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“My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

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Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#261

Post by tasubotadas »

jhbadger wrote: post #251
paulintrognon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Noam Chomsky has ever been sympathetic to the USSR, he just said that the US was not much better than USSR. For example in that speach he clearly states that USSR was a a flawed totalitarian system from the start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06-XcAiswY4 (he has in fact also stated many times that his political views were indeed censored in the US)

When Western intellectuals like Chomsky say they have been "censored", they mean that that their publishing house asked them to leave out or add stuff because they felt that such changes would help the book sell better, as their goal was to make money off authors they published. That's quite a bit different from the threats of jail time that Eastern Bloc intellectuals faced.

A modern westerner doesn't really get how it was in the Soviet block.

"Wasn't much better than USSR" is such bullshit on so many levels that it's hard to even to begin. In the US:

- you didn't have quotas to write "correct literature"

- you wouldn't disappear in a gulag for 10 years

- you didn't have to worry about standing in a queue for 1-2h to get fresh bread and sausage (it's easier to contemplate stupid shit when you don't have to worry about food)

- you didn't get assigned to a specific workplace where you HAD to work

- the books you read didn't have ideological crap (due to quotas) like "and children stopped starving because country X is a part of a friendly USSR"

I skipped not relevant bits but probably I still missed quite a few because I can only relay what my parents and others told me (I was born in the late 80s so I didn't get to experience the full glory of USSR).

EDIT: I forgot to mention a well-known practice of labelling people physically ill[1], getting them into physical wards, and pumping them with drugs until they are no longer "a thread". There is no need for a trial, and you can be held there indefinitely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#262

Post by zzzcpan »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #18
realusername wrote: post #10

That's exactly the reason why we need to decentralise Github, that's way too much power for a corporation.

What does “decentralize Github” mean?

This is something that needs to happen. Megacorp/government controlled source code hub is simply not acceptable for cultural and ideological reasons. There should be no centralized control of a repository distribution, if you publish it and people use it, no government or corporation should be able to censor it.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#263

Post by [deleted] »

orf wrote: post #252
lazyjones wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is appointed by the European Council and requires approval from the European Parliament. And now let's look at the past 3 presidents: always the same routine, the EP gets presented with 1 candidate and can say yes... or yes. Awesome democracy.

Just because you don't understand it, or have been misinformed, doesn't make it a terrible system.

[deleted]

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#265

Post by tasubotadas »

golergka wrote: post #205

I'm glad that US is pressing in this. Five years since Crimea happened, it's still cut off Russia in terms of business – all the major companies won't touch it with a ten-feet pole exactly because of sanctions. It's a sad state of affairs for people who still live there, but a good precedent for the world peace, showing that this annexation will not be normalized.

I don't really get why is this downvoted. If anything, the response to that was too weak.

Again, to some soft-hearted people, this might look like a terrible story when alone dev in Crimea can't access his GitHub but I have 0 sentiments here.

Ukraine's sovereignty was guaranteed by the UK, the US, and Russia when they gave up their nukes. So somebody had to at least pretend to do something. The US (compared to the UK) showed a much stronger response.

Now Russia came and claimed a part of Ukraine as their own. If there is 0 response to that, you know how it makes all the small countries feel that have borders with Russia? Ask Estonians or Georgians.

So when the next time they gonna occupy Tallinn or Riga, we all gonna be really happy that some dimwits are really concerned that our developers can't access GitHub. Great.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#266

Post by lazyjones »

n4r9 wrote: post #249
lazyjones wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is appointed by the European Council and requires approval from the European Parliament. And now let's look at the past 3 presidents: always the same routine, the EP gets presented with 1 candidate and can say yes... or yes. Awesome democracy.

Presented by the European Council, which is made up of directly elected heads of state. It's imperfect, but as someone living in the UK it's no worse than our own system.

I'm not sure comparing with a monarchy is the best effort we can make to judge the merits of the EU political system. ;-)

Living in a small, entirely democratic EU country, I can't say I'm impressed with how the Commission was formed and it's also obviously an inferior system to that of the USA.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#267

Post by amingilani »

Related: a little while ago, a Iranian developer's post[0] hit the front page. He commented 12 hours ago that GitHub has restricted his account as well.[1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20493699

[1]: http://shahinsorkh.ir/2019/07/20/how-is-it-like-to-be-a-dev-...

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#268

Post by mieseratte »

otalp wrote: post #260
jhbadger wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Western intellectuals like Chomsky say they have been "censored", they mean that that their publishing house asked them to leave out or add stuff because they felt that such changes would help the book sell better, as their goal was to make money off authors they published. That's quite a bit different from the threats of jail time that Eastern Bloc intellectuals faced.

Not many people know of the worst cases. Take the case of Chomsky's "Counter-Revolutionary Violence", which caused angry executives to literally shut down the publisher[1]: "Sarnoff(chief of book operation, Warner communications) complained that too many of Warner Modular's(small publishing company under Warner communications) works were written by left-wing writers. McCaleb replied that conservative writers were als…

> "Sarnoff(chief of book operation, Warner communications) complained that too many of Warner Modular's(small publishing company under Warner communications) works were written by left-wing writers.

Reminds one of Google, Twitter, et. al.

What's old is new.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#269

Post by tasubotadas »

lazyjones wrote: post #23
kragen wrote: post #6

During the Cold War, the primary thing that distinguished the US side from the USSR side was that, while speech by USSR people and people sympathetic to the USSR (like, say, CPUSA) was published in the US, publishing speech sympathetic to the US in the USSR would get you arrested. It seems like the US has become what the USSR was: companies who publish speech from people in Iran or Crimea are now violating the law by…

I'm less worried about a capitalist democracy like the USA than the EU in this regard. The EU is an undemocratic construct where moralist positions far outweigh the EU's own interests, so it's much more like the USSR than the USA could ever be.

All EU officials are elected directly or elected/assigned by the people that were elected.

This will help you to get the facts straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4Uu5eyN6VU

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#270

Post by ryanmercer »

jMyles wrote: post #56
elliekelly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with free speech - the sanctioned account was able to open an issue on GitHub complaining of the way their account had been handled. The account is the victim of a trade embargo, not a gag order.

Their Github Pages page was censored. They are unable to participate in the maintenance of an open source repository. This was done, according to Github, as a requirement to comply with the laws of its state. If that's not a free speech issue, there are no free speech issues.

>Their Github Pages page was censored. They are unable to participate in the maintenance of an open source repository. This was done, according to Github, as a requirement to comply with the laws of its state.

Software export is restricted to varying degrees, mostly encryption but there are other circumstances where export control exists on software (they used to be far more severe but have become considerably reduced). The BIS - https://www.bis.doc.gov - handles this and other CCL items.

Here is the relevant CFR https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CFR-2012-title15-vol2/CF...

To export anything that contains encryption over 64 bits you have to register with the BIS and be reviewed before you export. Even open-source software requires that you notify the BIS.

Other countries have similar export/import controls, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Arrangement

See also:

https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Industry_and_Securit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

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