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GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

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Re: GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

#11

Post by mokus »

Osiris wrote: post #10

> I do live and work in Finland So, they are blocking based on nationality rather than on location? How do they determine a user's nationality? Do ITAR laws really require blocking a nationality regardless of their physical location? Would an Iranian living in the U.S. also be blocked?

I don’t know anything about rules ghat might control blocking of accounts but, in general, US export regulations do say that conveying technology to a foreign citizen even face to face in the US is an “export”. The term for this concept is “deemed export”.

Re: GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

#12

Post by txcwpalpha »

Osiris wrote: post #10

> I do live and work in Finland So, they are blocking based on nationality rather than on location? How do they determine a user's nationality? Do ITAR laws really require blocking a nationality regardless of their physical location? Would an Iranian living in the U.S. also be blocked?

Where are you seeing that? Ctrl+F for "Finland" doesn't return anything for me in this article, but I do see this:

> I am a software developer based in Iran

as well as:

> I know that I’m a resident of the sanctioned country

Re: GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

#13

Post by altmind »

Reminds me of case when Slack blocked the accounts of Iranian s living outside of Iran(ie. Iranian national with Canadian permanent residency). Tech companies should be more careful with these blanket blocks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18724107

Re: GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

#14

Post by stareatgoats »

The US seems hellbent on giving up their world hegemony. Stopping people from using US software (or banks, money, etc) won't do anything else than hasten the flight to other systems and alliances.

The plan is of course to give those who flee the death penalty, but that never accomplished more than entertainment for the twisted.

It is sad to see such a great idea as the US nation behave so stupidly.

Re: GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

#16

Post by txcwpalpha »

Politics/commentary on the sanctions themselves aside, I do not know why the author keeps harping so strongly on the fact that it was a "FREE" service. The cost of the service/product is irrelevant. You are still doing business with a company by using their product even if you aren't explicitly giving them currency.

It's also entirely irrelevant because the purpose of the sanctions has nothing to do with restricting GitHub's revenue, but instead is supposed to restrict the sanctioned user's ability to use that service, which is exactly what's happening here, "free" or not.

Re: GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

#17

Post by jsnell »

Osiris wrote: post #10

> I do live and work in Finland So, they are blocking based on nationality rather than on location? How do they determine a user's nationality? Do ITAR laws really require blocking a nationality regardless of their physical location? Would an Iranian living in the U.S. also be blocked?

They probably don't block on nationality as such, but on something like:

- Creation IP geocodes to Iran

- More than X% of the requests in last Y years came from IPs that geocode to Iran.

Just blocking requests from Iranian IPs will achieve nothing except move those users to proxies and VPNs. If the lawyers have decided that there needs to be a technical solution, they probably need to go with one that's not totally trivial to work around.

The alternative option would be some kind of proxy/VPN detection (which I assume Microsoft must have technology for already). But it seems particularly ill-suited for Github's business, since they must get a ton of valid traffic from datacenter IPs.

Re: GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

#18

Post by microcolonel »

leggomylibro wrote: post #5

Put bluntly, fuck ITAR. I understand and applaud the intent of keeping extremely dangerous weapons out of the hands of just anybody. But the implementation is insane. Until recently, this same regulation was preventing people from freely distributing SSL libraries! I also understand that Microsoft feels forced to act on this, but as a developer I consider it user-hostile and will investigate other alternatives. Losin…

It's a bit much yeah. I started putting together a motion sensing unit, and realized (after leisurely reading related international law) that I had modified a component (changed its operating frequency) in a way that I may have had to declare it or talk to somebody in advance if I traveled with it outside the U.S. and Canada.

After dealing with stubborn, pedantic people in government, I don't even want to touch that unless I know there's good money in it.

I think it would be very cool if there were some tax credits or grant programs to offset the cost of compliance, particularly ones that don't require you to have a personal lobbyist to avail yourself of them.

My impression is that a lot of creative potential in arms and arms-adjacent (I actually agree with some of the ITAR's more dubious classifications to some extent, though I think there should be less onerous tiers of control for these things) industry is being squandered by unintended effects of the ITAR.

Re: GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons

#19

Post by wrs »

Why focus on the irrelevant paragraph about nuclear weapons and ignore the very next paragraph, which even says the same thing as the website notice? Github repository services aren't food or medicine, or otherwise exempted from sanctions, as far as I can tell. [1]

[1] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Sanctions/Page...

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