GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by elmo2you » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

epc wrote: post #453

elmo2you wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The US government should do whatever it sees fit for its subjects. That's not the issue.

The issue is that a US company should also be held accountable for whatever they violates abroad. Not by the US government, of course. But by the authorities of whatever foreign market they operate on (the only authority with jurisdiction anyways).

While the tide is gradually changing, so far a substantial part of the problem is that the US government has quite a few nasty ways to shield US companies from being seriously held accountable abroad. Still, the longer that reality exists, the more inevitable it will become that at some point US companies will simply be barred altogether from (some) foreign markets. You can only abuse a dominant position for so long, before the receiving end will no longer put up with it. That is, of course, when (or as soon as) they have the luxury of choice in the matter.

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

#482

Post by Gibbon1 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

beshrkayali wrote: post #480

nolok wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your comment as the countries you list are not under sanctions like the ones described. "doing this to entity X stop that from entity X" "no, look, here is another entity Y where didn't do this, and it still does that" If anything your comment implies we should sanction all of these countries too.

It's pretty simple really: - Sanctions don't achieve the goal of stopping funding terrorism as evident by it still happening. - IF the point of sanctions was to _actually_ stop terrorism funding, you'd start at the origin of where these ideas start, which is known to be Wahhabism/Salafism. - At least, you'd start at the origin of how people holding these ideas were supported and given weapons and training to achieve…

One thing to keep in mind Iranian leaders are mostly conservative Shiites. As such you are never going to get them to stop supporting Shiite communities in the middle east. Even if they disappeared tomorrow whoever replaces them is also not going to stop. And as Shiites they want nothing to do with Wahhabism/Salafism.

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

#483

Post by icelancer » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

bildung wrote: post #191

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…

While the US sure is dominant, there are dozens of software companies larger than those in that list, e.g. Zoho has about $5B revenue, Baidu $11B, Tencent $23B, Accenture $41B, ... The list employs some particular filters (e.g. SaaS seems to be excluded) and heavily emphasizes market cap over revenue.

Baidu and Tencent are in China, hence why they were excluded from the discussion (since the poster specifically said US/China can't be trusted).

Accenture is American-Irish and listed on the NYSE. Subject to US jurisdiction from a national, not global level.

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

#484

Post by icelancer » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

namdnay wrote: post #286

bildung wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the US sure is dominant, there are dozens of software companies larger than those in that list, e.g. Zoho has about $5B revenue, Baidu $11B, Tencent $23B, Accenture $41B, ... The list employs some particular filters (e.g. SaaS seems to be excluded) and heavily emphasizes market cap over revenue.

I wouldn't consider Accenture a large software company. They do a lot of software "consultancy" (ie bodyshopping), but the nature of the consulting game plus their decentralized architecture (I've worked with Accenture, and the relationship between their different offices seems to be closer to co-franchisees than colleagues) means I wouldn't consider it a "big software company" (as in lots of people working on the sa…

It doesn't matter anyway. Accenture is also an American company despite being incorporated in Ireland.

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

#485

Post by icelancer » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

waihtis wrote: post #161

f6v wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Silicon Valley wasn’t built overnight. The software industry is just taking off in the EU. Mind you, nobody would have thought that the US would loose their leading role in the Middle East, look at them now. I can see the same happening in tech.

Problem is that EU is not comparable in any manner to the US. For one, where do you suggest the Silicon Valley of EU is? London would've been a decent bet except that they just bailed. As someone else mentioned, capital is way harder to raise (meaning slower to market) - and then an underrated factor which is equally important is how easy or difficult is it to sell as a nascent startup. At least in my industry (cyber…

Wages are also strangely way, way worse in the EU. When you combine that with cost of living (and taxes) being far higher there, it's not a great recipe for growth.

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

#486

Post by mc32 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

gnopgnip wrote: post #409

mc32 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...” , this action is arbitrarily discriminatory, and very likely constitutes inflicting serious damage on another company without a legal basis...” Isn’t that what YouTube and FaceBook do day in day out when their influencers run afoul of policy?

If a user runs afoul of policy, the action was not arbitrarily discriminatory.

What? Your position is that if it’s policy and you enforce policy then it’s not discriminatory?

So if a policy or a law says X is disallowed or is unlawful, ipso facto, X can only run afoul of those bodies of governance and can’t be discriminatory? That’s interesting!

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

#487

Post by aaomidi » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

aaomidi wrote: post #238

Reminder that Microsoft has the power to ask the state department for an exemption from these sanctions for github. They have refused to do that. Google did that with Gmail and made the argument that Gmail is an important utility for freedom of the people there. Microsoft can do the same.

I'm glad that Microsoft finally reversed their stance on this.

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

#488

Post by rabite » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

will4274 wrote: post #454

rabite wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The Arab nations absolutely consider themselves kin with Palestinians. Pan-Arabism, Baathism (the ruling philosophy of Syria, which Palestine is a part of), and the Greater Syria of the SSNP are all extremely popular Arab world ideologies which include Palestinians in a framework of all Arab peoples. Your statement is extremely incorrect, and I find it extremely unlikely that someone who lived in the Levant would not know this.

Domestic disputes are also not like a foreign army arresting young children and raping them.

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

#489

Post by claudiawerner » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 2:25 AM UTC

claudiawerner wrote: post #30

capableweb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really suggesting that companies should willfully break laws? We already have this in reality I guess, but don't think we should suggest them to do it further. Right way to get change would be for companies to get together and lobby for the change they wanna see, not just break the law. Although I agree the export embargo is fucking stupid, especially when it comes to online technology, I really want to see l…

To the extent that a law is unjust or otherwise morally wrong, it could be said there is a moral responsibility to disobey an unjust law (where one would otherwise be following it in a way which results in the unjust outcome). Note that GP isn't saying that it's permissible to break any law, only immoral ones. It may be countered that the law isn't actually unjust (nor immoral), but a more convincing point is that it…

I'm surprised this got downvoted. Can anyone explain why and help me understand what mistake I've made in my argument?

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

#490

Post by namelosw » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 2:28 AM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #109

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.

This is ridiculous. China requires access to your company code and pretty much owns you. The USA government is interfering as much as Europeans government do, by making stupid laws and demanding access when they can think of an excuse. Sure, it's bad but it's not as bad as China. You can't trust any government, but some are better than others.

You must be kidding. There’s no way companies like Apple would ever handout iCloud source code to China.