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Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

ahmadhaghighi.com

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Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#131

Post by gdy »

Causality1 wrote: post #76
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.

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...

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#132

Post by judge2020 »

falcolas wrote: post #119
umvi wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand, a presidency term without a few foreign coups is considered a dull affair.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#133

Post by lucb1e »

tinco wrote: post #111
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, i…

> obviously they have in house legal council who advised this course of action

From my experience at technology companies, this may indeed be the case, but I would also not underestimate the chance that someone made this decision without being advised to do so by an expensive legal council.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#134

Post by jakear »

tinco wrote: post #111
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, i…

Just FYI.. you perhaps meant counsel not council, though the meanings are similar enough it can be hard to tell.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#135

Post by acdha »

londons_explore wrote: post #107
542458 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We should change the rules so that anything that's provided, for free, to the entire world can also be given to sanctioned countries and individuals.

That’s getting off-topic: U.S. law currently requires this. Whether or not you agree with that policy, the question is whether GitLab should knowingly break that law, incurring potentially significantly or even ruinous impact to their business, until the law is changed or should they comply while working with their representatives to change the laws? That’s a lot of risk to ask a company to take on for something which doesn’t benefit Iranians that much.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#136

Post by ReptileMan »

Myrmornis wrote: post #114
ReptileMan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Once again for US citizen in US under US jurisdiction - testing what DoJ will consider violation of the sanctions is dangerous games with only downsides. As the Aaron Swartz case showed it is enough to get entangled.

Especially if you maintain something that could be considered dual purpose

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#137

Post by einpoklum »

mirekrusin wrote: post #96
542458 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We shouldn't be upset at github/githlab/npm/dockerhub but our industry and ourselves - how did we let our projects/packages/tools/infrastructure to be hosted on such platforms in the first place? Hopefully this will trigger more activity on decentralised solutions; git is decentralised already, needs some ipfs/torrent/etc wrapper for issues/rest or maybe something based on fossil etc.

Well, we put our projects on the most popular platform, for visibility; and visibility is important for FOSS projects.

But you make a valid point. Perhaps we should put the "master reop" on something that's decentralized and not subject to US censorship, and only place a copy on GitHub/GitLab/etc.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#138

Post by amadeuspagel »

dsabanin wrote: post #16
sschueller wrote: post #8

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 implicit premise here is that we must somehow screw with Iran, and if you don't have some idea other then sanctions to do that, you should shut up. Well, I don't accept that premise. We should leave them alone.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#139

Post by einpoklum »

falcolas wrote: post #98
616c wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> What non-violent alternative would you suggest for punishing a foreign country?

It is not for the US to "punish" other world states, even if "Iran should be punished".

If you, or your state, believe some kind of sanctions are in order, there are international bodies and forums where this can be discussed and decided upon: The UN security council, international courts, and other more specialized bodies, some of which can make decisions which constitute sanctions.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#140

Post by amaccuish »

marcinzm wrote: post #110
AsyncAwait wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> countries with aggressive foreign policies If we go by that logic, the U.S. would get on that list. > non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens If that was indeed the standard to go by, I'd agree, but the list would then need to be much, much longer and possibly include even some traditionally democratic countries like Australia who have an actual law where they can force employees to secre…

>If we go by that logic, the U.S. would get on that list. I put an AND in my statement for a reason, please don't cherry pick parts of sentences. >The list would by these metrics include well over half the world. That's like saying that if you don't want to die you should live in a cocoon and never leave the house, rather than just making sure to avoid the most dangerous activities. GitLab is blocking the countries i…

> 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?

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