It seems like someone's Github has been blocked recently, every once in a while. Let me share my own experience. It happened several years ago. Maybe it still has some reference value.
Account has been blocked, find out the reason
It was December 2017. I woke up one morning and suddenly found that my account phith0n could not be logged in. The specific symptoms were:
I can't log in to my account. After logging in, I'm told clearly that my account has been blocked.
Github personal page access shows 404
All projects under my own name are accessed with 404
But the Group I created is still fine and not affected.
I was confused at the time, so I posted a complaint on Weibo. Later, someone told me in the comment area that he had received an email from DCMA. It was because a project was forked. This project was a cracked software. Many people in the security circle received emails or were blocked because of the fork of the project.
I remembered that I forked this project not long ago. And I also remembered that this was not my first offender. I had forked another project that violated the DMCA. It was code leaked by a large company. I forked it at the first time, but I didn’t take it seriously when I received the DMCA email. :
In other words, this cracked version incident is my second violation of DMCA, and this is indeed my mistake. I always regard forking projects as a step of "saving snapshots", so when I encounter some projects that I think may be deleted, I will fork them and save a copy.
I guess this is the direct reason why my account was blocked.
statistical loss
At that time, my account did not have as many followers and stars as it does now. This is a screenshot of my profile at that time:
Therefore, my biggest losses when my account was blocked were mainly the following:
What hurts the most is the more than a thousand stars I have ordered. I used star as a favorite, but now I have lost my favorite.
The code repository is lost, and the followers are lost. This is actually not bad, because I have the code locally, and followers can earn money slowly.
Some websites that use Github for third-party login cannot be logged in.
After knowing the general cause of the incident, there are two main things I have to do. The first thing is to find a way to recover the three losses mentioned above; the second thing is to contact the authorities to see if the matter can be rectified.
Recover damages
I didn’t have any expectations of being able to unblock, so I needed to recover my losses first. After I counted that my code was not lost, the main thing was to find the stars I clicked.
I used Google to search my Github ID, and I did find some backups of third-party websites, but either the information was too old and incomplete, or there was no list of stars, so I could only recover some of the losses.
But I soon discovered that the Github API is still accessible. That is, we can access the following API to find the warehouse that a user has starred:
https://api.github.com/users/[username]/starredFor example, the friend sam01101 who has been blocked in the past two days can find his star.
So I quickly backed up my star and calmed down quickly.
Later, another friend from the V station, No Light in the Wilderness, also encountered a similar problem, and he also used my method to back up the star.
Email complaint
The rest is up to chance. The account being blocked is indeed my fault, but there is a defensible reason for my problem, that is, I did not violate the DMCA on my own initiative, but it was caused by forking other people's projects. So I want to use this as a breakthrough.
I sent an email to ask why my account was banned, and I was told that it was indeed due to multiple violations of the DMCA:
And the other party replied twice, saying these two sentences respectively:
“Unfortunately, this means we'll have to keep your account suspended.
We're sorry for any disappointment, but we will not be restoring access to your account.
”
Basically, it was declared irrecoverable, but I finally gave it a try and wrote a long email, to the effect of:
Github is important to me, I have made a lot of contributions to open source, and I want to continue participating in open source projects
I realized my mistake and will be very cautious about forking projects in the future.
My own projects do not violate the DMCA, and there are other people involved in these open source projects. It would be unfair to other contributors to directly block me and these projects.
Strictly speaking, virtual assets are also assets and need to be protected
I don’t know what touched the other party. After this email, Github finally restored it to me:
The whole appeal process lasted for more than a month. The reason was also related to the fact that it was December and foreigners were celebrating Christmas, so it was delayed for a long time.
Review
Finally, when reviewing the whole thing, the lessons to be learned are:
Don't fork a project casually, especially if you know it is a project that violates the DMCA
Back up your code warehouse and star list in a timely manner
To log in to various websites, there must be another login method besides third-party login.
Trying to communicate will still produce results
Hope it helps others who are encountering similar problems now.
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