“The implication here is that any code committed to a public repository may be accessible forever as long as there is at least one fork of that repository,” the report’s authors claim.
Am I dumb or is this exactly the purpose of forks? I feel like I’m missing something.
*if it was forked or is a fork of something public. Only commits made while public can be read.
You should read the original research article, which has its own thread someone else linked below. Basically, people often delete a fork after testing the public repo by committing an API key, which can be read using the method mentioned, which GitHub claimed was an intentional design feature.