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
- 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. - 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 - 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"
Cross-posts:
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 57 users / day
- 383 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 3K Posts
- 75.4K Comments
- Modlog
It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.
For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂
That is a possible solution, though not exactly the most convenient, imo. That is, if I understand you correctly that you are talking about setting the OS timezone to be UTC.
And that’s the reason why I don’t use it, I need specific websites that access my local time, and apparently whitelisting is not a thing.
Sure it is. There’s a button labeled “Manage exceptions” that does exactly that.