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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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[-] orhtej2@eviltoast.org 109 points 6 days ago
[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 58 points 6 days ago
[-] TootGuitar@sh.itjust.works 17 points 5 days ago

The word is “scrapers,” as in to scrape.

[-] farmgineer@nord.pub 11 points 5 days ago

no disassemble!

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[-] bjc@scribe.disroot.org 67 points 6 days ago

did microsoft just lock up a good chunk of open source behind a (stochastic (for now)) login wall?

this feels like it should violate the gpl, but i bet it doesn't. truly devious.

[-] Corngood@lemmy.ml 54 points 6 days ago

Public GitHub repositories remain public and can still be accessed without a GitHub account, including repositories owned by paying customers. However, a subset of unauthenticated clone or fetch requests may now be asked to authenticate as part of GitHub’s protections against abusive traffic. If you receive a 401, update your application or script to use GitHub credentials.

Uh okay.

[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 32 points 6 days ago

I wonder why people still keep up with this bullshit and not switch to some better public Git hosting provider.

[-] ramble81@lemmy.zip 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Can you help me find a solution that:

  1. I don’t have to self host
  2. Provides SSO
  3. Provides local and remote build agents and actions
  4. Allows me to store private proprietary code
  5. Supports static IPs for runners

Number 4 rules out Codeberg. The only other one that really supports that level is Azure DevOps, and well….

[-] orhtej2@eviltoast.org 8 points 6 days ago

Could you suggest an alternative?

I know Codeberg exists, but they had reliability problems recently IIRC?

sr.ht and Gitlab are paid products.

Technically one can self-host a forge, but my attempts at setting up CI were unsuccessful (IMO that's way more complicated that setting up the forge itself).

[-] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 6 days ago

Codeberg's couldn't be much worse than github's reliability since 2019

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[-] Splendid4117@piefed.social 13 points 6 days ago

you can self host gitlab too, and its free. yes, you CAN buy a license, but you can run it free forever. you can also use their SaaS free forever too.

at least right now, I think it's the best alternative, though I completely understand people wanting to favor OSS.

disclaimer: I have contributed code to gitlab, but I am NOT an employee.

[-] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

Their SaaS is pretty good but of course you are running the same chain trust. You're betting that gitlab doesn't enshittify within the next 5 years which is hardly a guarantee.

Self-hosting gitlab is very resource-intense and complex from what I tried, though I did only try it two or three times.

I did set up forgejo which was way easier and less heavy but I haven't tested it much so who knows.

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[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 6 points 5 days ago

but they had reliability problems recently

Like GitHub, yes. But if you're not going to selfhost Forgejo they're the best option.

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[-] somegeek@programming.dev 21 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Holy crap this is huge!

Open source is no longer open source on github.

[-] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Be ready to supply your fingerprints using Microsoft Authenticator app and your free source access subscription for only 49 USD per month! /s

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 17 points 5 days ago

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 17 points 5 days ago

This might be a problem for many projects. Rust, comes to mind, that pulls everything from Github and is 100% dependent on it. Same as Go. They pull everything from Github.

It might make sense for them to use something like radicle, a distributed git. Many people can easily pick what they want to distribute. Scripts can be written that make the local node only host the projects you depend on. That would naturally make popular projects more available.

[-] expr@programming.dev 17 points 5 days ago

I'm worried about nix, honestly. An absolute truckload of nix packages pull their source from GitHub. It's the primary way to distribute flakes, too.

[-] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 11 points 5 days ago

nixpkgs is literally a GitHub repo

[-] exdor@programming.dev 3 points 3 days ago

Flathub

Nixos

GrapheneOS

uBlue (Bazzite, Bluefin etc), Secureblue

90% of android and linux apps

github is scary big

[-] ChaosMonkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 5 days ago

Wait, doesn't rust cargo pull from crates.io?

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[-] one_old_coder@piefed.social 25 points 6 days ago

Our aim is to make public repositories accessible without authentication as much as possible. However,...

It's new reddit then. I was still using Github as a shitty backup for my projects, but an alternative may be required faster than expected.

[-] dontbelievethis@sh.itjust.works 15 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I deleted my repos on github and moved to a mix of codeberg and selfhosted forgejo.

But I do occasionally fork/clone/reupload random projects from github to github so they have to spend money on storage and the scrapers.

[-] programmerlexi@sh.itjust.works 9 points 5 days ago

Git objects are deduplicated, the storage cost doesn't increase.

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[-] SomeRandomNoob@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 6 days ago

Time to leave github! Boycott is the only language companies understand!

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 points 5 days ago

Done a long time ago. It would be great if others at least had official mirrors. A mirrors.txt with a list of links in the repo would be very helpful and could be a start.

But I'm afraid people will either just stay or start hosting on the cursor git forge.

[-] Widdershins@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

First time ever seeing color in a post title

[-] orhtej2@eviltoast.org 4 points 5 days ago

Rendered fixed font with the use of one and only bacticks (`)

[-] 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?

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

Our aim is to make public repositories accessible without authentication as much as possible. However, like much of the Internet, we continue to see significant increases in the volume of robot traffic recently which has increased the need for verification, for example CAPTCHAs.

As I expected, it's about combating (excessive) bot traffic.

[-] AnnaFrankfurter@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 days ago

Hmm... I don't know whose building all those bots to scrape all of internet

[-] sleet01@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 days ago

"We're all trying to find the scraping LLM who did this!"

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

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