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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

#101

Post by vetinari »

tw04 wrote: post #80
vetinari wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does not work that way. How do you think Iran and North Korea are connected to Internet in the first place? For NTT and US, such a situation would be a PR disaster. It would be very difficult for them to explain to the public, why they are applying foreign laws to Japanese citizens. Even US knows that, and they would never push for such draconian thing.

> Does not work that way. How do you think Iran and North Korea are connected to Internet in the first place? It literally works that way. North Korea is connected through China Unicom, and China doesn't recognize the North Korean sanctions. Iran's internet access isn't part of the current sanctions. >OFAC or the State Department may also impose so-called “secondary sanctions” on non-US companies, even with no US nex…

> China doesn't recognize the North Korean sanctions.

And this is the key.

In order to the hypothetical NTT situation to be affected by US sanctions, Japan would have to recognize them. It would be up to the Japanese parliament to adopt them. US cannot force NTT unilaterally to kick out someone, NTT in Japan must be in line with Japanese law.

Most countries in the world do not adopt US sanctions as their own. The sanction are being enforced worldwide via contract law (i.e. the exporting company has a contract with the US vendor that it won't sell to specified parties); not by US forcing its jurisdiction on other countries.

That would result in pretty nasty questioning about democracy.

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

#102

Post by kujaomega »

Seems that Github has automated some repository banning actions.

3 days ago, the author of a repo got removed his account without reason and hours later got his account reactivated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22593595), after posting to hackernews.

As we see, the Aurelia repository were also removed, and hours later reactivated.

What caught my attention is that the banned user is from Russia and that Aurelia repository has got developers from Iran.

Is this a sign of Github country discrimination? Or is this a sign of Machine learning bias?

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

#103

Post by himinlomax »

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…

The stupidest part is, people in affected countries easily and routinely circumvent the block. The only people affected are foreign companies from countries that do not have a sanction, but risk being sued in the US. For example, European oil companies operating in Iran.

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

#104

Post by coffeemug »

jobigoud wrote: post #94
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…

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.

To pick an extreme example, do you seriously believe the US has less legitimacy in this respect than North Korea?

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

#105

Post by stephenhuey »

ISL wrote: post #6

What is Aurelia? Why would it be sanctioned?

A front-end framework I first used on a project about 4 years ago. I always hoped it would become as popular as Angular or React but it hasn’t picked up that much (I still have hope since I like it so much). Pretty strange that GH would have applied sanctions to it, even if it was a mistake.

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

#106

Post by webo »

cfv wrote: post #93
driverdan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Code search, access permissions, code owners, 3rd party integrations?

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

#107

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

deanCommie wrote: post #95
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So true.

If you’ve got something and it functions, your job is done, move on.

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

#108

Post by cfv »

webo wrote: post #106
cfv wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Code search, access permissions, code owners, 3rd party integrations?

If you tried looking it up yourself instead of making me feed you info in what totally looks like bad faith that would be awesome.

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

#109

Post by antoncohen »

jedberg wrote: post #62
antoncohen wrote: post #18

What frustrates me about these kind of things is how impersonal they are. How many orgs/users does GitHub sanction a day? Too many for it to be able to email the users and ask clarifying questions? Or even have a human dig in and double check what the algorithm says. Basic human interaction would seemingly solve 99% of false account lockouts and takedowns. Even basic heuristics like this org has a repo with 11,000 st…

Unfortunately US law dictates that you nuke first and ask questions later. You loose your platform protections if you don't.

Does the law actually require a fully automated means of detection? For example to "nuke first" means you need to know that sanctions apply. If the law doesn't require it to be fully automated, "know that sanctions apply" could involve a human doing verification.

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

#110

Post by buckminster »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #81
orclev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First a disclaimer, this is pure speculation on my part, but based on what others have said about github cracking down on sanctioned countries. I'm guessing they audited and found some accounts that belonged to people they suspected of being from sanctioned countries, and then went massively overboard and nuked any repo those users ever contributed to.

I wonder if one could get repos nuked by making issues / signing in / forking / pushing commits through a VPN in Russia/Iran/etc

Now that github is enforcing this they probably block sanctioned countries at the network level.
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