srctree

Opinions differ[^difficulty] on what exactly counts as consent. I'd venture to

guess it gets even more complicated when it comes to software. I'm sure that

contributes to why TOS are so unparseable by people required to agree to them,

that there's even a website dedicated to explaining common ones[^dislike]. What

does consent look like when it's software in between? If someone continues to

use the software, isn't that consent? No, it's not.

contributes to why TOS are so unparseable by the very people who are required to

agree to them, that there's even a website dedicated to explaining common

ones[^dislike]. What does consent look like when it's software in between? If

someone continues to use the software, isn't that consent? No, it's not.

[^difficulty]: Mine don't; clearly communicated agreement with disclosure. It's

@@ -36,8 +36,8 @@ use the software, isn't that consent? No, it's not.

because I disagree with a number of it's conclusions and assertions. I still

In something that I'm sure isn't a shock to those I expect to read this. I'm

gonna use an example from healthcare again. For any significant procedure,

In something that I'm sure isn't a shock to those I expect to read this, I'm

gonna use an example from healthcare[^again]. For any significant procedure,

there's someone who's been assigned to collect a signature on the paper that

will make the hospital's lawyers happy. But the patient signing their agreement

on the "terms of service" for the treatment, isn't where consent ends. Consent

@@ -46,7 +46,9 @@ learned, many times through mistakes; about what consent really means to the

humans they treat[^humans]. It's easy to put any one into a situation where

they'll "agree" to something. Only to then feel taken advantage of, or abused.

Abused by people who day job is literally to save their life, and help them

[^humans]: We're talking about medicine here because they better at

understanding what they do to humans. Their interactions with humans aren't

@@ -54,11 +56,11 @@ heal. One of the most common reasons cited is;

That's it, no one talked to them, no one told them what to expect, patents under

a significant amount of stress, who ostensibly trusted the people taking care of

them. Would feel victimized simple because they know what was going on. The end

result from some treatment with the primary goal of improving their health left

feeling abused. This isn't the experience of patents when someone is

That's it, no one talked to them, no one told them what to expect, patients

under a significant amount of stress, who ostensibly trusted the people taking

care of them. Would feel victimized simply because they know what was going on.

The end result from some treatment with the primary goal of improving their

health left feeling abused. This isn't the experience of patents when someone is

consistently talking to them, explaining them what's gonna happen next.

Reminding them during difficult procedures that they can ask to take a break if

they need it. Those patients leave from the exact same exchange feeling cared

Serendipitously I happen to come across this photo when doing something

![How Microsoft asks for consent](/assets/ms-consent.png)

This is consent right? Permission freely given, with a fair opportunity to

Well, I'm sure Android is better though, right? Surely they....

![How Alphabet asks for consent](/assets/goog-consent.png)

This one feels especially egregious to me. Because you can't tell the only way

to decline is hitting the back button, I'm also the type that likes the on

screen buttons, where I know most people use the new swipe gestures. But hey,

when has an update ever caused any problems[^911]? Obviously a system update is

[^911]: https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-teams-911-call-android-bug-fix-201139753.html

The last medical procedure I participated in was one of my own. It was an MRI

Now's probably the place where I'm supposed to describe the catalyst for this

> help make that transition as smooth as possible for you. But with this update,

> the original mobile layout is no longer available.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/12654190110999-New-Mobile-App-Updates-Layout

If that was just the catalyst, what is the real reason. The real reason is from

my disappointment watching sr.ht hurt itself in it's anger.

@@ -105,6 +120,53 @@ sr.ht used Anubis; it's not very effective...

I'm not apathetic to this specific source of anger and frustration. If anything

you'd describe this feeling I share as empathy instead. I've spent a bit of time

trying to make it easier for others[^easier commit]. My problem is more that

sr.ht has decided that it's time for them to externalize their costs directly

into **my** face! I've not done anything wrong, but the solution they've elected

to go with, out of anger for the current state of things, is to punish[^punish]

me. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I've elected not to play this little

game. I've had to reject a few questions related to code that was hosted on

sr.ht because I couldn't view it, until it was copied to a less open

service[^srctree]. This isn't how consent is support to work!

[^punish]: Calling this a punishment to me is stretching the definition a bit

far. If anything it's more of a punishment to sr.ht's users. Who now I

[^srctree]: Here, seems like an important place to disclose I'm building srctree

in part because of the other issues I have with github, and to a much lesser

I almost feel bad for the above. It does seem to imply I'm blaming sr.ht here

for failing to obtain consent. But that's entirely inaccurate. Source hut is

playing fair. The splash screen while my computer wastes energy and cpu cycles

for no other reason than "why not[^LLM power]", is totally within the

reasonability, and does seem to be fair in requesting consent; even though I

refused. The problem with the missing consent are the bots.

[^LLM power]: Remind me again, what's one of the major complains about GenAI?

It's important to note, while everyone loves to complain much more about the

bots from "Big LLM", I've *yet* to catch any of them ignoring, or abusing

robots.txt. Some of the complains are valid, they are needlessly aggressive, and

it's incompetence bordering on maleficence to scrape the web interface to a git

repo. Not a single one of them violates consent. While many have a deeply

ingrained disgust for them, or for the patrons funding their continued

existence. They're playing fair, by all the reasonable rules. They're not trying

to hide, they obey robots.txt, they clearly announce themselves, and most even

enumerate the IP's they'll make requests from so they can't be impersonated.

Wither you like them or not, they're being good web citizens... at least where

crawling/scraping and consent over access is concerned.

The ones violating the rules for consent are these.

43.128.149.102 - [03/Apr/2025:15:48:20 +0000] "GET /repo/dns/commit/43edea6e HTTP/1.1" 200 932 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_2_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1"

34.145.110.128 - [05/Apr/2025:18:03:29 +0000] "GET /repo/srctree/tree/srcapi HTTP/2.0" 200 1650 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

@@ -112,3 +174,18 @@ sr.ht hurt itself in its confusion.

35.197.78.148 - [05/Apr/2025:16:31:52 +0000] "GET /repo/mqtt/diffs/new HTTP/2.0" 200 639 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/123.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

35.203.140.140 - [05/Apr/2025:16:55:49 +0000] "GET /repo/srctree/issues/d HTTP/2.0" 200 564 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

I've created and now published [nft rules](https://srctree.gr.ht/repo/rules) for

IPs that I've had to ban for evading consent. The whole Hetzner ASN is banned,

as well as a few others. Tencent and AliCloud will be next I'm sure. And I've

filed an abuse report to Google Cloud already, but they only have a few more

days before I ban their whole ASN as well. GoogleBot, another normally good

citizen, one with a purpose I support (sharing information) would be

unfortunate, but acceptable collateral damage here.

***You can not obtain consent if you're lying about who you are, and what you're

doing!*** I'm happy to share my resources with well behaved bots. Ones that are

fair, and don't try to trick me. If you're lying about your user agent, you are

the problem. You're intentionally behaving to avoid consent, and to avoid the

ability for others to enforce their rules for consent.