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GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

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Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#231

Post by auslander »

tallanvor wrote: post #105
majia wrote: post #26

If Crimea was unwillingly annexed by Russia, then the sanction is punishing the victim instead of the criminal. If Crimea people genuinely supported the unification with Russia and received sanction for that, then it is a blatant attack on Crimean people's freedom.

The idea is to try and make it unsustainable for Russia to hold. --They have to pour money into the region to keep control of it due to people in the region being unhappy, out of work, etc. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good strategy, mind you.

> The idea is to try and make it unsustainable for Russia to hold

Why, then, blocking does not apply to all Russia, but to its victims only?

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#232

Post by czechdeveloper »

aerojoe23 wrote: post #203

I think it is interesting and a shame that we accept centralized issue tracking at all. Git is wonderfully distributed, probably in more than most of the github users realize. Unless they've gone out of their way to learn about it. When things like this (github's ban) happen, I think it is too bad that we don't have a widely accepted issue tracker built into git. To be a little more clear, you'd get all of the source…

It's not Microsoft choice. They have to listen to US laws.

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#233

Post by tandem_bike »

tandem_bike wrote: post #190
fit2rule wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. thus demonstrating that the US has been a far more negative influence on the world than most Americans have the courage to admit.

People who suffered at the hands of Saddam's regime would disagree. There was jubilation in the streets of Iraq when Saddam was driven out of power.

The point is that the invasion of Iraq itself could easily be considered a righteous act. The aftermath has been dreadful, no doubt, but that was not the intention, and when making moral judgements intention of the judged is ultimately what matters most.

The US has repeatedly underestimated how hard it is for functioning democracies to flourish, and that is a critical error on its part that it must learn from going forward.

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#234

Post by mieseratte »

theturtletalks wrote: post #213
emilfihlman wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They added the option to make private repos public so you can back it up. And allow all to see their contents, likes business and trade secrets. Top tier.

Yep. If you want to access your blocked private repo, you literally have to let everyone access it. And you can’t even delete it afterwards.

> Yep. If you want to access your blocked private repo, you literally have to let everyone access it. And you can’t even delete it afterwards.

One must wonder just how many companies with juicy trade secrets situated in a nation with adversarial relations to the US are hosting that juicy data in the US, with a US corporation.

Given that the public, open-source situation is not changed this is starting to sound like a tempest in a teacup.

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#235

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

ashelmire wrote: post #217
raxxorrax wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irans government is pretty backwards. The Iranian society is and was much more open a few decades ago. Truly a sad story of development in the completely wrong direction.

Have you seen the US lately? We're en route to undoing Roe v Wade, the Civil Rights Act, years of progress on other matters, etc, and we've already basically given up on functional democracy by allowing corporations to spend as much as they want on candidates. What do they say about those in glass houses...?

The female lawyer who defended a woman who refused to wear a hijab was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. [1]

Homosexuality is punishable by death. [2]

Please don't act like the problems you see in the U.S are the same problems they have in Iran.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/she-... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/06/14/countries-wh...

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#236

Post by adamsea »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #137
cdmckay wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that sanctions also kill people through lack of supplies like medicine being available, people being unable to economically support themselves, and, if the sanctions cause the government to collapse, all the death that results from that. So let’s not pretend sanctions are somehow nonviolent.

Everything that reduces quality of life kills people in some way. Heck, I commute through a town that back in the day was rich enough to prevent the highway from being expanded. I bet a couple people have died in ambulances in gridlock there. Sanctions are a heck of a lot less violent than bombs, or some tit for tat response (which would probably eventually escalate to bombs). They're basically one step up from taxes…

Sounds like something you could say about anything.

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#237

Post by hsk823 »

not_a_cop75 wrote: post #186
wickerman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of harassment that citizens of any state that the US claims to hate at any given time endure on a daily basis is disgusting. Exiled iranians living outside of Iran for 20 years have got their bank accounts closed solely for being Iranian. I can't help but think that these internet services will be going that way in the future. The fact that the "free software" community is not putting their foot down for t…

It's unfortunately hard to separate good and honest foreigners from those that would prefer to destroy other nation states.

It's hard but not impossible, and unfortunately in cases like this, innocent people being harassed is the point, to get nation states to be pressured by their own citizens to act the way the sanctioning country wants.

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#238

Post by tandem_bike »

zbentley wrote: post #133
tandem_bike wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-US ideology is strong here, and it's a losing battle speaking reason to ideologues. The ideology is rooted in something I am sympathetic to, even though I am very pro-US. Many here and elsewhere on the internet are either not from the US, or - if they are US citizens - do not personally identify with the power-elite that they feel controls the nation, or with the majority of citizens that comprise the nation…

That argument is disturbingly convenient: it lets you dismiss any evidence-based criticism of US policy as "biased, ignoring the good parts, criticism is inevitable because it's the most powerful country in the world" . . . Without actually engaging with any evidence to the contrary.

Not true. This is more a meta perspective one should take when thinking about the US. We should continue talking about what the US does wrong, but we should also recognize the tremendous good the US has done and continues to do around the world.

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#239

Post by zelon88 »

luckylion wrote: post #164
zelon88 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an individual feels wrongly and disproportionately impacted by US sanctions they can apply to the SEC for a waiver. A small, lonely dev will probably be ok. But the issue isn't with one dev who gets caught in the crossfire. You want to stop fighting a blazing inferno to mount a rescue operation because there's one kitten in the burning apartment building. Individual liberties cannot be realized without sanctions a…

> If an individual feels wrongly and disproportionately impacted by US sanctions they can apply to the SEC for a waiver. A small, lonely dev will probably be ok. And github & Co will then invest money to not blanket-ban, but make exceptions for this individual? I have some doubts. Do you believe that Iran's cyber warriors or their critical infrastructure people host their code on github? Because if not, you're not "f…

> And github & Co will then invest money to not blanket-ban, but make exceptions for this individual? I have some doubts.

I don't see why not. It's probably a simple boolean value in their database somewhere. If they can blanket ban, they can probably be selective for a minimal cost.

> Do you believe that Iran's cyber warriors or their critical infrastructure people host their code on github?

It wouldn't surprise me one bit if they did. People put weird stuff on GH for all kinds of weird reasons. Every week we hear about an unsecured AWS bucket from some huge mega-corp or state actor who should know better. But they are all run by humans who are free to make mistakes and break rules.

> I find that a very problematic worldview, as it gives you permission to do anything.

Being the most powerful and influential player in technology gives us permission to do anything. Having (one of) the largest tech markets and the (nearly) unlimited resources to spend makes us able to do whatever we want. And if we want to keep it that way we will ensure that we don't let unfriendly nations take advantage of our technology. We developed encryption to protect our banking sector. Just because we're nice enough to open-source it doesn't give Tehran officials the freedom to use it to suppress their entire nation. If authoritarianism worked so well they would be on top of the world with all their proprietary technology and censored information. But they're not. So either you're going to play nice with our toys in the sandbox or we're taking our ball and going home.

Re: GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

#240

Post by cardigan »

hkai wrote: post #229
cardigan wrote: post #208

Posting Nat Friedman's tweets here so they're easier to read - they're doing more than most companies about the whole thing, not sure where the vitriol in these comments is coming from: It is painful for me to hear how trade restrictions have hurt people. We have gone to great lengths to do no more than what is required by the law, but of course people are still affected. GitHub is subject to US trade law, just like…

It's crazy how Trump imposed these restrictions against innocent people and got away with it.

It's the nature of economic sanctions that there are real people's livelihoods which are directly affected. That happens with all economic sanctions... nothing unique about this one
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