Corporate Kangaroo Court – The GitHub Edition

If you value your stuff, you should own your stuff

This tweet about someone’s GitHub account getting suspended has been making the rounds lately.

You see these all the time: someone’s Google account suddenly gets locked and the person loses emails and can’t access anything anymore. Or their business account gets blocked and their business stops because of that Or someone’sApple id gets blocked and they lose all their photos, music in the process. .Or they get locked out of their dev account and can’t maintain their app. Or someone’s Wise account gets blocked and they can’t access their money. Or their Amazon account gets locked and they lose their gift card credit. Or their AirBnb account gets locked and they lose their rental revenue¹. The pattern is always the same: people suddenly can’t access their account, have little to no explanation for why, recourse is never very explicit, rarely fair, never appealable.

If they get sufficient traction, some community manager might get on the case, it becomes a PR issue, and the problem promptly gets resolved. That tweet made the rounds, and GitHub gave them back their access. What worries me is the thousands of similar cases where people don’t have a platform. I have 225 followers on twitter, a good portion of them are probably bots, and I suspect the rest hates me and is just in it to see me crash. That is to say that, were such things to happen to me, I’d be on my own.

Companies are fiefdoms, they’re not democracies with a (albeit always slow) working judicial system. If one of the automated sheriffs identifies you as a criminal, it doesn’t put you on trial, but directly sentences you to jail. Your process from there-on is never documented, goes through the customer-support jesting court, where you shall kneel in front of the local little lord’s justice, pleading your innocence and begging for mercy. Whatever judgment they render is final, non appealable, and is based on human appreciation more than facts. If your sentence is not commuted, you’re summarily sent to exile, never to return.

Or not. No-one knows because their law is not public, the judicial system is not public, you’re on your own. When you consider that Peter Thiel wants you to live in such corporately administered societies, considering their present day record, it makes you dream of the future…

At some point during my first year of engineering school, my account got locked, out of nowhere. I popped into the network admin office, and someone informed me the reason attached to my ticket was: “good prank! ~Panda”². I had promptly been condemned to 2 weeks of community service to get my account re-instated.

You see: that network admin office was ran by other students, and they really, really didn’t want to do the job they were paid for ; getting people to do that work for free instead of them was much more appealing. The rate of infraction was too low. So they used the first spec of power they had to immediately abuse it and dip into corruption by using the tiniest of excuses (or in my case a completely made up one) to get people into the “community service pool”.

I was already a dick back then, so I tattled on them to the uni’s director. That got me unlocked, and very much flagged as a target for the next 3 years. Needless to say that it taught me a life lesson on how much trust to put in people in charge, as soon as they have any sort of marginal power.

Since then I have lived like a crazy prep’er, building my own infra, self-hosting anything I can. I usually put no trust in third parties. I always use email sign-in rather than Google single sign-on. I have my own photo storage, my email is on a shared host that I pay, everything backed up offsite on disks and on the cloud. (The chance of losing both accesses concurrently remaining relatively limited).

But I’m using GitHub, and I trusted them without thinking for some reason. Or so I did. That tweet rubbed me in the wrong way, almost like a treason.

I have 187 repositories, and every single one of them is precious to me. Despite the garbage that most of them contain, losing any of them would make me cry. It’s my code, don’t you dare separating me from it. So I moved everything onto my own server. (More on that very soon).

All these platforms go for scale. They don’t have the time or means to have individualized relations with people, especially when said people aren’t part of some enterprise-scale company who provides a sizeable chunk of their revenue. If they catch one good person for every bad one they eliminate, it’s seen as an unfortunate side-effect, a necessary cost, and they’re fine with it.

If you want to have a reliable way of storing your code, you should store it yourself. You always pay for stuff one way or another. Making sure that you own your own code isn’t free. If you choose convenience, you might pay for it another way.