Re: [PATCH] gitweb: redacted e-mail addresses feature.

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Mar 21, 2021, 01:27 UTC
Message-ID: <YFahDtIkSmpLD2oZ@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <8735wpz699.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

On 2021-03-21 at 00:42:58, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 24 quoted lines

> 
> On Sun, Mar 21 2021, Georgios Kontaxis via GitGitGadget wrote:
> 
> > From: Georgios Kontaxis <geko1702+commits@99rst.org>
> >
> > Gitweb extracts content from the Git log and makes it accessible
> > over HTTP. As a result, e-mail addresses found in commits are
> > exposed to web crawlers. This may result in unsolicited messages.
> > This is a feature for redacting e-mail addresses from the generated
> > HTML content.
> >
> > This feature does not prevent someone from downloading the
> > unredacted commit log and extracting information from it.
> > It aims to hinder the low-effort bulk collection of e-mail
> > addresses by web crawlers.
> 
> So web crawlers that aren't going to obey robots.txt?
> 
> I'm not opposed to this feature, but a glance at gitweb's documentation
> seems to show that we don't discuss how to set robots.txt up for it at
> all.
> 
> Perhaps having that in the docs or otherwise in the default setup would
> get us most of the win of this feature?

I'm going to guess that the two features are orthogonal. robots.txt is great for communicating to well-meaning actors what you do and don't want crawled. For example, one might ask a web crawler not to crawl individual commits because that creates excessive load on the server.

This option is about preventing email harvesting, usually for the purposes of sending spam. Spam is email abuse and all reasonable people know it's unacceptable, so by definition the people doing this are bad actors and are not likely to honor the robots.txt. As someone who runs his own mail server, that is certainly my experience.

So I am in favor of this feature. I think it mirrors what many other tools do in this space and having it as an option is valuable.

Show 23 quoted lines

> > diff --git a/Documentation/gitweb.conf.txt b/Documentation/gitweb.conf.txt
> > index 7963a79ba98b..10653d8670a8 100644
> > --- a/Documentation/gitweb.conf.txt
> > +++ b/Documentation/gitweb.conf.txt
> > @@ -896,6 +896,18 @@ same as of the snippet above:
> >  It is an error to specify a ref that does not pass "git check-ref-format"
> >  scrutiny. Duplicated values are filtered.
> >  
> > +email_privacy::
> > +    Redact e-mail addresses from the generated HTML, etc. content.
> > +    This hides e-mail addresses found in the commit log from web crawlers.
> > +    Enabled by default.
> > ++
> > +It is highly recommended to keep this feature enabled unless web crawlers
> > +are hindered in some other way. You can disable this feature as shown below:
> > ++
> > +---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > +$feature{'email_privacy'}{'default'} = [0];
> > +---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> I think there's plenty of gitweb users that are going to be relying on
> the current behavior, so doesn't it make more sense for this to be
> opt-in rather than opt-out?

I agree this make sense as an opt-in feature. While many people will want to enable it, users who are performing an upgrade won't necessarily want the behavior to change right away.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US