Building bots to mend badges, or how to get your GitHub account suspended
I did this 3 years ago.I created a bot that would scan for private SSH keys to connect to AWS and other services, it also warned about leaked software licenses for SublimeText and other popular programs at the time. While many people appreciated the initiative, it was not taken the best way by others. Ultimately, GitHub suspended my account and I had to explain what was all about.One year later, through my employer, I created another bot to scan for security vulnerabilities in projects written in Ruby, Python, PHP and Node.js; this time I already knew that I would need to contact GitHub beforehand to make sure what were the limits of the "automation". They simply stated that — at the time — no automation was allowed, which was quite surprising because CI is automation. Travis and other services are allowed to do things there so I didn't understand why my bot was different.I reported to my employer that we would need to shutdown that project and move on to something different. One year later, I find that GitHub implemented a (semi) vulnerability scanner for a selected group of programming languages, warning the repository owners about problems with their software dependencies. I cannot be mad about this, it's their service, but it still made me a bit angry.