Frank Lloyd Wright, an American architect who designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years once said, “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer on the construction site” Programming or developing code is the same.
‘Bulli Bai’ or ‘Sulli Deals’ have been in the news in the recent past. What is common between the two is that both were derogatory to women and both were hosted on GitHub an Internet hosting provider, for software development, distributed version control and source code management functionality.
More than 80 million developers of apps across the World use GitHub today. Several of them upload complete or part code on it that is shared, improved upon and published. Today, it is the largest repository for code examples. New projects are ideated, innovated, developed, debugged, updated and stored along with their versions throughout their life cycles. Virtually, any file can be a part of the Git projects. It is like a social networking site for programmers and very special.
Since Git encourages recording of even small changes, programmers, whether they are beginners or experts, can trace the steps of some of the most gifted developers in the world and find out how they solved difficult problems, since it allows practically anyone to upload anything with free intelligence made available. It is not surprising that students take to it as an important code learning tutorial platform. They also get credits for the changes they suggest in code or for developed applications, which they then use in resumes for employment.
The greatest strength of GitHub is its open-source model that encourages open collaboration. Source code, blueprints, and documentation are all freely available to the public. Truly a great code and application development tool for students and faculty. It could be a great repository for innovative and shared teaching methodologies and project-based learning.
All good tools can be misused as well. In 2014, GitHub hosted various copies of a suicide manual. Roscomnadzor, the federal service for supervision of communications and IT in Russia promptly banned it. With files such as TerrorismDatabaseDesc.pdf, terrorism.Rmd freely available on GitHub, and a dark web version of GitHub, the git.psi. going live, Governments must be truly worried. These are Global Terrorism Databases, and contain over a lakh of terrorist incidents worldwide, with over 100 different attributes for each incident.
Unfortunately, most students copy code and design new applications and present them as own assignments which then pass muster for lack of complete understanding and availability of right tools for detection. “Navigate to the project board, click Menu, click Copy, under “Owner”, click repository and copy the project board” This is all that is required to be done by an engineering or a science student or anyone else to copy a project.
Problem solving, Project based learning and coding are three skills that every institute stresses today. However, contrived use of GitHub, kills the spirit of these initiatives. Copying from anywhere is not ethical, even if it is copied from GitHub. How does GitHub ensure, what is uploaded is not pirated? Or how does an institute ensure, what is submitted as an assignment is not a copy paste from GitHub? Of course, there is a Copydetect code plagiarism detection tool based on “Document Fingerprinting”. How many of our colleges use it anyway? Is not Project based learning rendered completely useless then?
That both ‘Bullibai’ and ‘Sullideals’ apps allowed auction of women of a certain community is disgusting. That this is not the last nor is the ultimate in disgust is the concern. GitHub even hosts code to create ‘deepfakes’ which can damage reputations apart from bringing down governments. It can even create non-consensual porn videos. That GitHub allows anything and everything to be shared is a security risk. That it encourages moral turpitude in young minds is a concern. All that is required is to brainwash a few students into developing applications that can spread fear, terror, anger and everything else. Vested interests, terrorist organisations, foreign agencies inimical to a country’s interests would all have a field day.
‘Bulli Bai’ app used the same source code as ‘Sulli Deals’ available on GitHub. That some young engineering students were arrested for their role in developing the apps is unfortunate. That they used source code on GitHub is doubly unfortunate.
In July 2021 close to 80 women were auctioned on Sulli Deals app. What precautions were taken by GitHub to prevent its repetition six months later when Bulli Bai app was hosted on it, with pictures of 100 women auctioned? Once may be learning. What is it, if it happens a second time? Why cannot GitHub be blamed and action taken? Did you know that GitHub can be prosecuted only under the US Justice system under MLAT which is challenging? The Indian government does not monitor GitHub the same way for content as it does the other social media platforms. This must change. The larger question however, is how does one distinguish the difference between content as we see on Facebook for example and programming language that we see on GitHub?
Is moderating all that happens on GitHub a solution? Extremely difficult, for it is hosted by millions of developers all over the world. Most of it is in JAVA and other programming languages. If one were to moderate it, every project and millions of lines of code would need to be tracked from source to finish.
However, banning it would probably be throwing the baby out with the bath tub. Some rockstar projects that drive technology today are developed on GitHub such as JQuery, HTML5 Boilerplate and Ruby on Rails.
Sharing intelligence allows convergence of solutions fast. Individual working may create exceptionally brilliant solutions, but may take years to fruition. In a world where collaboration is the key, more platforms like GitHub will come up. However, content on them must be tracked heuristically and on a set of keywords, elimination must happen before uploads. As happens in operating systems, 2/3 step authentication and social media profiling must be done before a candidate is registered to work on GitHub. A student’s login must ensure his credentials are authenticated and recorded whether he uses a public or a private login. Above all, expecting acceptable work ethics is important, but believing that a moral system is valid for all is also fundamentally immoral.