Look, I promise this is an interesting story. So, in early january of this year, I fell into a rabbit hole that I have not been able to crawl out of. It’s about a mysterious github user named @eemailme and how it led me to find out something that I did not know about until now. And our tale starts with

“test”, the github repo

In my recomended on github, a new repo suddenly popped up… It was called test and was made by a mysterious user named eemailme. This naturally peaked my curiosity and I decided to go and look around a bit. There, I saw 2 issues, aptly named:

The first one is referring to the description of eemailme’s github and then calling them an AI bot. But that doesn’t really matter for now. What I want to focus on is the second one of these 2 issues, “hey”.

hey

“hey”’s description was 2 simple words: “shut” and “up”, in that order. Whoever this donnaken guy (the one who opened the issue) was, I knew he really didn’t like eemailme. But why?

This is a string of responses to this thread that explain the situation a bit:

  1. poka: What is this? Why 24 people stars this helloworld repo?? What is this issue??? So strange…
  2. donnaken: this user adds a watch to every repo imaginable jchloos v2
  3. poka: ok, he watched my repo too, so I understand, this is how I came here ^^ jchloos v2? The username is eemailme, so i email him… And probably go to sleep…
  4. donnaken: jchloos is some random user with their own website who also botted watches on (presumably) thousands of repos I thought it was someone actually flattering me but I figured out the ruse

[…]

  1. michael: Its a bot network..

And then the next message michael drops is:

  1. michael: yah, it looks like its a manual user. I think there is some setup where the person or persons behind the network is reading specific public code and building A.I tools using the code. There is a real person though who reads the emails. I thought this was connected to a larger criminal network of attorneys I’ve been dealing with, but the behaviors suggest its more of a fringe company. Everything is white labeled right now, they also appear to be using cut outs to avoid facing legal action. They are not following git hubs terms of service though. I’d say more but I don’t want to expose too much yet..

michael

The fuck you mean Michael!? Not exposing too much yet!? WDYM!? As you’ll see, our pal Mike here is very important to the story. A few messages pass and then one of our most important characters drops in like a bombshell: hexcode (Who I’ll call “hex”)

  1. hex: this smells (potentially) related?: https://research.checkpoint.com/2024/stargazers-ghost-network

Hex links to this very important blog post by “checkpoint”, talking about a ghost-network of stargazers (people who star repos). Please go read it for yourself before you continue on. After this bombshell hits, the thread is quiet for a while, with some “edouard” guy getting a false positive with his antivirus along the way. But this is where I come in. I, at the time, believing all of this was due to corruption, posted a message:

  1. me: How is it possible that these users aren’t banned by github? Is github that corrupt nowadays???

And this is where Michael starts playing a bigger role.

The internet: A weird place

  1. michael: I’m not sure why you would assume its corruption ? There is a real person behind it. Do you have anything to show they are doing anything but watching you and pulling the code thats been put out in the open ?

  2. me: Yeah, tbh kinda impulsive of me to say -_-, it’s just kind of… Weird?

  3. michael: I understand and I did a bit of research, mbostwick/agile-game#5 , the internet is a weird place ..

Now, I’m too lazy to document his “bit of research”, so if you have the time, read it yourself. If not, you’re on your own. I respond:

  1. me: That is certainly interesting. I did not expect this to turn out as it did. I’ll have to agree with you; The internet is a weird place.

The internet: 6 months later

And now… We get to the fun bit. The one where I do the research myself. On the same project, I see 2 closed issues. A very important one, hides here.

+

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions here ;)