this crap

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 points 5 days ago

BUT currently there is no good way to throttle AI bots that literally trash web.

Sure is. There are plenty of protocols resilient to DDOS.

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 4 points 5 days ago

DDOS is most effective on expensive endpoints. A git clone isn't exactly cheap. Fetching is especially expensive if you vary the revisions you fetch.

Does GitHub have an alternative here? A Git-compatible protocol with anonymous access that is DDoS-resilient?

[-] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 days ago

have you never heard of anubis? tons of websites use that to screen out most of the AI scrapers.

this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
157 points (99.4% liked)

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