Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

ahmadhaghighi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 353 posts

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#161

Post by sudosysgen »

marcinzm wrote: post #148
amaccuish wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I put an AND in my statement for a reason, please don't cherry pick parts of sentences. As a non US-citizen, I don't really care if the US is democratic or not. People have voted and continue to vote for terrible things. What matters is what a country does. So actually the US would certainly be on that list. Unless your argument is, it's not evil if we all voted for it?

>Unless your argument is, it's not evil if we all voted for it? This has nothing to do with good and evil which seems to be a point you're missing. It's about risk of coercion to employees of companies. The US government could be turning babies into hand bags but if it doesn't coerce it's residents into acting against their employers then it doesn't create a risk for companies. edit: Seriously, this was all in the or…

The US has no more qualms about coercion of employees in order to further foreign policy than China or Russia. US legal options for such things are incredibly wide and far ranging.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#162

Post by ahelwer »

colinmhayes wrote: post #156
opnitro wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does the US? Should everyone be sanctioning us?

Afaik the U.S. no longer sponsors terrorists. I'd love a link if I'm misguided. Further, elimination of zionists is still a stated goal of the Iranian government. I'm not saying Israel is guilt free of course, but afaik they've never threatened nuking anyone. Again, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

"No longer" is doing a lot of work here, because by its nature none of this stuff comes out for a number of years after it occurs. We might also ask whether the "rebel" groups the US arms in e.g. Syria are terrorist organizations from another perspective, where four years ago DoD-funded groups were fighting CIA-funded groups: https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-...

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#163

Post by sudosysgen »

colinmhayes wrote: post #156
opnitro wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does the US? Should everyone be sanctioning us?

Afaik the U.S. no longer sponsors terrorists. I'd love a link if I'm misguided. Further, elimination of zionists is still a stated goal of the Iranian government. I'm not saying Israel is guilt free of course, but afaik they've never threatened nuking anyone. Again, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

The US has sponsored terrorists covertly for decades now. Just because they stopped publically sponsoring terrorists doesn't mean much when most of the last century was spent covertly sponsoring them too.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#164

Post by sudosysgen »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #54
vikramkr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no sanctions may[0] be equally effective as sanctions. [0] https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/ersd201803_e.pdf The literature isn't conclusive either way, there's evidence in both directions. But sanctions definitely tend to hurt everyday citizens more than they hurt the targeted governments. Dictators and cronies aren't going to have to worry about increased prices of goods - they get whatever they want - tha…

The point of doing this is to make the citizenry unhappy with the government causing the mess for them. The ideal case is that they force change so that the sanctions go away. But depending on local propaganda, that may or may not work.

Almost universally, the citizenry will actually be even more angered towards the Americans too. From what my friends tell me, this is largely the case in Iran. It doesn't help that the US is sanctioning alone.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#165

Post by opnitro »

colinmhayes wrote: post #156
opnitro wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does the US? Should everyone be sanctioning us?

Afaik the U.S. no longer sponsors terrorists. I'd love a link if I'm misguided. Further, elimination of zionists is still a stated goal of the Iranian government. I'm not saying Israel is guilt free of course, but afaik they've never threatened nuking anyone. Again, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Link on current US funding:https://theintercept.com/2019/10/26/syrian-rebels-turkey-kur... As other comments saying, this info always lags a few years. But there's never been any official reckoning when these details come out, so no reason to assume it has stopped. See also US promotion of Elliot Abrams, despite his connection to the EL Mozote massacres.

On your second point, I want to be clear that I'm not defending the Iranian gov't. I disagree with the use of sanctions that disproportionately effect the least powerful in there society, by design. This is compounded by the fact that the reasons for these sanctions are not moral violations, as the US and its allies behave in much the same way, but instead about international power.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#166

Post by saurik »

einpoklum wrote: post #129
miracle2k wrote: post #88

People should resist the temptation to defend this. 1. Blocking Iranian IPs, as opposed to accounts, is almost certainly over-compliance. Note that the vast majority of websites do not do this. Even big ones, such as Gmail, do not do this. 2. It does not speak well of the United States justice system if someone could be prosecuted for failure to block Iranian IPs. If this were required, the law should be clear. Other…

> People should resist the temptation to defend this. You yourself are defending these ludicrous sanctions to some extent: > 1. Blocking Iranian IPs, as opposed to accounts, is almost certainly over-compliance. So blocking Iranian IPs is fine? If you tell me "but GitLab is in the US, it has to" - it chose to base itself in the US only after apparently having previously being based elsewhere. With the way things stand…

> > 1. Blocking Iranian IPs, as opposed to accounts, is almost certainly over-compliance.

