GitHub has just announced a license for developers in Iran:
https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
451–460 of 515 posts
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#452Well, GitHub is now fully available in Iran: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the pressure by the EU and China on US companies to enforce local laws globally (GDPR, RTBF, Taiwan), I don't see how Github, operating in the US, as a US company, has any chance absolving itself of enforcing US laws and regulations (though in this specific case they appear to have overreacted, likely due to regulatory enforcement via algorithm and not common sense). If you expect US companies to respect GDPR a…
I think you may have either misunderstood me, or maybe have gotten the logic backwards. I'm not saying that US companies should not enforce US law. I think they should. That is: strictly within the US market. When they operate outside the US market, they have to (also) adhere to whatever law exists for that market. If that creates a conflict, the company has a choice to either open up show elsewhere, outside of US ju…
My shorter version: Precedent in the US is that the US views its jurisdiction over US citizens and corporations as global. If I as a US citizen step over the border to your country and bribe an official of your country in order to gain a commercial contract, I can (and probably, though not definitely) will be prosecuted for breaking US law, regardless of whether or not bribery is perfectly legal in your country. Same for corporations: if the act is prohibited in the US, the US Government generally does not distinguish between whether the act occurred in the US or not.
This is not new. The Internet exacerbates the potential for conflicts, but it’s not a new problem with the rise of the Internet.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine being a programmer in Israel and hearing that the leader of a neighboring country wants to kill you and everybody you know. We're not unaware of the impact of sanctions. Fundamentally, starving a generation of Iranians of information and experience is worth it if leads to civil unrest and regime change, therefore preventing Iran's current leaders from committing the genocide they've said they want to commit s…
Imagine being almost any other religion in the Middle East and learning that Israelis on a day to day basis are lobbying to carve your countries apart by imperialist wars via their American proxies, bulldozing the homes of your coethnics in Palestine, raping their children, forcibly hijacking their TVs and exposing their kids to pornographic broadcasts, organizing a famine in Syria by their Kurdish proxies, and occup…
There's a lot in your post that's wrong and this comment won't allow me to correct all of it. Grabbing two:
- the Arab nations don't consider themselves kin (or "coethnics" whatever that means) with the Palestinians. When Jordan and Egypt controlled the Palestinian territory, they treated the Palestinians worse then Israeli does today.
- the groups that commit the vast majority of rape (per capita or otherwise) in the middle east are not Israeli. In most of the Muslim countries, it's legal to rape your wife. In some of them (such as Iran), men execute their daughters for being raped by their neighbors. One well known group (ISIS) was really into rape - and so Iran gave them money so they could rape more.
If what you care about is rape, murder, and genocide, you're against Iran 100x as much as you're against Israel.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#455Just happened: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
That's huge! > we are working with the US government to secure similar licenses for developers in Crimea and Syria as well That's also super cool to hear! Related Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25648585
"We were working for two years to get this license." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25648849
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nope. No backups, no sympathy, simple as that. This is a really garbage opinion. Long tail reliability situations like this is a major blocking point to large scale adoption of many things. No one wants to use something where the consequence of making a mistake is "well I guess you're f*cked now". You're ignoring the entire usability side of computing and innovation. > 2FA is worthless if you start to put holes in…
> No one wants to use something where the consequence of making a mistake is "well I guess you're f_cked now". You're ignoring the entire usability side of computing and innovation. Wow wow wow, so you're basically saying that users who are capable enough to even need/use decentralised version control systems are too dumb and incompetent to setup Time Machine, Timeshift, or File History? Really? > There are other way…
> you're basically saying that users who are capable enough to even need/use decentralised version control systems are too dumb and incompetent
Do not put words in my mouth. I did not say that, you just did. I said that usability is a real concern, because no matter what you expect people to do, it will never work perfectly 100% of the time.
> I'm not talking about security in general.
You can say that now, but that's not what you said previously. "There's no such thing as a "trade-off" when it comes to cyber security"
> you instead share your entire private life with these companies?
Again, I did not say that. Github is a social coding network. I am not saying that I have all of the answers as to how this should work, but I am saying that if 1 member of a 100 person organization loses access to their account, and the other 99 members all confirm that their account access was lost via some event and assert their identity, you could have the start of a reasonable recovery path.
