The Register: GitHub Copilot auto-coder snags emerge, from seemingly spilled secrets to bad code, but some love it. “Early testers of GitHub’s Copilot, which uses AI to assist programmers to write code, have found problems including alleged spilled secrets, bad code, and copyright concerns, though some see huge potential in the tool.”
Silicon Republic: GitHub’s new AI tool is like predictive text for programmers. “The company, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, collaborated with OpenAI to develop GitHub Copilot. This will act as an AI programming assistant in GitHub’s visual studio code editor. The new tool will give suggestions for lines of code or entire functions inside the editor, acting like predictive text for coders.”
Now available: data dump of puns. From the page: “Open source Puns! We’ve got a data dump of all of our puns on our site. You can check out the Github repository here.”
Mashable: Scientists figured out the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine’s code and posted it on Github. “Hackers have posted a brand new trove of reverse-engineered data on Github. And by ‘hackers,’ I mean ‘scientists.’ And that trove of ‘reverse-engineered data’ is the mRNA sequence which makes Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine work.”
Data Center Knowledge: GitHub Sponsors Expands to Help Open Source Developers Make More Money . “GitHub Sponsors wants to make sure independent open source developers can get paid for what they do, so the project has been expanded by adding corporate patrons.”
CNBC: GitHub head of HR resigns after investigation into firing of Jewish employee over Capitol riot comments. “Microsoft-owned GitHub, the code sharing site for software developers, said on Sunday that the company’s head of human resources resigned after an investigation into the company’s dismissal of a Jewish employee found ‘significant errors of judgment and procedure.’”
ZDNet: Personal data of 16 million Brazilian COVID-19 patients exposed online. “The personal and health information of more than 16 million Brazilian COVID-19 patients has been leaked online after a hospital employee uploaded a spreadsheet with usernames, passwords, and access keys to sensitive government systems on GitHub this month.”
Neowin: Google discloses ‘high’ severity security flaw in GitHub. “The vulnerability has been classified as a ‘high’ severity issue by Google Project Zero. We’ll spare you the nitty-gritty technical details – and you’re free to view them in detail here if you want – but the meat of the matter is that workflow commands in GitHub Actions are extremely vulnerable to injection attacks.”
Dark Reading: Research Finds Nearly 800,000 Access Keys Exposed Online. “When AWS keys were exposed in GitHub repositories, GitHub responded by invalidating those keys. Researchers at Digital Shadows have found that this proper action doesn’t end the issue of exposed keys as they have found almost 800,000 keys available on the Web.”
ZDNet: GitHub just buried a giant open-source archive in an Arctic vault for 1,000 years. “Microsoft-owned GitHub has finally moved its snapshot of all active public repositories on the site to a vault in Norway. GiHub announced the archiving plan last November and on February 20 followed through with the 21 terabyte snapshot written to 186 reels of film.”
ZDNet: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references. “GitHub is working on replacing the term “master” on its service with a neutral term like ‘main’ to avoid any unnecessary references to slavery, its CEO said on Friday. The code-hosting portal is just the latest in a long line of tech companies and open source projects that have expressed support for removing terms that may be offensive to developers in the black community.”
VentureBeat: GitHub launches Codespaces for browser-based coding. “The biggest facet of today’s news is a new product called GitHub Codespaces, which is designed to make it easier for developers to join a project, launch a developer environment, and start coding with minimal configuration — all from a browser. Available in ‘limited public beta’ from this week, Codespaces is a cloud-hosted development environment with all the GitHub features, and it can be set up to load a developer’s code and dependencies, extensions, and dotfiles, and includes a built-in debugger.”
BetaNews: All core GitHub features are now free. “When Microsoft acquired GitHub two years ago, it was clear that some things would change along the line. Microsoft lifted the private repository creation limit one year ago and worked for the last 18 months on making core GitHub features available for free for everyone, according to a new announcement.”
Reclaim the Net: Chinese citizens turn to GitHub to archive coronavirus outbreak events in a bit to avoid censorship. “As ever with any loss or grievance, we have on one hand the human desire to forget bad experiences in order to be able to move on with your life – and on the other, the urge to keep some memories, regardless of how traumatic they may be. In China, this is even more involved and difficult, as citizens are racing to preserve coronavirus memories against censors. And on GitHub, as it happens to operate both in China – and ‘beyond the Great Firewall.’”
TorrentFreak: DMCA Notices Took Down 14,320 Github Projects in 2019. “Github has revealed that throughout 2019, the coding hosting platform took down more than 14,300 projects following DMCA complaints. Of the total notices received, only a tiny proportion was contested via counter-notice. Interestingly, the Microsoft-owned platform also reveals that one copyright complaint cannot be detailed as it’s the subject of a gagging order.”
