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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

Git records the local timezone when a commit is made [1]. Knowledge of the timezone in which a commit was made could be used as a bit of identifying information to de-anonymize the committer.

Setting one's timezone to UTC can help mitigate this issue [2][3] (though, ofc, one must still be wary of time-of-day commit patterns being used to deduce a timezone).

References

  1. Git documentation. git-commit. "Date Formats: Git internal format". Accessed: 2024-08-31T07:52Z. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#Documentation/git-commit.txt-Gitinternalformat.

    It is <unix-timestamp> <time-zone-offset>, where <unix-timestamp> is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. <time-zone-offset> is a positive or negative offset from UTC. For example CET (which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.

  2. jthill. "How can I ignore committing timezone information in my commit?". Stack Overflow. Published: 2014-05-26T16:57:37Z. (Accessed: 2024-08-31T08:27Z). https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23874208/how-can-i-ignore-committing-timezone-information-in-my-commit#comment36750060_23874208.

    to set the timezone for a specific command, say e.g. TZ=UTC git commit

  3. Oliver. "How can I ignore committing timezone information in my commit?". Stack Overflow. Published: 2022-05-22T08:56:38Z (Accessed: 2024-08-31T08:30Z). https://stackoverflow.com/a/72336094/7934600

    each commit Git stores a author date and a commit date. So you have to omit the timezone for both dates.

    I solved this for my self with the help of the following Git alias:

    [alias]
    co = "!f() { \
        export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE=\"$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z)\"; \
        export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=\"$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z)\"; \
        git commit $@; \
        git log -n 1 --pretty=\"Autor: %an <%ae> (%ai)\"; \
        git log -n 1 --pretty=\"Committer: %cn <%ce> (%ci)\"; \
    }; f"
    


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[-] Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

Not really as those are public things.

Would you mind citing an example of exactly what you are referring to? I feel like I'm presuming a lot of things in your statements here.


Dhcp is more of a issue.

I don't know if it's "more", or "less" of an issue, but all these things are worthy of concern.

this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
81 points (92.6% liked)

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