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Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

ahmadhaghighi.com

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Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#201

Post by fakedang »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #185
Siira wrote: post #128

I am Persian. From what I gather, the middle-plus class here still mostly believes that changing the regime is costly and risky (especially since it might very well lead to a civil war, as the regime has no humanity and has shown that it will kill every single one of the people to survive). These sanctions certainly help align our incentives more with the US agenda, but they do not seem to be enough after all. Obama'…

I have basically no background in the subject, but I'd be interested in your perspectives if you feel like answering any of these questions: - What are the United States' goals with respect to Iran? - What goals of Iran's are being hindered, objected to, or otherwise meddled with by the United States? - In the end, dictators know that the Western block is finicky, unstable, and short-termish; This makes it so that hi…

Not OP, not Iranian, but going by my Iranian friend, it's mostly as follows:

- odd that you're asking an Iranian Qn#1. They don't know either

- Iran wants to play a regional power in the Middle East, far greater than it is now. It is to be noted that many countries in the ME, such as the UAE, Qatar, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain have significant Shia minorities or majorities in some cases. When the Arab Spring happened, Iran actively encouraged protests within the Shia population to overthrow the monarchy in Bahrain, until the UAE and Saudi Arabia reacted. Even now, the UAE regularly arrests Shia folks it suspects of cavorting with Iran (a large part of the Arab population in the Emirates are descended from Persia). Not to mention, Iran invaded and expelled the local Arab population of a tiny island of one of the constituent Emirates of the UAE, before the country's formation and during the time of the Shah. Iran is quite the expansionist.

- basically what Rouhani thinks. Wait until Biden gets into power, and hope that he's going to continue the Obama policy. This is not common among all dictators though - some want Trump to be in power, like the monarchs of the Arab states, since he's an Iran hawk.

- a solution to Iran's repressive regime, duh. Iranians have been immigrating en masse for a long time to the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Anywhere there is a democracy. There are a ton of Americans, British, Europeans and Canadians who graduated from Sharif University of Technology, the equivalent of Iran's MIT.

- not just term limits, but the need to "pander" to their constituencies. One decade, they warred in the Middle East, the next decade they want to leave the mess they created, but then commit more troops (Obama on Iraq)? It's definitely not like Russia or China or India (all of which are/were friendly with Iran) who have had a steady policy in the region of being on talking terms with everyone.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#202

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #185
Siira wrote: post #128

I am Persian. From what I gather, the middle-plus class here still mostly believes that changing the regime is costly and risky (especially since it might very well lead to a civil war, as the regime has no humanity and has shown that it will kill every single one of the people to survive). These sanctions certainly help align our incentives more with the US agenda, but they do not seem to be enough after all. Obama'…

I have basically no background in the subject, but I'd be interested in your perspectives if you feel like answering any of these questions: - What are the United States' goals with respect to Iran? - What goals of Iran's are being hindered, objected to, or otherwise meddled with by the United States? - In the end, dictators know that the Western block is finicky, unstable, and short-termish; This makes it so that hi…

> Solution to what problem?

Presumably, the 'oppressive' part of oppressive regime. Guy has my sympathies FWIW.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#203

Post by arp242 »

Siira wrote: post #128

I am Persian. From what I gather, the middle-plus class here still mostly believes that changing the regime is costly and risky (especially since it might very well lead to a civil war, as the regime has no humanity and has shown that it will kill every single one of the people to survive). These sanctions certainly help align our incentives more with the US agenda, but they do not seem to be enough after all. Obama'…

The regime is here and as you pointed out it's not easy to "just change it"; the point of Obama's strategy was to limit the regime's access to nuclear weapons, not to directly make life better for the average Iranian. It was effective at that goal. And Iran with nuclear weapons would make regime change in the future even harder.

International politics with these kind of countries are tricky business; personally I'd love nothing more than see Iran become a better place, but you can't just force things like this. We tried in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that didn't turn out so well. People are still trying in Syria and we can't exactly call this a great success either.

So ... your best bet is to deal with these kind of regimes the best you can, by applying pressure in one area and making a deal in another. I think few people are especially happy with this, but it's the best option out of a bad bunch.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#204

Post by trhway »

bigbubba wrote: post #199
trhway wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they voted wrong way.

I'm under the impression that nobody but Russian state media claims that election was legitimate.

wrong way in wrong elections :) Of course, like any Russian election it was just a formality, a décor. Nobody really needed it as the will of the people was clear - no more threats of more of those "trains of friendships" full of Western Ukrainian nationalists, especially given all the quiet massive arming of those nationalists that had happened under the cover of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the run up to the 2014.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#205

Post by didibus »

Siira wrote: post #128

I am Persian. From what I gather, the middle-plus class here still mostly believes that changing the regime is costly and risky (especially since it might very well lead to a civil war, as the regime has no humanity and has shown that it will kill every single one of the people to survive). These sanctions certainly help align our incentives more with the US agenda, but they do not seem to be enough after all. Obama'…

A good NPR on the topic: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/671672020

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#206

Post by arp242 »

excieve wrote: post #184

What many don't seem to understand about Crimea, is that Crimea is an occupied territory of Ukraine [0] (as understood by UN, as well as most countries except the Russian Federation and several of its affiliated states). As an occupied territory, it doesn't have any legitimate institutions (such as a recognised government, banks, courts, etc.) — only a foreign occupation regime. Same way as Germany's Reichskommissari…

On the other hand, many of the people living there are not at fault for any of this. They just ... live there.

This is why I have such mixed feelings about these kind of sanctions: sure, I don't really disagree with what you're saying, but on the other hand in practice it means hurting normal people just building a life for themselves.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#207

Post by dijit »

lucb1e wrote: post #112
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 the…

Gitlab is hosted on google cloud, and fronted by cloudflare... those IP restrictions apply to google cloud, AWS, Azure and Oracle Cloud. (and Cloudflare since that's a US company also)

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#208

Post by da39a3ee »

ReptileMan wrote: post #136
Myrmornis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're so scared of the country you live in that you are publicly recommending to your fellow Americans that they don't host a project on a (gasp) German website like codeberg? You have completely lost perspective, or you are a mindless rule-follower, or a coward, or some combination of all of these.

I also find the Aaron Swartz case extremely sad and depressing, but what he was doing was very different from using a European website in the way the website owners intend.

> with only downsides.

Of course there are upsides; that is the whole point of this discussion: the upside is that the resources will be available to all people in the world.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#209

Post by arp242 »

tpetry wrote: post #113

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.

One difference is that Cloudflare doesn't directly do business with you if you visit a website that's using cloudflare, whereas signing up for GitLab (or cloudflare, for that matters) means entering in a legal agreement.

I'd have to look at the exact text of the sanctions to see if providing service like cloudflare is a violation, but it's not really the same thing as having an account.

Re: Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access

#210

Post by concordDance »

davedx wrote: post #198
Siira wrote: post #128

I am Persian. From what I gather, the middle-plus class here still mostly believes that changing the regime is costly and risky (especially since it might very well lead to a civil war, as the regime has no humanity and has shown that it will kill every single one of the people to survive). These sanctions certainly help align our incentives more with the US agenda, but they do not seem to be enough after all. Obama'…

Whenever anyone uses the term “virtue signalling” I automatically discard their opinion in the same way this phrase does with the people it’s referring to: that a bloc of people (the entire EU and democrat party of the US no less) are simply “pretending to care to look good”. The use of this phrase belies a cynical, reductionist attitude that I have no respect for whatsoever

Is it that you think virtue signalling doesn't happen?

Because I've done it myself many times (mostly before I understood the term, but also afterwards on occasion).

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