> So blocking Iranian IPs is fine?

The person you responded to, in the very sentence you quoted, said no, as this is "over-compliance".

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#167

Post by toast0 »

dijit wrote: post #84

Quick note that anyone using a US based cloud provider will likely be blocking all sanctioned countries. It’s not configurable at all. It was a sticking point for us when deploying the sequel to a game I was working on. Ultimately we determined that the benefits of using the provider outweighed the benefit to users since we weren’t shipping the game there officially anyway. (With one notable exception) It still leave…

At least on some clouds, it's configurable, but your lawyers need to speak to their lawyers, etc, to get worldwide access enabled, and annual reconfirmation between lawyers.

You would probably have to be in an OFAC exception category, of course. Routing to sanctioned countries from a provider that mostly blocks them probably isn't the best either.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#168

Post by Causality1 »

gdy wrote: post #131
Causality1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in complete agreement that most of our "allies" in the region are fairweather friends and as morally bankrupt as anyone else. However, I'm also in favor of blanket sanctions against any nation whose parliament takes up a literal "Marg bar Āmrikā" collective chant.

That's ironic, that you have a problem with casuality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93United_States_rel... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93United_States_rel...

Yep, the US did terrible things to Iran 67 years ago. How much time has to pass before it's no longer appropriate? Would it have been appropriate for the US congress to chant "death to Japan" in 2008? The Islamic Revolution was 41 years ago. Should the South Korean parliament be chanting "death to China"?

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#169

Post by jlgaddis »

542458 wrote: post #89
PestoDiRucola wrote: post #28

Gitlab blocked Iran's Access* This happened because of US sanctions[0]. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/code-of-condu...

I’m a little confused at people who are mad at GitLab here. I’m under the impression that sanctions and export control laws tend to be fairly strict, and penalties for knowing non-compliance are harsh, including the possibility of jail time. GitLab’s hands are pretty tied here.

> ... sanctions and export control laws tend to be fairly strict, and penalties for knowing non-compliance are harsh, including the possibility of jail time.

Yeah, no kidding. It's not even "knowing non-compliance", though -- although that's almost certainly worse.

To illustrate this with an example that most HN readers will easily understand (and which some might even be affected by):

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Department of the Treasury recently issued an advisory [0,1] to "alert" U.S. companies of the potential risks of "facilitating" ransomware payments.

The TL;DR is that "U.S. persons, wherever located" are subject to heavy civil penalties -- under "strict liability" -- if you "facilitate" a payment from a ransomware victim that ultimately ends up going to an "entity" that's in one of the embargoed/sanctioned countries (Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Cuba, ...) or on OFAC's "Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List".

"Strict Liability", by the way, means that you're still liable and subject to penalties even if you "did not know or have reason to know".

"Oh, really? Oh, well, that's too bad. You're still liable, pay up!"

Finally, think about how broadly the vague term "facilitate" might possibly be interpreted (especially by the U.S. Government!) There's belief in some infosec circles that this even means that, for example, a consultant who told a ransomware victim, "yeah, you should probably pay if you want your data back" might be considered liable.

--

[0]: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...

[1]: https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/126/ofac_ransomware_a... (PDF)

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#170

Post by Symbiote »

dijit wrote: post #84

Quick note that anyone using a US based cloud provider will likely be blocking all sanctioned countries. It’s not configurable at all. It was a sticking point for us when deploying the sequel to a game I was working on. Ultimately we determined that the benefits of using the provider outweighed the benefit to users since we weren’t shipping the game there officially anyway. (With one notable exception) It still leave…

I only use Amazon Route 53. Does anyone know if that's ever been blocked in Iran etc?

It doesn't seem to be blocked at the moment, but it's also something I can't find any official documentation on.

Post reply on HN