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ctfs / write-ups-2016

Wiki-like CTF write-ups repository, maintained by the community. 2016
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Remove Copyright content #3307

Closed dhanvi closed 6 years ago

dhanvi commented 6 years ago

Email from Toby Lin

Hi Tim & Tummala,

I hope this email finds you both well. My name is Toby and I am representing Cyber Skyline in this email. I am writing in regards to the https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2016 GitHub repository and the Cyber Skyline challenges that is filed under ncl-ctf-preseason-2016, ncl-ctf-regular-season-2016, and ncl-postseason-2016. Cyber Skyline is the copyright owner of all the challenges posted in the ncl-* directories. The individuals who committed the content into this repo do not have the right or consent from Cyber Skyline to reproduce our work in any way. Cyber Skyline is contracted by the National Cyber League to create the challenges and operate the Cyber Skyline platform to deliver these challenges to students who sign up for the National Cyber League. 

The National Cyber League CTF is not a free competition and each player pays a small $25 registration fee to access the challenges. Therefore it is unfair to the people who paid the registration fee for the experience while other may be able to gain free access to the content on this repository. A small percentage of the registration fee goes into administrative and marketing overhead while the rest goes into challenge research and development and Cyber Skyline relies on the registration fee to continue providing an immersive learning experience. We are not backed by some major company, we are just a small startup trying to better the landscape for cybersecurity learning. If players realize that they can just wait for someone to copy all the content from the game and post it afterwards on Github, then we will start to lose players and we lose the ability to fund our development. 

I hope you can understand our standpoint. We want to keep providing our services but we also need to be able to keep the lights on for our development team. I understand that you guys did not post our work in any malicious intent and is doing it solely for the purpose of furthering cybersecurity education, but we need to also protect our copyrighted work. 

Therefore, I kindly ask that you remove the ncl-* directories from the https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2016 repository by close of business on Friday, October 20, 2017. If no action is taken by then, we will file a formal request with GitHub to remove the content, but note that GitHub will remove the entire repository, GitHub will not selectively remove directories. 

I love the work that you guys are doing, and I hope we can come to an agreeable resolution. 

Thank you very much for your time and I appreciate your understanding in this matter!

Best, 
Toby Lin

Cyber Skyline
Hey Tim & Tummala, 

Apologies, correction to the previous email: by Friday, October 27, 2017. This is what working on weekends does to your brain.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you guys have any questions or concerns.
dhanvi commented 6 years ago

@ctfs/collaborators

IMHO it is better to remove the content right away, which I would be doing.

Let's discuss if you dis-agree or if there is a better option for us.

dhanvi commented 6 years ago

Force pushed to the repo, every please rebase

mathiasbynens commented 6 years ago

Removing the challenges was the right thing to do in this case. Thanks for handling this, @dhanvi!

m1ghtym0 commented 6 years ago

Thanks @dhanvi

Amar1729 commented 6 years ago

Just to clarify though - the command for other contributors should be a reset --hard upstream/master, not a rebase, yes?

dhanvi commented 6 years ago

@Amar1729 yes reset --hard would be the correct thing to do.