Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
I am 12 years old. My GitHub account is flagged for no reason. I am using the GitHub Student Pack. The problem is that I use GitHub OAuth everywere, I can't access applications like Replit and Digital Ocean that I registered using GitHub OAuth. Maybe it's because I'd never use Windows, I use GNU/Linux instead. I used Proton Mail to register GitHub. However, like RMS said, Microsoft is bad. I won't use GitHub anymore. But it is difficult to migrate. But GitLab is related to Google. I don't like BitBucket. And I can't use Netlify and Vercel with Codeberg which is what I love.
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> You must be age 13 or older. While we are thrilled to see brilliant young coders get excited by learning to program, we must comply with United States law. GitHub does not target our Service to children under 13, and we do not permit any Users under 13 on our Service. If we learn of any User under the age of 13, we will terminate that User’s Account immediately. If you are a resident of a country outside the United States, your country’s minimum age may be older; in such a case, you are responsible for complying with your country’s laws.
This is far more likely to be the reason than using Linux over Windows, lol.
A few things:
- have you tried emailing [email protected]? They can help tell you what’s wrong or fix it for you.
- it probably has nothing to do with Linux vs windows.
- “Microsoft is bad” is a mindset that restricts many opportunities. Consider avoiding “black and white” ideas about things.
Good luck!
He/she can edit the bio later, but he/she can't edit your post.
Internet never forgets and I'm pretty sure this kid is going to be very successful, especially when you see how he is acting today and curious about learning.
As someone who mentors young people in STEM, something I’ve found to be very important is to respect their agency. If this is a “this person is not competent enough to make the right call in not sharing their name” then perhaps a moderator should be involved and they shouldn’t be on here. But if they’re allowed to be on here and introduce themselves with their name, we should respect that.
I appreciate that you have good intentions. I hope you see the same in mine. If you feel very strongly about this, please don’t hesitate to report the thread. Dang is pretty wise.
I think that would be a needlessly bad outcome.
Fair enough.
I agree. Microsoft is "50 shades of Black".
Oh! and funded by Google: https://www.kyivpost.com/technology/google-fund-invests-20-m...
Sorry you are learning the lesson about keeping all one's eggs in one basket the hard way. Don't single-source your identity authentication management and make backups for things important to you. If at all possible use adversarial services and treat accounts at services as ephemeral so that if one bans you, the other probably won't.
There should probably be a 12 Factor Lifestyle manifesto. https://12factor.net/
In more generalized terms, OP what you need to do is called risk management analysis.
At your age, your parents typically do this for you but its never too early to start learning it. It applies to many aspects in life, in chess its called adversarial thinking, or prophylaxis.
To do this, basically, you start by having a goal, something you want to do or have done. Then you start by asking yourself what are the most likely risks or outcomes (what can happen), then you extend that to the uncommon but do happen risks, potentially the risks and the rare risks if the failure is particularly critical as well (i.e. safety-critical, or impacts your well-being).
Write them down, then determine what your requirements, dependencies, and what your points of failure are, how many points of failure do you have, is there a single point of failure where everything depends on a single thing, can that break?
Once you have it on paper, then reorganize to reduce, eliminate, mitigate, or remove those points of failure. Sometimes that means creating redundancy (more than two of a thing to combat a single point of failure) because that provides flexibility. Brittle systems break, flexible systems can cope or gracefully degrade if a leg of the system diagram is broken. This is called system resiliency in IT.
Unexpected things will happen, and if you've gamed out what those outcomes are ahead of time, and worked backwards, and have a plan for dealing with them (mitigating), or have removed the issue by investing more or doing something differently, you are well on your way because you prepared ahead of time, and if something does happen you don't have to deal with the emotional shock alongside trying to figure out what you are going to do because you've written your plan out (step-by-step) and have contingencies in place. You just need to pull out the instructions you made, and follow them, and hopefully you've written the instructions, and validated them ahead of time.
They should be written in a way that you can mindlessly follow them because you won't be nearly productive while you are in it, strong emotions have a way of clouding our thinking and sapping our productive efforts.
When you first start doing this, it takes practice, which is why I said write it out, it can be as simple as a series of circle nodes as long as you account for those previous items how you write it out doesn't matter.
This is used in many different places, and its particularly critical in IT (i.e. backups, business continuity, disaster recovery). Contingency planning (another name for a part of this), means you always have at least one fallback plan. If its not written/documented, its not a plan.
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
Presumably because of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Pr...
Sorry to hear you've lost access to your accounts. That really sucks.
If you don’t want this to happen again, you need more control of your platform.
“The cloud is just someone else’s computer.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
> On the Internet, proprietary software isn't the only way to lose your computing freedom. Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, is another way to give someone else power over your computing.
Also contact Digital Ocean via email and explain what happened and that you need to close the account. Then you have a legitimate record of what happened so if they try to send you an invoice, you have evidence that they shouldn't be doing this per your earlier request.
Good luck and I'm sorry to hear this happened to you.
It requires a photo id government issued. You would be able to use a passport.
Try sr.ht or savannah.gnu.org, and keep fighting the good fight. I remember being your age and I'm sorry the Internet is the way it is.
As others have pointed out, this is due to COPPA. Use a foreign service, host your own, or get creative. Personally I'd say that hosting your own is probably your best, if not your cheapest option, as it'll teach you plenty about running a server, and ultimately, could be done on a pretty minimal spare machine (raspberry pi), if not right on your main system. You can get a free hostname redirect from a service like No-IP to access it with a dynamic IP if you're trying to access it from outside of your home network.
As much as COPPA does have some negative side effects, it's not getting repealed any time soon -- companies are still collecting WAY too much information about children, including the under 13 crowd, mostly under the same argument Pornhub tried using ("the uploader SAID the content was legal"), and then happily reaping the financial benefits of having collected it. Perhaps having a tier of under 13 rules allowing reduced use could work, but the legal system is picking its battles here, and making sure kids have access to online services just isn't a priority.