Re: [PATCH v5] gitweb: redacted e-mail addresses feature.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 8, 2021, 21:04 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqmtu8sd2a.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <20210408171648.GA7133@dcvr>

Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> writes:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Georgios Kontaxis <geko1702+commits@99rst.org> wrote:
>> > Georgios Kontaxis via GitGitGadget <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> Introduce an 'email-privacy' feature which redacts e-mail addresses
>> >> from the generated HTML content
>> >
>> Eric Wong wrote:
>> > A general reply to the topic: have you considered munging
>> > addresses in a way that is still human readable, but obviously
>> > obfuscated?
>> ...
>> > I also considered Unicode homographs which can look identical
>> > to replacement characters, too; but rejected that idea since
>> > it would cause grief for legitimate users who would not notice
>> > the homograph when pasting into their mail client.
>
> As a data point, none of the homograph@ candidates I posted here
> on Mar 29 have attracted any attempts on my mail server.

That is an interesting observation. All homograph@ non-addresses, if a human corrected the funnies in their spelling, would have hit whoever handles @80x24.org mailboxes.

I take it to mean that as a future direction, replacing <redacted> with the obfuscated-but-readable-by-humans homographs is a likely improvement that would help human users while still inconveniencing the crawlers. It may however need some provision to prevent casual end-users from cutting-and-pasting these homographs, as you said in your original mention of the homograph approach.

But other than that, does the patch look reasonable?

Thanks.