Note: sanctions against Iran are preventing them from buying medical supplies. Millions could die there from COVID-19.
My relatives live in Iran. Sanctions devasted the people's lives, not the government!
GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
271–280 of 312 posts
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#272Are there any European hosted (and owned by a European company) alternatives to GitHub or GitLab?
Not european, but the non-US ones I know of are
- https://gitea.com/ by the gitea project is hosted in China by a Chinese company. It's probably the safest one to use.
- https://bitbucket.org/ by Atlassian is probably hosted in the US but is owned by a company headquartered in Australia.
Personally, I don't think searching for alternatives in other jurisdictions is the right way to tackle this issue. With the way things are devolving in terms of hosting reliability (i.e. getting automatically banned by big tech for vague reasons) and US laws that overstep their boundaries, the best way is to host mirrors across as many services and networks as possible and switch your workflow (incl. issues) to a mail-based one.
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#273I can empathize that GitHub has to abide by laws more stringently now that it's part of Microsoft but oh boy does it's automatic flagging system need work.
One day I was randomly permanently banned because a hacker starred some of my public repos from hacked accounts (only ~6 stars btw). I had no involvement whatsoever, it was likely an attempt by the hacker to dilute the target of the repos they were trying to star. It took me ~2 weeks to appeal and they still blamed me for hacking even though the IPs of those accounts were different. My ban was eventually lifted but I doubt their system works nearly as well as it should.
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#274The funniest thing to me is that the twitter account complaining is a Microsoft employee and Github is owned by Microsoft but the only way he could complain and be heard is via twitter? Amazing!
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://m.imgur.com/a/grRvEWt
Well that does seem hysterical. I wonder what kind of overlap exists between those who have been panicking about "Russian hackers" for the last four years and those who now believe that reluctance in allowing remote Russian developers access to potentially sensitive or valuable US code bases is "racist".
> allowing remote Russian developers access to potentially sensitive or valuable US code bases is "racist".
You do realize that GitLab is open source, right?
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#276Without 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.
It should really be an argument to have github decentralized as well.
I know the “hub” part is in the name, but there must be a way to have separate legal instances working under different sets of rules. The finance world optimized the hell out of regional rules, we should find the legal equivalent to avoid a single gov. setting the rules for the whole planet.
Up until now it might not have been worth the hassle, I’d argue it has become more important nowadays.
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#277Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Flagging this account was obviously a terrible mistake, and I apologize to anyone who was affected by it. We're investigating why it occurred and will make changes to make sure it doesn't happen again. I am glad that we restored access to the account in less than an hour after Aurelia filed their appeal. For context on why any account flagging is ever necessary, unfortunately, every comp…
You need to do a post-mortem on this. What exactly did Aurelia do to trigger this to start with? A contribution from a sanctioned country? A github issue posted by someone from a sanctioned country? How exactly are open source projects supposed to avoid this possibility if they don't happen to literally be Rob Eisenberg? How many other project repositories have been disabled because of this problem? Is Github doing a…
Lower in the thread is a response from an Aurelia author, saying there is an ongoing investigation to find out why it was flagged.
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#278Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Flagging this account was obviously a terrible mistake, and I apologize to anyone who was affected by it. We're investigating why it occurred and will make changes to make sure it doesn't happen again. I am glad that we restored access to the account in less than an hour after Aurelia filed their appeal. For context on why any account flagging is ever necessary, unfortunately, every comp…
GitHub, DROP ICE!
I'm sorry, I understand why you don't like the ICE, but why should they start "randomly" arbitration what can and can't appear on their platform? That's just a massive can of worms nobody wants to open
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to use an Iranian based VPN. Sanctions are almost always implemented by billing address, not by IP address. Geolocation services are crap when you start getting in to third world countries.
Billing addresses are easy to fake.
Ok? I'm sure most e-commerce websites would scoff at the idea of having shoppers mail in a notarized copy of their passport before they can make a purchase.
Re: GitHub shuts off access to Aurelia repository, citing trade sanctions
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, there's a real lack of information in Github's response. I hope we get something more complete. But really, if your project is mature enough and you have the bandwidth, just host it yourself. Gogs, Gitlab, cgit .. lots of FOSS implementations to choose from.
I agree. This is the second story list this we have seen come across the front page of HN this week. I'm glad they sorted it out quickly, but it is almost certainly a result of Mr. Eisenberg's high profile. We saw another story like this come across the front page this week. The author is less well known (also happens to reside in Russia), and claimed that he had trouble even getting an e-mail response from the given…
Here at RhodeCode we strongly believe in self-hosting, this is why we started as an on-premise product for source code management.
You should check out RhodeCode too for self-hosting your own code, with extra security features to make sure it's well protected