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GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

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

#321

Post by beshrkayali »

mc32 wrote: post #312
beshrkayali wrote: post #305

So are we not going to talk about how economic sanctions end up as a way to use the people of these countries as a way to pressure their governments for political gains? How these sanctions directly and indirectly cause an increased poverty gap and negatively impact the living standards? How the governments of these sanctioned countries magnify this economic pressure to prevent people from revolting and to entrench t…

You can make the same arguments against capricious Google and YouTube delisting, Facebook or Instagram bans, Twitter bans, App Store takedowns etc.

True, and I'd agree. But these companies are private entities. I can disagree with them but I can't force them to do anything, aside from not using them. Economic sanctions are introduced by governments, supposedly from and for the people.

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

#322

Post by whimsicalism »

beshrkayali wrote: post #305

So are we not going to talk about how economic sanctions end up as a way to use the people of these countries as a way to pressure their governments for political gains? How these sanctions directly and indirectly cause an increased poverty gap and negatively impact the living standards? How the governments of these sanctioned countries magnify this economic pressure to prevent people from revolting and to entrench t…

> economic sanctions end up as a way to use the people of these countries as a way to pressure their governments for political gains?

It's not as if this isn't commonly known. But when you view sanctions as a de-escalatory alternative to outright conflict, which also has huge negative impacts on the people of the countries in conflict.

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

#323

Post by whimsicalism »

beshrkayali wrote: post #321
mc32 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make the same arguments against capricious Google and YouTube delisting, Facebook or Instagram bans, Twitter bans, App Store takedowns etc.

True, and I'd agree. But these companies are private entities. I can disagree with them but I can't force them to do anything, aside from not using them. Economic sanctions are introduced by governments, supposedly from and for the people.

> companies are private entities.

Private entities chartered and regulated by the government, of course.

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

#324

Post by MattGaiser »

madsbuch wrote: post #223
icelancer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you are conflating marked share with quality of offering. Indeed there are viable local options for many of these things. Heck, the reason why European companies have so little relative marked share, is because they serve smaller, domestic, markets. A Danish webshop provider probably has a better offering for a webshop for servicing the Danish market. It probably has better support for Danish accounting, bett…

Do Danes have unique server needs compared to the rest of the world?

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

#325

Post by vinay427 »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #235
sjagoe wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's less about the compute resources, and more about possibly needing a team dedicated to maintaining quite a lot of infrastructure to replace the features that GitHub has, which is far more extensive than just git hosting.

GitLab, Gitea or others provide most, if not all, and in some cases even more features than GitHub. Theiy are fully or partially Open Source and they are easy to host. You need to compare the cost of self-hosting to the cost of SaaS - INCLUDING the risk of getting locked out. One downside of the SaaS model is that you are just a very small customer in the bigger scheme and they can't really justify spending money on…

> Let's say you are company of 5 people, paying 50 bucks a month for a service - how many hours per year can they spend on servicing you before you become a net-negative account?

It probably isn't sustainable for a business to only consider this aspect. One thing that comes to mind with companies that thrive with a large number of small non-B2B customers, who individually don't tend to have much power, is that they understand that people love to talk about customer service when it's bad, and occasionally when it's very good as well. Word spreads, and nearly everyone places at least a little weight on this public perception of kindness or flexibility with customers especially when it isn't in the immediate financial interest of the company to do so.

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

#326

Post by whimsicalism »

u801e wrote: post #128
jamesmishra wrote: post #108

I'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…

> They are not responsible for the content of US export control law But they are responsible for understanding what's required under those laws. If they're going beyond what's required to comply with the law, then those further actions are entirely on them.

Yes, so Github has to take on the assumption that they are visiting relatives, not resident in Iran.

Or you get the alternate headline "Github facilitates Iran sanction evasion by allowing Iranian developers to mark themselves as 'visiting a relative'" and the associated charges.

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

#328

Post by harperlee »

MattGaiser wrote: post #324
madsbuch wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are conflating marked share with quality of offering. Indeed there are viable local options for many of these things. Heck, the reason why European companies have so little relative marked share, is because they serve smaller, domestic, markets. A Danish webshop provider probably has a better offering for a webshop for servicing the Danish market. It probably has better support for Danish accounting, bett…

Do Danes have unique server needs compared to the rest of the world?

Don’t strawman the parent post, they have already generalized US service dependency beyond OP, and there are already examples of local needs above:

> It probably has better support for Danish accounting, better locale support

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

#329

Post by rurban »

jfrunyon wrote: post #159
brmgb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US embargo prevents doing business with Iran. Providing service in Iran would be a violation of the embargo. 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. GitHub should get flak for that in the same way Paypal regularly get flak for randomly freezing accounts.

> not conducting business with Iran > its employee tried to login while there Those two statements are incompatible with each other.

Nope. There is an explicit exception for non-citizen's. Only Iranian citizens need to be blocked.

And blocking on the first login attempt is overreach. The system doesn't know if you are tourist, visitor or resident. So wait two weeks at least.

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

#330

Post by hospadar »

whack wrote: post #110
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…

> You have relinquished so much control, why be surprised if that stares you back in the face? We live in a market-based economy with highly specialized division of labor. The idea of "keeping control" of all our necessities and dependencies, is an archaic one. The system generally works, because we create sensible laws that foster trust, vet for partners who are trustworthy, and name-and-shame entities that violate…

I very much agree - the likelihood that your business will die because it just isn't great at selling stuff seems much greater than the likelihood that it will die because you get really unlucky with a service provider.

THAT SAID, it seems worth it for even a really tiny company to spend a half hour thinking about "what would I do if github (or AWS or google or the app store or whatever) cut me off?"

Probably in a lot of cases the answer is "call them and beg forgiveness" (i.e. if it's AWS), but for something like github it seems like "switch to gitlab" (or "deploy git server" or anything else) is a pretty easy move.

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