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Github confirms random 401 responses on unauthenticated git clones are no mistake (eviltoast.org)

submitted 6 days ago by orhtej2@eviltoast.org to c/programming@programming.dev

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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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[-] TootGuitar@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago

We’re talking about AI bots scraping GitHub in this post. Nothing to do with books.

[-] Quantenteilchen@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 5 days ago

Yes, and I was talking about the practice of some AI companies buying books in bulk to feed to their LLMs en masse which sometimes/often destroys the book in the process.

I was trying to build a bridge between those two related topics to "justify" the mistake and make it an intentional remark instead.

this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026

157 points (99.4% liked)

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