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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOPtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlPSA: Git exposes timezone metadata
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    2 months ago

    Any given time zone there are going to be millions if not billions of people.

    One more bit of identifying information is still one more bit of identifying information.


    Git also “leaks” your system username and hostname IIRC by default which might be your real name.

    This is only part of a fallback if a username and email is not provided [1].

    References
    1. Git. Reference Manual. git-commit. “COMMIT INFORMATION”. Accessed: 2024-08-31T23:30Z. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#_commit_information.

      In case (some of) these environment variables are not set, the information is taken from the configuration items user.name and user.email, or, if not present, the environment variable EMAIL, or, if that is not set, system user name and the hostname used for outgoing mail (taken from /etc/mailname and falling back to the fully qualified hostname when that file does not exist).


    A fake name and email would pretty much be sufficient to make any “leaked” time zone information irrelevant.

    Perhaps only within the context where one is fine with being completely unidentifiable. But this doesn’t consider the circumstance where a user does want their username to be known, but simply don’t want it to be personally identifiable.


    UTC seems like it’s just “HEY LOOK AT ME! I’M TRYING TO HIDE SOMETHING!”

    This is a fair argument. Ideally, imo, recording dates for commits would be an optional QoL setting rather than a mandatory one. Better yet, if Git simply recorded UTC by default, this would be much less of an issue overall.


    if you sleep like most people, could be defeated by doing an analysis of when the commits were made on average vs other folks from random repositories to find the average time of day and then reversing that information into a time zone.

    I mentioned this in my post.


    It’s better to be “Jimmy Robinson in Houston Texas” than “John Smith in UTC-0”

    That decision is contextually dependent.









  • When I use a website as a source, at the time that I access it for information, I will also save a snapshot of it in the Wayback Machine. Ofc theres no guarantee that the Internet Archive will be able to survive, but the likelihood of that is probably far greater than some random website. So, if the link dies, one can still see it in the Wayback Machine. This also has the added benefit of locking in time what the source looked like when it was accessed (assuming one timestamps when they access the source when they cite it).