> the CEO running the show is in an entirely different category
Not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that a CEO is just automatically more responsible and not going to lose something? Or are you saying that he's clearly just more important so it's okay to bypass the stated procedure for just him/her?
> Do you leave your house key under the doormat? Do you keep a post-it note with all your passwords taped to the back of your phone - you know, just in case you forget one and for convenience?
This is not even a valid comparison, and you're just trying to be condescending. I don't leave a house key under my mat just in case I lose it. But I also don't expect to never be allowed to enter my house again just because my key is lost.
> if you can't afford a data storage solution I seriously wonder why you have a need for a distributed version control system in a (semi-)professional environment.
Because many people use Github for non semi-professional environments? It is full of amateurs. Just because you don't find someone's work valuable, doesn't mean that they don't. Saying "Well it's not professional, so if you lost it then it doesn't matter" is not correct.
> 20 bucks for a protective case for your phone - no problem. 50 bucks for a half decent 1TB portable USB HDD to backup
You're comparing a 1 time action to a recurring action. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have back ups. You obviously should. But people are human beings. Even if 99% of people have perfect back ups, that's still 560k (according to Github home page numbers) that will have failed backups or some other issue.
PS. you keep widely including the term "decentralized", as if just because git is decentralized, that nothing on Github should matter. For better or for worse, Github has become the central git repository provider for millions of people. Claiming that Github services should be magically decentralized just because git is decentralized is an invalid claim. Because Github is not decentralized.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Nope. There is an explicit exception for people who you know are not an Iranian national.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#458The US sanctions on Iran has such a massive impact on Iranians that most of us don't realise. All US companies have to comply and majority of the tech companies are unfortunately in the US. I know you can use a VPN and configure it on a router level to make sure that you are always connected via a VPN but just the fact that 1 slip-up can result in account level blocks (which google is notoriously good at and can esse…
Imagine being a programmer in Israel and hearing that the leader of a neighboring country wants to kill you and everybody you know. We're not unaware of the impact of sanctions. Fundamentally, starving a generation of Iranians of information and experience is worth it if leads to civil unrest and regime change, therefore preventing Iran's current leaders from committing the genocide they've said they want to commit s…
Israel is starving several generations of Palestinians of opportunity and experience [0], resulting in civil unrest. Israel could de-escalate its tensions with its neighbors (including Iran) at any time. It just needs to start treating its neighbors with respect.
Unfortunately, peace in the Middle-East would shift political power in all countries involved, shift government spending, reduce military aid from superpowers [1], and reduce the importance of the countries to the superpowers. A lot of power and money is trying to prevent that from happening.
You don't need to play along with those powerful people. They don't want to help you. Lasting peace would help you and your descendants much more than continuing the current situation.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 th…
Sure, I get what you're saying, but I hope you see my point here. Pursuing 2nm lithography (which is something like 1-2 nodes from bleeding edge?) with 135 billion euro surely tells you something about their commitment.
I would also point out that many of these companies you mention are immensely scattered. Take anyone and you'll find their resources spread across an evergrowing domain/portfolio. I'm not saying it's bad that Apple is developing cars and Facebook VR headsets - I'm just saying it spreads them thinner. If the EU found it valuable enough to pursue e.g search within the next five years it's not at all unfeasible or unreasonable to do so. It might even be better for the greater good of the internet frankly.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine being a programmer in Israel and hearing that the leader of a neighboring country wants to kill you and everybody you know. We're not unaware of the impact of sanctions. Fundamentally, starving a generation of Iranians of information and experience is worth it if leads to civil unrest and regime change, therefore preventing Iran's current leaders from committing the genocide they've said they want to commit s…
Israel is starving several generations of Palestinians of opportunity and experience [0], resulting in civil unrest. Israel could de-escalate its tensions with its neighbors (including Iran) at any time. It just needs to start treating its neighbors with respect. Unfortunately, peace in the Middle-East would shift political power in all countries involved, shift government spending, reduce military aid from superpowe…
What does Israel's conflict in Palestine have to do with Iran? The Ayatollah doesn't care about Palestinians.
Saying that Israel could resolve the issue by de-escalating is nonsense, as much as saying the same thing about North and South Korea. One side has leaders intent on acquiring nuclear weapons and publicly claims it will use them against its neighbors.