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GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

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Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#91

Post by anigbrowl »

woofcat wrote: post #69
Joker_vD wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What standing does Country B have to make such a request, and what is Country B's own WMD policy?

Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#92

Post by GordonS »

save_ferris wrote: post #31
dwohnitmok wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like a JS frontend framework. I've never used it. I have no idea why it would be sanctioned. Bizarrely Aurelia 1.0 at https://github.com/aurelia/framework has a banner across its top indicating trade sanctions, but the new version Aurelia 2.0 doesn't https://github.com/aurelia/aurelia . Aurelia's developers suspect it's because they have contributors from sanctioned countries. That's the first I've ever hear…

My first question is: how does Github know that certain committers are from sanctioned countries? Do they have Github profiles showing they're from sanctioned countries? Given the number of huge FOSS projects on Github, it's feasible to imagine that many major repos have code contributed by people from sanctioned countries. I have no idea what their motive is, but it smells really political to me. I could see Github'…

> how does Github know that certain committers are from sanctioned countries? Do they have Github profiles showing they're from sanctioned countries?

Even if not in their profiles, you can pretty reliably detect a user's country from their IP address.

Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#93

Post by cfv »

driverdan wrote: post #86
cfv wrote: post #77

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.

Merge requests have been a gitlab feature since forever though. Like issues, and webhooks

Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#94

Post by jobigoud »

woofcat wrote: post #69
Joker_vD wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Country A has zero legitimacy doing this if they have the exact same weapons of mass destruction. Their only argument would be that they are more responsible. It reminds me of parents punishing their kid for smoking while they are smokers themselves. No credibilty.

Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#95

Post by deanCommie »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #79
woofcat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s a nice app example in theory , but can you point to any examples where this is working in practice? Iran doesn’t count because they were / are complying but the US is a bully. North Korea is a good example of sanctions not working in every way that matters.

Humans are weird.

In the absence of a working solution, people would prefer a well-intentioned (but as you said non-effective) solution to NOTHING.

If you do nothing, people will yell at you to do SOMETHING.

Sure, doing the RIGHT thing is best - but until then doing something is better than doing nothing.

Not saying I agree, just that's the idea.

Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#96

Post by unlinked_dll »

vasco wrote: post #44

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…

Why should software or online services be treated different than any other good/service when it comes to an embargo?

It's fine to debate an embargo, but that belongs in the political space and not technical or business realm.

Personally I may not agree with the efficacy of particular embargoes, but I do support the ability of my government to enforce one wholeheartedly. Because by the same token that you want to sell your information services to people oppressed by hostile foreign powers, there are those that want to sell them to the oppressors, and it's generally impossible to tell the difference. I don't want to hear about another IBM selling bookkeeping tools to another Nazi regime to improve the bureaucracy of their death camps, and if that means a few indie developers can't get Iranians to use their front end JS framework that's ok with me.

This debate belongs in the senate, not in the tech world.

Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#98

Post by jkaplowitz »

mullingitover wrote: post #78

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.

Whatever free speech rights apply to Iranians in Iran don't come from the US Constitution, not even from its First Amendment. The US Constitution protects US citizens (and maybe non-citizen nationals) anywhere and anyone of any nationality within the US, with respect to their dealings with the US federal/ state / local governments or those private entities exercising the authority of these governments. That's it.

Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#99

Post by gtrubetskoy »

Github was cool when git was new years back - but these days, and especially given how git inherently is not centralized, it is not very clear to me why we all cling to github. With a little work, all that it offers can be done without any help of a centralized server/corporation.

Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions

#100

Post by downerending »

vasco wrote: post #44

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…

I don't think anyone reasonably expects that their citizens will have any useful reaction. Rather, it's simply a way to cause economic hardship to the country.

Whether that's a wise or ethical idea depends on the particular situation, but it's certainly a much smaller hammer than (say) direct military action.

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