The Software Heritage Archive (@swheritage) wants to deadname me forever.
Part 1 of 3-ish.
https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/4968198-the-software-heritag
@arborelia @swheritage
I occasionaly use SHA packages to reproduce old setups by via essenially a local list of content-addressed archives and pinned commits. I see how re-writing could be disruptive to that workflow.
As long as there aren't functional code-changes, I do think it's worth breaking the content-addressed semantics and serving a redirect for the archives. The hashes wouldn't match, but there could be some (PII-respecting) meta-data available about it. I'm more than willing to jump through those hoops on my end.
No re-directs for commits-- but how long can a git tag be? Could there be tags mapping old commits to their re-writes, so that checking out an old hash (in full) still works? The suggestion is, uh, iffy (major mod. to the repo, only maybe possible?, & would it scale?), but my point is that legal PII rights come first and the technology + users, if they believe in their mission first and foremost, will adapt to accommodate.
@antlers @swheritage If the goal is to engineer a complex solution that meets all of SWH's goals while respecting trans people, it turns out it's even more complex than this. I haven't gotten there in the story yet
But it would require them to work with trans people to develop the solution, which they won't.
More relevantly, by now, they also won't consider easier solutions that work against their goals, such as taking down their archive of ftfy.
@ryanc @arborelia @antlers @swheritage Can't you file a copyright claim at that point?
@endrift @arborelia @antlers @swheritage I sent them a takedown notice.
French law doesn't have anything like fair use, so...
@ryanc @arborelia @antlers @swheritage I smell multiple legal cases against them incoming
@endrift @ryanc @arborelia @antlers @swheritage I smell weirdly technical answers.
I don't actually think there's blockchain stuff behind SHA; I've interacted with its API too much. What I do think there is is an abuse of git (it's very unlikely that you'll have two git commits with the exact same hash) and part of the datastore involves deduplication via git histories. This almost makes sense, but it does mean that undoing that will require a lot of work that may or may not cause downstream issues.
There's a git koan about this.
There's been times the SHA is the only place I can find someone's long-dead project that they spite-deleted after someone made a passing remark about them they didn't like, causing them to go full nuclear destruction on every bit of their code/online presence.
This has happened enough times that I'd afford two Seattle priced lattes if I had a quarter every time someone did this to otherwise important software.
@endrift @ryanc @arborelia @antlers @swheritage And this sucks. Both in that they're one of the few places that isn't Internet Archive that has software archives that don't flake out.
One of the core issues is that there's no *clean* way of handling name changes between histories, and in part that's by design (imagine editing software to credit yourself that you didn't write) but leaves others in the dust (post-namechange, etc.)
@ryanc @endrift @antlers @swheritage good luck! They have never replied to my takedown notice but I bet if you’re in the EU you’ll have a better shot
@ryanc @endrift @antlers @swheritage and yeah they now have my birthdate and birthplace and a scan of my ID, all for nothing it seems
@arborelia @endrift @antlers @swheritage I'm a UK resident and should have EU and UK passports soon, so... maybe?
If they ask for a scan of my ID, I'll contact Gandi's legal department, then get a French lawyer, screw that.
@ryanc @endrift @antlers @swheritage oh actually I ended up reading the UK’s version of the GDPR and it sounds _powerful_
@arborelia @endrift @antlers @swheritage I the right to rectification for gender purposes regularly. I also have a California address so I can use California Consumer Privacy Act on American companies.
@ryanc I don't like this dystopian cyberpunk take on being a citizen of the world...
@womble I'll probably end up with a different gender listed on each of my passports too. 😡
@womble Also, I do strategic work at an AAA megacorp, so my position in the cyberpunk dystopia is a little odd.
@arborelia @endrift @antlers @swheritage
From what I can tell, the way French copyright law is written seems as though it would constitute infringement of the author's moral rights to refuse to honor a request to change how they're identified.
It additionally seems to grant authors a right to withdraw their work that cannot be contracted away, though paying compensation to the publisher may be required.
Again, as far as I can tell, an open source license does not remove the author's moral rights.
These people seem to be doing a serious fuck around and find out with French copyright law...
@arborelia @antlers @swheritage Oh, they archived my software that is marked "all rights reserved" and absolutely is not under any open source license.
They demand a date of birth for removal requests, assholes.