“My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

[Heh, this is also one of those "Best way to get a correct answer on the internet..." kind of situations. Oh well, live and learn.]

This is one of those threads that's going to be coopted as a way to flog arguments against either or both of the US or GitHub when the truth is almost certainly that it's just a mistake.

I'm aware of no US sanctions against Crimea. There are sanctions against Russia over the Crimean annexation, but those are targetted to specific industries (which certainly don't include some dude's open source game downloader) and in any case are not actually being enforced by the current administration for reasons that no one here wants to discuss.

They messed up. Or plausibly the author is actually not in Crimea or has some other undisclosed affiliation, I guess. But most likely they messed up and will fix it.

Yikes. Sanctions are a scorched earth policy. In my humble uninformed opinion the best thing would be to attempt to get out for many reasons :(

During the Cold War, the primary thing that distinguished the US side from the USSR side was that, while speech by USSR people and people sympathetic to the USSR (like, say, CPUSA) was published in the US, publishing speech sympathetic to the US in the USSR would get you arrested.

It seems like the US has become what the USSR was: companies who publish speech from people in Iran or Crimea are now violating the law by doing so. Moreover, in cases like this one, already-published material is being destroyed, in a way that wasn't practical in the USSR, due to technological limitations (though they did try — famously Beria was airbrushed out of official photographs). The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents — but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.

This is a crucially important reason to move away from centralized and proprietary systems and onto decentralized, peer-to-peer, secure, free-software systems.

Learn from history.

(Edit: previously I gave Noam Chomsky as an example of someone sympathetic to the USSR, but that is at best debatable. The Communist Party USA, now in its 101st year, is a much clearer example, one that published continuously throughout the Cold War despite US prosecutions of its leadership.)

>The Crimea peninsula is now cut off from number of products and services, as US law forbids companies from providing services and exporting goods to the disputed territory.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_that_applied...

That's exactly the reason why we need to decentralise Github, that's way too much power for a corporation.