I had that initial reaction too, but he's right. I mean, I fucked up. I didn't read the Terms of Service evidently, and I'm suffering for that. What I do know for sure though is that I never, under any circumstances, contributed to anything malicous. That is: malware, cryptominers, and their ilk.
As a developer who's still early in their career, my hope is that someone will see this, understand the existential weight of having all that work disappear, and be sympathetic to a request for a second chance.
My ideal resolution would be just to get an idea of what happened, what caused the ban, so I can avoid that in the future, and me taking my time to go through GitHub's terms of service so that I do understand what I'm agreeing to. I'll own it- when I was 14 I did not carefully read the terms of service agreement, which was updated who knows how many times since then. This was a long time ago.
I would even be willing to freeze my GitHub in its current state, restoring it but not allowing any further activity on it. I just want the record of to be able to say, "Hey, I fixed this issue in node-tar" or "I fixed this issue in Puppeteer Extra".
Note: Edited OP to include my SO.
As far as code goes, I never contributed to anything even remotely malicious. I worked primarily on obscure scraping problems related to Puppeteer and Playwright. I built some libraries for that I published on NPM, but at no point did I ever contribute or use GitHub in any capacity for anything malicious. I am a hundred percent certain of this, and this is why I am inclined to the other explanation which seems to make more sense.
I would love to get their side of the story. The problem is the rules prohibit creating a new account to discuss the old account being banned without warning. So this sort of kneecaps any potential conversation. Nonetheless, I have broken the rules, I guess, and created a new account and tried to establish some contact, but my ticket doesn't get any responses and based on my research it doesn't seem like it will.
Point taken about mirroring to Codeberg (or sr.ht), and this is something I was already planning on doing in terms of migration. At the same time, if there was any way to restore my GitHub, that would certainly simplify all of my next steps.
More than my own repos, I'm mainly concerned about my contributions to others. I've gotten hired twice just by someone contacting me from an issue that I had fixed on a GitHub discussion and that's no longer there.
"Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest." ~ Garry Wills
You're lazily mixing metaphors here. This is the problem in all such discussions, it often gets reduced to some combination of hand waving and hype training. "AGI" means different things to everyone, okay? Then it's a meaningless term.
It's like saying hey with a quantum computer of enormous size, we could simulate molecular interactions at a level impossible with current technology. I would love for us to be able to do that- but where is the evidence it is even possible?
I recently finished Peter Turchin's "End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62926960-end-times. I thought his insight (that societies often fall into so-called secular cycles, rather profound and illuminating).
There is a comparable software that has a friendlier UX: https://mochi.cards/. It's basically Anki, if Anki were smoother. Does cost a tiny bit though.
Why? It works and is (so far as we can tell, except for a few exceptions like thyroid cancer) completely safe. It would have immediate results. Sure, it would be better to fix the root causes. But we are so far from being in a position where that is feasible.
I don't think anyone here is disputing the fact that in the eyes of the law, his actions were illegal. But as someone who develops web scrapers/automation for a living, I poke and prod APIs in much the same manner as this guy. I don't feel such exploration should be criminalized. Sadly, it is.
In your SSH scenario, its completely different- you're literally acting with the intent of accessing someone else's computer to exfiltrate sensitive data. That's not what happened here (according to the author).