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Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

ahmadhaghighi.com

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Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#111

Post by tinco »

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…

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

Do you have a source for this being over-compliance? Gitlab and Github are both actively sharing technology. It's not like Gitlab randomly decided "Hey let's block Iran today", obviously they have in house legal council who advised this course of action.

With regards to your second point, everyone knows there are sanctions on Iran, it's been all over the news, and besides it's not like Gitlab is a random US citizen. They are a big company that is doing business overseas. It stands to reason that they should be aware of all laws and restrictions on international trade.

I think it's the other way around, companies like Google and Facebook should grow some responsibility, it is not unreasonable to ask a company to "fish" for any accounts that conflict with any laws. Google and Facebook might give the impression that it's hard, but it's really not, it's only hard if you expect to make hundreds of dollars for every dollar that you invest acquiring your user base.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#112

Post by lucb1e »

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…

> US based cloud provider

Huh, I thought it was GitLab B.V. and that still exists[1], but Wikipedia says they're headquartered in the USA as of 2018[2] and the official "About" page[3] mentions Amsterdam, the Netherlands nor B.V., but does mention a "GitLab Inc.". The history on Wikipedia doesn't mention them having moved and still has the "Tech companies from the Netherlands" category (not sure if that's because they're still originally from there, or because the category was never removed).

Not sure blocking Iran would have happened if they hadn't opened a corp overseas.

[1] https://www.kvk.nl/orderstraat/product-kiezen/?kvknummer=600...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GitLab&diff=82685...

[3] https://about.gitlab.com/company/

Edit: slightly older, 2017 reference of USA headquarters https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6J-gitlab-s-secret-to-ma...

Editv2: the TOS still says that the intellectual property is with GitLab B.V. but the branding page says the trademark is held by GitLab Inc. The privacy policy is not GDPR-complaint (on multiple counts and I haven't even read it, just spotted some things like implicit+non-opt-outable consent while looking for who is the data controller) and doesn't mention who the data controller is. It does make clear that all data goes to the USA and you better suck it up. Looks like they fully embraced all of the USA's freedoms including censorship and privacy violations under their home country's law. I'm giving up searching for more info about the move at this point: there is no news article in HN search, the blog search requires me to accept more tracking which (after seeing the illegal-in-the-EU privacy policy) I'm not sure I'm willing to engage in, and the website seems to have had mixed mentions of B.V. and Inc. as of 2016.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#113

Post by tpetry »

So the consens is that many companies are doing this because of sanctions by the US.

What about cloudflare? They are responsible for more and more of the internet‘s traffic. And even if you are a non-us company and have servers not in the US many people use cloudflare because of its ddos protection. Does cloudflare block these countries too as they are an american company despite you not being a us company.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#114

Post by Myrmornis »

ReptileMan wrote: post #75
Myrmornis wrote: post #51

What steps can maintainers of projects hosted on GitHub/GitLab/etc take to make their projects available to users in countries affected by this US policy? For example, is there an alternative git hosting site where it would be helpful for me to maintain a fork, so that the README is available and people can open issues and PRs? Similarly, where would be a good place to host the binaries built on each release so that…

>What steps can maintainers of projects hosted on GitHub/GitLab/etc take to make their projects available to users in countries affected by this US policy? If they are under US jurisdiction it is inadvisable to try and circumvent such stuff.

I'm talking about something like keeping a fork on a git hosting website in a country where it's accessible by anyone. No individual open source developer is going to be prosecuted for doing that.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#115

Post by godelzilla »

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…

Imperialism always attacks innocent citizens.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#116

Post by cosmin800 »

belltaco wrote: post #108
cosmin800 wrote: post #106

TL, DR; is the Nth time I read the same story, someone losing access to something they think they owned. I don't want to sound too heinous or else ..but please don't be so naive to trust github, operated by microsoft,an usa company, with your life work. You own what you can defend. Your github account is not yours. Sober up. Using any service inside USA is a priviledge not a right.

This is Gitlab not Github.

oh, so sorry, indeed, gitlab, other company. Gitlab Inc. San Francisco, United States, must obey us law.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#117

Post by Myrmornis »

dilatedmind wrote: post #64
Myrmornis wrote: post #51

What steps can maintainers of projects hosted on GitHub/GitLab/etc take to make their projects available to users in countries affected by this US policy? For example, is there an alternative git hosting site where it would be helpful for me to maintain a fork, so that the README is available and people can open issues and PRs? Similarly, where would be a good place to host the binaries built on each release so that…

I could be reading this wrong, but it looks like github allows open source contributions from sanctioned countries. https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

OK, and from the article it looks like GitLab is blocking all access to their site. So is your understanding that GitLab is currently much more restrictive than GitHub in this regard?

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#118

Post by godelzilla »

dsabanin wrote: post #55
ahelwer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I think the sanctions exists because of the nuclear program. NATO is not going to trade and help technologically a country that's trying to develop nuclear weapons in order to threaten to NATO and their main officially stated enemy – United States. Why would you buy oil from a country or give access to your tech to them when they are using these resources to ramp up their military against you?

Maybe Iran wouldn't need to defend itself if they weren't being attacked.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#119

Post by falcolas »

umvi wrote: post #105
falcolas wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What non-violent (yes, there is violence inherent in sanctions, but it is a rather different scale than war) alternative would you suggest for punishing a foreign country? EDIT: I see this question has been asked in other threads, but not answered. Whether Iran should be punished is a separate question (one on which I am personally too ignorant to hold an opinion about) from how should one country punish another.

Well in the case of authoritarian regimes, I would imagine trying to pump more information from the free world into it would be a more effective "punishment" that restricting information. In practice though that's hard. Most authoritarian regimes have state censors/firewalls to filter only information that is advantageous for the state.

China (hell, vaccinations/flat earth too) has shown that this isn’t terribly effective. The ‘west’ has been pursuing a policy of “if we enlighten them, they will revolt”, and it ain’t happening. Some have been enlightened, others have had their own biases strengthened, and the government has simply continued unchanged.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#120

Post by monokh »

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…

> 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.

How do you define an iranian account? It's a complicated rule set there. Iranians not legally resident in Iran are exempt from the sanctions for example.

I feel like IP bans are correct. If you're evading sanctions and internet censorship, you use whatever proxy and many do just this. Companies under these sanctions can write it off as not being the wiser and the users get to where they need to.

Closing accounts with an IP login from Iran does feel like an unnecessary step here.

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