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Comment by Shared404

4 years ago

Given that having an email address attached to commits is a fairly standard component of git, is there a way to prevent this?

Short of using burner/fake email addresses of course

6 comments

Shared404

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judge2020  4 years ago

The best way, at least when committing to GH, is to use your GH email itself like so

  8601934+judge2020@users.noreply.github.com

You can find this in email settings https://github.com/settings/emails under “Keep my email addresses private”

You can’t receive email at this address, so, hopefully, anyone that needs to contact you can find your real email elsewhere.

  • Shared404  4 years ago

    I don't actually use Github for my personal stuff, but that's good to know either way!

    Thanks for the heads up.

mwt  4 years ago

The only (remotely) effective strategy I've seen is to use burners that only show up in commits and then report all companies using them to GitHub itself in the hopes that eventually those companies will somehow be reprimanded.

Of course, the problems with this strategy are that the manual work scales poorly, there are two or more points of failure, and the best outcome is only marginally positive, doing nothing to deter future abuse.

  • myself248  4 years ago

    > the best outcome is only marginally positive, doing nothing to deter future abuse.

    This is the problem with virtually all spam remedies so far. If the penalty is that their success rate merely goes down, well it's already dismal, what's another few percent even matter? The economics are massively in their favor.

    Until they start getting kicked off platforms for a certain number of spam complaints, the way creators get kicked off platforms for a certain number of DMCA strikes (which can be bogus, that's a problem I'd not like to copy), there's nothing incentivizing them to really, really hesitate and check with legal before pulling the trigger on an email.

    Spammers should live in fear. Until we make that happen, nothing will change.

    • mwt  4 years ago

      > Until they start getting kicked off platforms for a certain number of spam complaints

      This is even far from a solution. The spam I get is always from a newsletter or "startup" I had never heard of before. This leads me to believe MyMachineLearningNewsletterForum will just rebrand under a new name if they were ever given some death penalty from the Internet (putting aside how infeasible that is).