How long before someone gets an Iran VPN so that their company is knocked out and they get a day off.
My first thought was that this could have been avoided if a VPN was used. Why bother with such a weakly enforceable policy?
GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
181–190 of 515 posts
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure they are. Propose an EU or non-Chinese Asian alternative to AWS that is, say, 80% as efficient/effective. If that's not possible, then choosing AWS for your startup/scaling business is not the stupidest move you can make, assuming AWS fits your use case. "MS Windows having a marketshare of 96% should not necessarily stop you from designing your business around linux" But Windows doesn't have this kind of markets…
I think you're missing the point. It's less a question of "can you find an alternative that is at least 80% as efficient", and more a question of "is this 20% bump in efficiency worth the liability risk". Your opinion is 'yes'. OP's opinion is 'no'. Both are valid opinions and highly depend on the nature of your business. But, OP's somewhat un-american sentiment aside (which I believe is mostly what you're reacting t…
I am not anti-american or anything like that.I even acknowledge american dominance in Tech and better conditions for skilled workers (read much higher salaries).
That said as a european I have to consider my interests and interests of my business.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#183If the Iranian employee logged into the Github account, isn't blocking the account exactly what the law says they should do? If all they did was apply a merge request in one of the repos then would reverting the merge and blocking the account would be enough to comply? Is there some alternative way to comply with US export restrictions? The real question here is why people even consider using US cloud companies when…
The real question is why GH blocks an Indian company and all its Indian employees (all legal and outside the US sanctions list) when an employee logs on in Iran. Does US law require application to such an extreme degree? If not, then why is GH doing it?
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#184So many dimensions come to play here. 1. There's the obvious legal aspect i.e. how these laws are framed and interpreted. 2. Then there's the geopolitical aspect. Is it fair to impose sanctions on Iran. 3. There's another aspect around GitHub policy that asks if an entire organization be banned for the location of one team member. 4. Finally, there's the aspect of relinquishing control. Your app development is on the…
> Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system.
GitHub is simultaneously not the be-all-and-end-all of Git[1] and more than Git[2].
If they have good backups of everything (if not they should consider this a beating with the ol' clue stick (I'm assuming everything on github can be backed up away from it?)) this should only be a bump in the road, though a considerably inconvenient bump as there is nothing they can just restore to and move on using without a pile of changes and/or admin work.
[1] pick a new location for the "source of truth" repo for your team, push everything to that, and you're golden again
[2] all the bits wrapped around it are available elsewhere, but not necessarily in a convenient ready-made integrated manner[3]
[3] there is GitLab of course, not a direct 1-1 feature mapping in either direction but close enough for many, I'm told performance is more of an issue but you can always self-host if controlling that is worth the extra admin to you
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#185I'm on GitHub/Microsoft's side here. They are not responsible for the content of US export control laws, and they have an incredible amount to lose if they are found to be in violation of US export control laws. Presumably GitHub needs some automated tool to prevent inbound traffic from sanctioned countries, and it's hard to be certain that they are complying with US law if such automated tools have some wiggle room…
“ none of it is GitHub/Microsoft's fault.”
Not really:
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
pretty clearly states they don’t even need to ban that specific person let alone thr entire company.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#186Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#187Please please PLEASE add at least one other provider to your remotes if you're going all in on cloud. Consider also doing a regular local backup of all your repos. A quick Google search will yield you tools that will automate this entire process on platforms such as GitHub , BitBucket and GitLab. I personally delegated this to a Cron job. I check the backups manually once a month to check all is in order.
While this is good advice of course, it is not clear to me if the problem is just the source code.
The twitter message says "We are completely blocked from deploying!."
Maybe they already have the source code elsewhere but use GitHub actions?
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#188How long before someone gets an Iran VPN so that their company is knocked out and they get a day off.
My first thought was that this could have been avoided if a VPN was used. Why bother with such a weakly enforceable policy?
> Why bother with such a weakly enforceable policy?
To show they've done what they can to enforce the embargo, in the hope that the policy is enough to satisfy the authorities wrt doing enough.
They can't tell is a user is circumventing the policy via a VPN, but such a user is actively circumventing the enforcement of the policy so can't try pass the buck with a "well they let us, so we just assumed it was OK" based excuse.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#189Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#190Entrusting your business to an american entity is the stupidest idea you could have thought about. Especially us europeans should not rely on American services at all.It's not worth it. American corporations are just as much a liability as their counterparts in China.
The top 33 "software and programming" companies by revenue in the world can be found below [0]. 28 of them are American. Two are in the EU. One is in the UK. One is in Australia. The last is Russian. One of the companies in the EU produces enterprise software almost no one on this website uses (SAP). The other is Dassault. In the US the top five companies are Microsoft, Oracle, ADP, Adobe, and Salesforce. If you incl…
>Until then, no one is going to flock to Hetzner over AWS.
You don't need the market to flock to Hetzner or OVH to use it yourself and avoid US sanctions.