What happened to the Pholcus crawler?

[Darko Luketic]

I had a notification about some issue I commend on in https://github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus

Pholcus was a crawler written in Go, no English docs. I starred it, along with about 6200 others.

I assume the guy was bullied by the Chinese government or parts of it, maybe killed, who knows, because his status shows "Cease to programing and cease to live.",

because the readme says strange things:

Pholcus (source removed)
Disclaimer

This software is only used for academic research, but because of frequent occurrences of crawler developers in China related to news related to violations, the source code of this library has been deleted. At the same time, academic enthusiasts who have downloaded this software are strongly recommended to delete the source code as soon as possible.
Solemnly declare: The user must abide by the relevant laws and regulations of his location. The user shall bear all the consequences caused by illegal and illegal use! !!

This is translated with Google Translate, the original text can be found in the readme.

What happened there?

When people get bullied or killed over software then something is wrong (I remind you about the truecrypt incident) then a Streisand effect must happen, e.g. a spotlight needs to shine on that issue.

Maybe it was removed for copyright violations (the right holders suing the crawlers, might as well happen in the EU with the new laws passed recently and I hear the US is having similar talks).

Maybe it's just a marketing ploy, https://github.com/pholcus-go/pholcus exists with a fork from 25 nov 2019, the github organisation was created on 24 dec 2019, the same day the https://github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus repo was zeroed.

If anyone knows what happened, please enlighten us.

I find that all very suspicious.