Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 515 posts

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#271

Post by sparkling »

x3c wrote: post #153
cies wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system. And Git is open source. Github is a US-registered company under MS. The US has a history of weaponizing its economic power. Stallman (RMS) was right once again.

This particular case was overreach by Github and not the US Lawmakers. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/... 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account? A: No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted. See FAQ 37. Source: https://twitter.com/Hamed/status/13…

The problem starts with how to even identify if someone is physically in Iran. Making that asumption based on the IP address is highly questionable.

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#273

Post by 13of40 »

stevehawk wrote: post #257
amaajemyfren wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems someone has responded to it. https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346452935924846593

lol someone responded a week later and possibly only because it made the front page on hacker news

Two things to consider: That guy is the corporate vice president for developer services, so he probably had to run that response by Legal before committing like that. Also unless this is a really exceptional year, there probably wasn't anyone "at work" at Microsoft last week except on-call rotations.

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#274

Post by Sacho »

another-dave wrote: post #148
cies wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GitHub should get flak for that in the same way Paypal regularly get flak for randomly freezing accounts. Random? I think the problem with Paypal was that they do not warn or provide reasons for freezing. GH's reasons are clear. > Blocking a whole European company not conducting business with Iran because one of its employee tried to login while there is not respecting the embargo, it's just overreach. Says who? Th…

> Says who? There is a law, the law is unclear and IHMO a bad law. Says the US Department of the Treasury, as mentioned in the Twitter thread further down: > 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account? > No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted. from their "FAQs: Iran sanctions"…

Is Github on the hook if the client is actually a resident? If so, the law is still bad and github's response may be appropriate(just blocking login from Iran sounds better though). You can't expect them to investigate the personal details of their users.

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#275

Post by tamentis »

rapnie wrote: post #260
factorialboy wrote: post #34

So 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. But git and github are not the same, as the latter contains a lot more extras in terms of functionality. There are good github alternatives, like https://gitea.io And if you then talk decentralized version of that, ForgeFed comes into picture. See https://forgefed.peers.community As it happens there's a recent interest to evaluate that for implementation in…

We all know that, but we both know most Git repositories out there are probably on Github.

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#276

Post by kavalg »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #104
EdwinLarkin wrote: post #74

Entrusting 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.

>Especially us europeans should not rely on American services at all.It's not worth it. Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success. We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives and if they would, the money would evaporate over night to co…

It depends. For example, office software is already far into the flat region of its innovation curve. IMHO it would suffice to throw away MS and adopt e.g. LibreOffice in all educational and government institutions throughout EU (and there are precedents already). GitHub shall be even easier to replace (complexity is far below office and open source alternatives do exist). Now with AWS, it is really a tough question. Hetzner is doing a very good (albeit slow) progress towards AWS functionality. Their prices are competitive and customer service is much better that what I ever got from AWS (not affiliated, just a happy customer). The level of integration in AWS however is still out of the reach of Hetzner (Cloudfront, S3, SES etc).

It would be really interesting to know your opinion on what functionality in AWS is indispensable and what you can sacrifice in case Hetzner/OVH price for the rest is the same as AWS or lower.

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#277

Post by kmeisthax »

pastrami_panda wrote: post #241
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Especially us europeans should not rely on American services at all.It's not worth it. Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success. We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives and if they would, the money would evaporate over night to co…

> We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives Did you miss this a couple of weeks back? https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...

That's for semiconductor technology, not a full software stack, search engine, social network, or server hosting farm that could compete with Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Designing ICs is already a niche market, and designing process nodes for IC manufacturing is even more niche. Furthermore, the EU already had technical superiority here: ASML is the company that supplies TSMC with the machinery that powers their 5nm node.

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#278

Post by cambalache »

zed88 wrote: post #11

What's the difference between a Chinese company and a US company? None. Both work for the state, although US ones operate under the guise of democracy. This sort of union between tech and politics is not going to take us anywhere.

An American company pays the salary of a overwhelmingly fraction of the people on this site. They will be dealt with accordingly.

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#279

Post by richardwhiuk »

wccrawford wrote: post #86
otagekki wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rewrite? Wow. Hopefully for them it is just code so all they'd have to do is push their branches to a new self-hosted server.

Right? Why wasn't there a backup somewhere other than Github? Even just a repo that was checked out somewhere.

Feels like this code was owned by the company was the author no longer worked for....

Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

#280

Post by nanna »

To be fair Nat Friedman replied:

> Hi Sebastian, sorry to hear about this. I will check into it right away and get your org unblocked.

https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346452935924846593?s...

Pretty messed up that they built this kill switch in the first place though, if you ask me.

Post reply on HN