Contact

• General
• Sending your email Address Privately
• Double-Blind

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General

I use git primarily for archive repositories. If you are interested in collaborating, or have a suggestion, or most importantly, have found an error or omission, I am eager to hear from you.

Utopia

In an ideal world, I would simply publish my email address. Responsible people desiring to communicate would just send me an email, and I would be untroubled by nonsense that wastes my time.

Reality

Email is completely broken. In order to thwart marketers, phishers, spam artists, and sundry crackpots, I do not publish my email address. That, however, is insufficient.

Believe it or not, there are actually instructions available online showing people who know nothing about git how to harvest the email addresses that are part of every repository. The people at GitHub, in their infinite wisdom, provide a remedy. By default, a new account is set up to keep email private. There is also an option that prevents me from accidentally pushing my email to a repository, and I have selected that option.

Additionally, my '.gitconfig' file contains the line:

  email = ruminations@users.noreply.github.com

and it is the email address of record in all my repositories. Moreover, GitHub uses the same address for account related notifications. Sending an email to that address results in a notice that your missive is undeliverable. I will remain blissfully unaware of the contact attempt, and hence untroubled by delinquents.

People who know something about git know how to contact me anyway. They simply raise an issue on one of my repositories. GitHub forwards the issue, and if I see fit, I respond. This small barrier is apparently beyond the ken of the social parasites.

An Alternate Solution

Given the nature of my interests, there are those who know nothing about git who may have a legitimate communication to send. Here is how you do that:

1. Create a throw away GitHub account.
2. Raise an issue on this repository.
3. After I reply, be courteous, and delete your throw away account:
   • Go to the user settings page.
   • Select account management in the side bar.
   • Click on delete account.

NOTE: GitHub, in its infinite stupidity, has made individual issues undeletable. For this reason, periodically, I will delete this entire repository and recreate it, sans historical issues. It is for this reason that my prefered communication channel is 'Double-Blind' - see the section below.

If your communication pertains to a specific repository, by all means raise the issue on that repository. As should be obvious to any intelligent reader, any form of social hustle is unwelcome. That specifically includes employment recruiters, media employees, and individuals addicted to fatuous social media outlets.

Defects in the Alternate Solution

There are two problems with that simplistic solution, detailed here.

A: Coercive Participation

My solution forces you to join GitHub. I understand all too well how odious that is. Social media outlets use that tactic extensively to expand their user base, often denying even casual perusal of content to outsiders. It is for this reason I absolutely refuse to participate in social media.

There are differences, however, in my coercive requirement:

1. It is not the provider (GitHub) imposing the coercion - it is me.
2. Unlike social media, your participation is guaranteed to result in a successful contact, although it is not guaranteed to produce a reply.
3. Unlike social media, the path to successful removal of participation clearly exists apriori - you will be able to easily remove your account by following the instructions above.
4. Unlike social media, you will not forever-after be tracked all over the internet.
5. Unlike social media, you will not forever-after be targeted by all manner of rubbish that wastes your valuable time, network bandwidth, and computing resources.

Moreover, for some inexplicable reason, coercive participation does not seem to be a barrier for the great majority of people. If you are willing to accept the privacy intrusions of social media, you should be more than willing to surmount the small barrier to communication I have imposed. If you are more like me, you can see that this barrier is miniscule in comparison to that routinely imposed by social media.

B: Issues are Publicly Viewable

This is a bigger problem. If I don't want my email address visible, why should I expect you to make your's public? Indeed. There is a solution to that. Follow the instructions in the next section.

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Sending your email Address Privately

Anyone seriously using git is familiar with ssh. If you already have a GitHub account, you doubtless connect using ssh and have uploaded one or more public keys. The instructions here show you how to raise an issue whose content is your email address encrypted with my public key.

As a consequence, although the issue is public, I am the only one who can decrypt and gain access to your address.

For your convenience, the file 'id_rsa.pub.pem' in this repository contains my public key in the format necessary to follow these instructions. The file 'secure_communication.txt' gives a more detailed tutorial for those who might like to use this method in other contexts.

1. Click on the .pem file in this repository, view it in raw mode, and copy the text into a file on your local machine in some convenient place.

2. Open a terminal in that directory and issue the command chain:

   echo "user@example.org" | \
   openssl rsautl -encrypt -pubin -inkey id_rsa.pub.pem | \
   base64 # > cipher.txt
   

   where '\' is the line continuation character and may be omitted if you prefer to pack everything into one command line. In the first line replace 'user@example.org' with your email address and a short message (retain the double quotes). In the second line, 'id_rsa.pub.pem' is the local file you put my public key into, and may be named anything. The name here is the name I used.

Loose functionality is:

1. echo creates a text stream feeding through a pipe to
2. openssl that converts it to an encrypted stream feeding a pipe to
3. base64 that converts it to a printable character stream.

Optionally, you may funnel that text into a file by removing the comment command '#'. Or you can use it as is and copy and paste the output printed on the terminal into the issue you raise. That text will look something like:
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=

Since I use a 4096 bit key, the method is limited to 500 character messages, more or less, depending on the actual size of the public key that ssh-keygen created. In my case, the limit is 500 characters.

That's all there is to it!

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Double-Blind

If you like, in lieu of your email address, you may send the url of your GitHub contact repository similar to this one. I can then post an encrypted reply and neither of us will ever know the other's email address (assuming you have elected to keep your GitHub contact address private).

Note that this is not anonymous. GitHub knows your email address and mine and also logs the ip addresses of transaction origins under your account settings security tab.

The process merely ensures privacy - there is no reason for the plain text of communications to ever leave the local machines of the communicants, assuming they trust one another's integrity, and personal email addresses remain as secure as the privacy provisions offered by GitHub.