First a disclaimer, this is pure speculation on my part, but based on what others have said about github cracking down on sanctioned countries. I'm guessing they audited and found some accounts that belonged to people they suspected of being from sanctioned countries, and then went massively overboard and nuked any repo those users ever contributed to.
I wonder if one could get repos nuked by making issues / signing in / forking / pushing commits through a VPN in Russia/Iran/etc
Let's take a moment and appreciate the copy and paste support response "If a user or organization believes that they have been flagged in error, then that user or organization owner has the opportunity to appeal the flag by providing verification information to GitHub. Please see our FAQ for the appeals request form." https://twitter.com/GitHubHelp/status/1240682163193942018 Is that an official GH account? It's old a…
> Is that an official GH account
Yes. It is linked to from github.community, which is linked to from support.github.com.
Sanctions for online services are one of the worst things about working in this industry. Being forced to implement and maintain technical solutions to block access to every day citizens of certain regions because some guys in suits decided these are second tier humans is demoralizing as hell. How are people supposed to rise up and depose or vote for less tyranical governments if they cannot access information, or us…
>What exactly is the plan? Are we expecting that individuals who disagree with their regimes would leave their country and their families? It just feels like cold blooded retribution with no care for the regular every day population. That it will impact the country economically and hopefully result in the Government changing coarse or for the People of the country to not want to live in a shitty place with a poor eco…
Sounds good in theory but the evidence is lacking.
Sanctions for online services are one of the worst things about working in this industry. Being forced to implement and maintain technical solutions to block access to every day citizens of certain regions because some guys in suits decided these are second tier humans is demoralizing as hell. How are people supposed to rise up and depose or vote for less tyranical governments if they cannot access information, or us…
"How are people supposed to rise up and depose or vote for less tyranical governments if they cannot access information"
Sanctions for online services are one of the worst things about working in this industry. Being forced to implement and maintain technical solutions to block access to every day citizens of certain regions because some guys in suits decided these are second tier humans is demoralizing as hell. How are people supposed to rise up and depose or vote for less tyranical governments if they cannot access information, or us…
When regular diplomacy fails to resolve an international dispute, what further options do you believe exist? As far as I can tell, generally speaking, you have economic sanctions, and war. I know which of those I would personally consider to be more humane, but if you have a case for war, then please make it. I’m also not aware of any sanctions that have been put in place because a government sees the citizens of another country as second tier humans. But if you have any rationale to support that ridiculous claim, I’d be interested in hearing it.
Without even delving on the perverse sanctions part, it should never be forgotten that the whole point of git is that it's a distributed source control system. Grab your source and move it elsewhere. Heck, even an old forked gitlab community instance should work. Github is good for the exposure, but it's their house, and so their rules apply, not ours. Don't rely on them to always be OK with you staying.
Every time something like this happens someone has to make this argument. This isn't just about the source, it's all the other tools like pull requests that Github provides. Git is only one part of Github.
However what's the alternative? Country 'A' would like to build a weapon of mass destruction. Country 'B' asks them nicely to not do that. They ignore the request and continue building the technology. At that point you can either do the following: - Ignore it and hope they don't destabilize the region / world. - Economic and Trade sanctions to slow down their progress, and impact the economy of the country. - Physica…
Country B is the one having many weapon of mass destruction and used it 2 times already.
And is the only country to have ever used such weapons in wartime, and on a civilian population, nonetheless.
Isn't this a first amendment violation? Are we not on board with the notion that code is speech, and that the constitution applies to everyone, not just US citizens? With those things in mind, I don't understand how the Iranian peoples' free speech rights can be infringed just because their speech is in the form of code.
That's not how the First Amendment works. It applies to the government, not private businesses.
Apparently, the idea is that those "Crimean or Iranian" would get pissed off at their government and revolt. Which, as the practice shows, doesn't quite work taht way. They get pissed off at the sanctioning government as well, and are less likely to believe that that government actually worries about their interests and rights and not, say, as using them as a free battering ram against their current government/regime…
However what's the alternative? Country 'A' would like to build a weapon of mass destruction. Country 'B' asks them nicely to not do that. They ignore the request and continue building the technology. At that point you can either do the following: - Ignore it and hope they don't destabilize the region / world. - Economic and Trade sanctions to slow down their progress, and impact the economy of the country. - Physica…
However what's the alternative?
Not arbitrarily pulling out of the seemingly workable agreement with other countries?
In this particular case, country B and country A have both behaved terribly at various times.
Sanctions for online services are one of the worst things about working in this industry. Being forced to implement and maintain technical solutions to block access to every day citizens of certain regions because some guys in suits decided these are second tier humans is demoralizing as hell. How are people supposed to rise up and depose or vote for less tyranical governments if they cannot access information, or us…
GitHub could take the approach of collecting less data and saying that they don't know where their users are. They could drop the IP at the LB, disassociate all location metrics from their user accounts, and thus have no ability to tell where developer accounts are from.
But instead they choose to data mine users for their location and block them. Just like their ridiculous contract with ICE, GitHub is choosing to actively participate in these sort of things.