Phase 3, Act III: The Building Is on Fire

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. I've spent two posts documenting how GitHub went from beloved developer platform to a Phase 3 extraction engine under Microsoft's roof. Phase 3: Profit covered the trust erosion — the data training opt-out nobody told you about, the absorption into CoreAI, the quiet class system between enterprise customers and the individual developers who built the place. Phase 3, Act II covered the billing model flip — usage-based credits landing June 1st, the same week a new data collection policy went live. Same direction, different levers. I was going to wait before writing Act III. Then May happened. The Breach They Warned Microsoft About in December On May 20th, GitHub confirmed what security researcher Mazin Ahmed had been warning about since December: a threat actor called TeamPCP had breached roughly 3,800 of GitHub's internal repositories. The attack vector was a malicious VS Code extension installed on an employee's device —…