Often when you work in a company network your are using a proxy to connect to the internet and it is not uncommon that you receive the following error when trying to execute bower install or npm install

ECMDERR Failed to execute "git ls-remote --tags --heads git://github.com/jquery/jquery.git", exit code of #128

The proxy is blocking the connection to Github because most proxy do not allow git://-urls. The solution for this is very simple. Just change the git urls to https and everything will work. This command changes all github urls to https:

git config --global url.https://github.com/.insteadOf git://github.com/