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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

#241

Post by gdy »

geoka9 wrote: post #178
gdy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crimea is a special case: it used to be Russian but was reassigned to the Ukraine at the time when they both were part of the USSR. It wasn't a big deal until the USSR dissolved and suddenly Crimean residents turned out to be in a foreign country.

It had been Turkish before it was Russian. Should we go on? Besides, the indigenous population (Crimean Tatars) and the Ukrainians in Crimea never thought of Ukraine as a foreign country.

Let's not confuse events of the 18th century and the modern history.

Crimea was called Crimean Khanate at that time and the backbone of its economy was the slave trade. As a major slave trade hub it has seen many hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians captured by Crimean Tatars and sold to Turkey until Catherine the Great's counter-terrorist operation finally put an end to it in 1783 :)

This dramatic history rooted in inability of the Crimean Khanate peacefully coexist with Russia can hardly be compared with a single action of a Soviet bureaucrat in Moscow in 1954.

And you are misinformed, Crimeans Tatars are not the indigenous population, they are a remnant of the Golden Horde.

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

#242

Post by fit2rule »

tandem_bike wrote: post #233
tandem_bike wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

[flagged]

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

#243

Post by zelon88 »

pavelludiq wrote: post #177
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…

> Individual liberties cannot be realized without sanctions and foreign policy. What kind of jingo non-sense is that? We now have over a century of data on how effective US foreign policy is at promoting democracy around the world and if you read the history even badly, you can't help but notice that it's much better at killing people in monstrous numbers than at promoting individual liberty.

American foreign policy isn't designed to promote "democracy around the world."

It's designed to promote democracy in the free world that the people who control the world live in.

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

#244

Post by whoopdedo »

espeed wrote: post #206
miracle2k wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I wrote somewhere else, the Gitlab case is both worse and better. Gitlab did not make a specific decision to block Iranian users, it merely made a technical decision to move to Google Cloud, and Google Cloud is blocking sanctioned countries on a network level (which is abhorrent). But I don't see Gitlab making an active decision that they have to do this for sanctions compliance reasons, it was just a side-effec…

See comments in this previous thread from 31 days ago [1]... Google Safety & Security Blog: An update on state-sponsored activity (2018) ... Detecting and terminating activity on Google properties "Actors engaged in this type of influence operation violate our policies, and we swiftly remove such content from our services and terminate these actors’ accounts. Additionally, we use a number of robust methods, including…

Can we start calling this "The Great Reverse Firewall"?

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

#245

Post by whataboutist »

24gttghh wrote: post #115
whataboutist wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you also forget about the US shooting down Iran Air Flight 655?

So, you mean where the US at least kinda-sorta apologized and paid restitution? I hate the Regan years as much as the next person, but this is a false equivalence. I didn't see Russia/Donblast apologize after MH-17...

Fair, besides the fact that they took 8 years and did not admit legal liability or formally apologize to Iran. However, this is not true for every crime that the US has committed. OP could've explained why those crimes might not be relevant to the discussion, instead he tried to one-up them with the crimes of other regimes.

In the case of the US, or every other great power; that game can go on indefinitely.

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

#246

Post by luckylion »

zelon88 wrote: post #239
luckylion wrote: post #164

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. 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…

Large services are banning IP ranges (https://gist.github.com/alibo/dfd7c258bcc44a0e8c9f7c5bfd3bd2...), so they'll have to invest and provide alternatives to those individuals.

> Being the most powerful and influential player in technology gives us permission to do anything.

Read this again, slowly. You're advocating for the law of the jungle where the actor with the biggest club has the right (and, I presume, duty?) to do whatever they please to whomever they please whenever they please.

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

#247

Post by mrtksn »

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.

I don’t think that it would have been different if someone else was the president. Pre-Trump I had a vacation in Cuba and since I knew that the internet is a luxury there I made Spanish available offline on Google Translate. Works great, then I made the mistake to launch the app when I hade one hour access to the internet in Havana and puff translate is gone. I’m not allowed to use it there. That surely destroyed the communists.

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

#248

Post by kerkeslager »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #197
kerkeslager wrote: post #192

As far as I know, SourceHut[1] is still available everywhere. [1] https://sourcehut.org/ EDIT: I stand corrected.

Sourcehut is US operated and I cannot accept users from sanctioned countries. You can run your own instance if your legal circumstances differ, but you cannot use the official hosted version.

As other users have pointed out, the sanctions don't apply to internet services as long as they are provided for free[1]. So this is political pressure, not legal requirement.

I'm disappointed that you've chosen to give in to the political pressure. I posted about SourceHut to promote your service because I thought you were doing something better than the big guys.

[1] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

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

#249

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

kerkeslager wrote: post #248
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sourcehut is US operated and I cannot accept users from sanctioned countries. You can run your own instance if your legal circumstances differ, but you cannot use the official hosted version.

As other users have pointed out, the sanctions don't apply to internet services as long as they are provided for free[1]. So this is political pressure, not legal requirement. I'm disappointed that you've chosen to give in to the political pressure. I posted about SourceHut to promote your service because I thought you were doing something better than the big guys. [1] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctio…

SourceHut accepts payments and will eventually become paid-only. I am a one-man operation and I don't have the legal wherewithal to stand up to the government. You can tell me how this legal fight fits into our budget, the finances are public:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q....

I have to prioritize the health of the service for everyone above the needs of a few people.

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

#250

Post by yxhuvud »

dijit wrote: post #2

Same as Gitlab then[0]. US Sanctions should not affect internet services (so long as they are provided for free)[1], but political pressure appears to be very strong. Personally I find it quite abhorrent, and would cite this as a reason not to use US based companies in future. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/19/gcp-move-update/ [1]: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

There is no real difference between sanctions on internet service and any other thing, except things directly involved in the reasons for the sanctions (notably military material)
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