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Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

ahmadhaghighi.com

11–20 of 353 posts

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#11
post #3

GitLab can’t do nothing about it, and whining will not help. Everything is on government level.

What a defeatist attitude. What you unkindly label as whining, I see as advocacy for a good cause. Blocking access to gitlab does nothing but strengthen the autocracy in Iran and prevents Iranian devs from making a living and supporting their communities.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#12
post #3

GitLab can’t do nothing about it, and whining will not help. Everything is on government level.

They are not whining, and GitLab could have notified them about the account suspension, and sent them a link with their archived account data to download.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#13

> GitLab is not the only actor in this discrimination against Persian/Iranian people, we also blocked by GitHub, Docker, NPM, Google Developer, Android, AWS, Go, Kubernetes and etc. US sanctions compliance most likely Edit: confirmed by Gitlab: https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1312183287402512384

Yep, usually gets picked up when a company ends up getting SOX compliance before going public. While OFAC sanctions are not strictly speaking part of SOX, every audit I've seen ends up putting them in place anyway.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#17
post #3

GitLab can’t do nothing about it, and whining will not help. Everything is on government level.

What a defeatist attitude. What you unkindly label as whining, I see as advocacy for a good cause. Blocking access to gitlab does nothing but strengthen the autocracy in Iran and prevents Iranian devs from making a living and supporting their communities.

Putting post like that is nothing more than whining, as it doesn’t change anything. Want to do something better? Write some petitions, make a campaign or anything other, but bashing company that have to comply with US laws is just stupid. Sorry if this is unkindly and defeatist for you.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#18

> GitLab is not the only actor in this discrimination against Persian/Iranian people, we also blocked by GitHub, Docker, NPM, Google Developer, Android, AWS, Go, Kubernetes and etc. US sanctions compliance most likely Edit: confirmed by Gitlab: https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1312183287402512384

Sadly to the point. I feel for Iranians in Iran (I know many, whether they call themselves Persians or Iranians as expats is their choice and I respect that).

Having had the opportunity to meet the former in their homeland so so long ago, many Americans do not understand how grueling the sanctions regime system is for average Iranian citizens in their everyday; this is sadly a minor example as I saw based experiences a decade ago. It does not impact government officials as much as we hope, and the citizens are far, far less empowered to force government change to break free of a system sanctions hopes to disincentivize (I will not even waste time here, Google and look, even recent attempts lead to backlash).

As a Westerner, and a lover of HN, I would love to see data-driven examples of sanctions actually working. Was South Africa are only positive example from US sanction strategies? I will go look, but this is one of many examples in Iran of us causing resentment and confusion for citizenry and not really helping. (For Americans, this is a not a red-blue problem if we talk long-term approach, all political parties have sided with sanction strategies in the long-term for a while: Cubans and Iranians we have punished and it has not really seemed to help us _in the long-term_ shifting their governments and policy objectives, but I would love to see evidenced counterpoints.)

The first time I was struck by this perverting are efforts in explaining open society to citizens of countries with indifferent governments was a decade ago, when SourceForge did the same thing. We respect the rule of law, but to spite the faces of democratic cultural principles. Oh well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073903

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#19

Open source code, books and knowledge should never be blocked, until we learn this we are no better than the people we are trying to "punish" with pointless and ineffective sanctions.

What's your alternative to sanctions that's more effective? War?

The only thing Iran is guilty of is insufficient deference to US hegemony. Any other charge you levy can have its equal found in our so-called allies in the region, or even the US itself.
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