<story><title>GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/github-warns-users-reposting-youtube-dl-they-could-be-banned-201102/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colejohnson66</author><text>I’ve heard this over and over, but I never understood it. How is Git supposed to be decentralized when you push and pull from one place? Would you just set up multiple “origins” with each one pointing to a head maintainer’s computer (and named appropriately)? Because that sounds like a massive pain compared to a centralized system like GitHub.&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is the benefit of a VCS built on the idea of decentralization: not having to be online to make commits (&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt; SVN &lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;). But, in theory, could a centralized system work in “offline mode” like Git?</text></item><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;gt;&amp;quot;Time for a decentralized version control system?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I have to laugh at this one. Git &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a decentralized VCS, that was effectively re-centralized (via Github) for the sake of convenience.</text></item><item><author>jasode</author><text>Some example comments in this thread:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;People should move their youbube-dl repositories to servers hosted in Switzerland, &amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;Time for a decentralized version control system?&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;The nice thing about fossil&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;... those well-meaning suggestions are missing the &lt;i&gt;true difficulty&lt;/i&gt;:   The community wants a (1) &lt;i&gt;Schelling Point&lt;/i&gt;[0] for workflow&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;discussions&amp;#x2F;PRs that&amp;#x27;s also (2) censorship resistant.  So far, (1) and (2) contradict each other&amp;#x27;s goals.&lt;p&gt;Nobody has come up with a technology solution that satisfies both goals.  Yes, Fossil has has discussions built into the repo, but fossil is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a Schelling Point.  Yes, one can run Gitlab on a self-hosted Raspberry Pi from a home internet connection but that&amp;#x27;s also &lt;i&gt;not a stable Schelling Point&lt;/i&gt; because ISP like Comcast can shut that IP down for DMCA violation.[1]  And SMTP mailing lists also ultimately depend on a server that holds the discussion archive and a &lt;i&gt;well-known&lt;/i&gt; address for new users to send a &amp;quot;add my email&amp;quot; request.  Thus, the &lt;i&gt;existence of a well-known&lt;/i&gt; server becomes a &lt;i&gt;specific target&lt;/i&gt; for RIAA&amp;#x2F;DMCA takedown.&lt;p&gt;As for other &amp;quot;uncensorable&amp;quot; technology ideas such as IPFS, Freenet, blockchain, etc.  I haven&amp;#x27;t seen any proof-of-concept from other projects that demonstrates similar easy-to-use collaboration of Github.  Remember, it&amp;#x27;s not about the raw git repo... it&amp;#x27;s about the Focal Point for the &lt;i&gt;collaboration workflow&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Focal_point_(game_theory)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Focal_point_(game_theory)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.xfinity.com&amp;#x2F;support&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;comcast-dmca-compliance-policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.xfinity.com&amp;#x2F;support&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;comcast-dmca-compli...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>With git, &amp;quot;push&amp;#x2F;pull from one place&amp;quot; is merely a usage&amp;#x2F;behavior convention by collaborators. Nothing about git requires push or pull, and nothing about git requires that you only use a single &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; repository.&lt;p&gt;The key point about git is that &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; copy of the repository is semantically equivalent to every other copy. The one on your local machine is a fully fledged repo just like the one on your colleague&amp;#x27;s machine and just like the one on github or wherever else a &amp;quot;canonical repo&amp;quot; is hosted.&lt;p&gt;This is utterly different from older systems like svn or perforce, where the &amp;quot;central server&amp;quot; is semantically distinct from whatever you have on your machine.&lt;p&gt;At any time, you could decide that a different instance of the repo is canonical (shared push&amp;#x2F;pull), and that&amp;#x27;s what make git decentralized.</text></comment>
<story><title>GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/github-warns-users-reposting-youtube-dl-they-could-be-banned-201102/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colejohnson66</author><text>I’ve heard this over and over, but I never understood it. How is Git supposed to be decentralized when you push and pull from one place? Would you just set up multiple “origins” with each one pointing to a head maintainer’s computer (and named appropriately)? Because that sounds like a massive pain compared to a centralized system like GitHub.&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is the benefit of a VCS built on the idea of decentralization: not having to be online to make commits (&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt; SVN &lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;). But, in theory, could a centralized system work in “offline mode” like Git?</text></item><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;gt;&amp;quot;Time for a decentralized version control system?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I have to laugh at this one. Git &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a decentralized VCS, that was effectively re-centralized (via Github) for the sake of convenience.</text></item><item><author>jasode</author><text>Some example comments in this thread:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;People should move their youbube-dl repositories to servers hosted in Switzerland, &amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;Time for a decentralized version control system?&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;The nice thing about fossil&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;... those well-meaning suggestions are missing the &lt;i&gt;true difficulty&lt;/i&gt;:   The community wants a (1) &lt;i&gt;Schelling Point&lt;/i&gt;[0] for workflow&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;discussions&amp;#x2F;PRs that&amp;#x27;s also (2) censorship resistant.  So far, (1) and (2) contradict each other&amp;#x27;s goals.&lt;p&gt;Nobody has come up with a technology solution that satisfies both goals.  Yes, Fossil has has discussions built into the repo, but fossil is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a Schelling Point.  Yes, one can run Gitlab on a self-hosted Raspberry Pi from a home internet connection but that&amp;#x27;s also &lt;i&gt;not a stable Schelling Point&lt;/i&gt; because ISP like Comcast can shut that IP down for DMCA violation.[1]  And SMTP mailing lists also ultimately depend on a server that holds the discussion archive and a &lt;i&gt;well-known&lt;/i&gt; address for new users to send a &amp;quot;add my email&amp;quot; request.  Thus, the &lt;i&gt;existence of a well-known&lt;/i&gt; server becomes a &lt;i&gt;specific target&lt;/i&gt; for RIAA&amp;#x2F;DMCA takedown.&lt;p&gt;As for other &amp;quot;uncensorable&amp;quot; technology ideas such as IPFS, Freenet, blockchain, etc.  I haven&amp;#x27;t seen any proof-of-concept from other projects that demonstrates similar easy-to-use collaboration of Github.  Remember, it&amp;#x27;s not about the raw git repo... it&amp;#x27;s about the Focal Point for the &lt;i&gt;collaboration workflow&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Focal_point_(game_theory)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Focal_point_(game_theory)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.xfinity.com&amp;#x2F;support&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;comcast-dmca-compliance-policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.xfinity.com&amp;#x2F;support&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;comcast-dmca-compli...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thethethethe</author><text>&amp;gt; I’ve heard this over and over, but I never understood it. How is Git supposed to be decentralized when you push and pull from one place?&lt;p&gt;Git is a _distributed_ version control system, not a decentralized version control system. This simply means that users of the repository download the entire repository onto the machine they are making changes from. Distributed version control systems have no opinions on whether the source of truth for a given repository is decentralized, distributed, or centralized.</text></comment>