This means that as a disgruntled employee I can simply visit Iran, log in my company Github account and boom!
I have now taken revenge on my whole company with minimal effort.
GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
61–70 of 515 posts
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#62Nat Friedman, the CEO of Github has always been followed around by rumors of racism against dark skinned people. I remember someone saying he was saying racist stuff about Indians being rapist while literally visiting India. His whole eagerness to replace the terms master/slave has always stunk of someone trying to mask something.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#63Why don't we have internet havens yet? Companies are so clever in legally avoiding tax by registering companies in the most favourable jurisdictions and only running the absolute minimum of operations through tax expensive countries and so on, why don't we have the equivalent for avoiding dumb laws such as US trade wars, DMCA takedowns, etc.? Can most internet operations not run through companies who are registered a…
> Why don't we have internet havens yet?
Companies pull tricks to optimize profits. Evading tax increases profit, but so does controlling the internet and sending blanket DMCA takedown requests instead of spending money on case-by-case review.
Heck, if the big companies wanted to avoid these things, they'd probably wouldn't be lobbying for these things.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#64This means that as a disgruntled employee I can simply visit Iran, log in my company Github account and boom! I have now taken revenge on my whole company with minimal effort.
Or just use a vpn that has servers in Iran? I think there are a few, hidemyass is one also I think, services designed to test access from different countries.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#65Please please PLEASE add at least one other provider to your remotes if you're going all in on cloud.
Consider also doing a regular local backup of all your repos. A quick Google search will yield you tools that will automate this entire process on platforms such as GitHub , BitBucket and GitLab. I personally delegated this to a Cron job. I check the backups manually once a month to check all is in order.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> EDIT: concerning hypothetical worlds, I pretty much not want to live in a world were companies blindly follow the law regardless of how harmful it is. We have tried these worlds in the past and they were not pretty. Personally, I think a distinction is necessary. Companies IMO should absolutely obey the laws regardless of if they like them or not. It's entirely unfair to blame them for obeying the law. They (as wel…
I'm sorry, I cannot reply to your post without triggering Godwin's law.
There are countries in which being gay will still cause you serious trouble.
Or not agreeing with the political leadership.
We are quite privileged to just assume that following the law as written (AND interpreted by the judiciary) will mostly work out alright and doesn't cause us moral dilemma. And companies consist of people, too. Is it then all of a sudden morally acceptable to build spying software so your country's leadership can prey on it's political enemies? Or assist in persecuting discriminated groups?
You don't have to cite long abolished laws or an industrialized killing machine for pointing that out ;-) though the post is really begging for it.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Block requests from Iran, display a message that connections are blocked for legal reasons. Allow account to be used when not in Iran.
Would that comply with US law?
Compliance with the law is not binary. The US has a system of selective enforcement whereby they go after the most flagrant violators to make an example to everyone else. Blocking requests is compliance enough, practically speaking.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... one employee opened his laptop while visiting [h]is parents in Iran. I suppose this implies that the employee is Iranian. The U.S. sanctions are pretty aggressive, and I don't think preventing login from Iran is anywhere near enough to comply. The law is the problem here.
> I suppose this implies that the employee is Iranian Sorry what??? I have family in India, but not because I'm Indian, I just have family there. I have family in Poland, not because I am Polish (well I am kind of, but not on paper). I have family in the UK, but I'm not British. This is 2021, not Christopher Columbus times.
You seem rather outraged by the sensible assumption that parents living in Iran are probably Iranian, and that a person with two Iranian parents is probably also Iranian.
In 2021, people are still directly related to their parents, and the majority of citizens in most countries is indeed the local population.
They may of course have obtained American citizenship now, but we're talking in the context of crazy US sanctions on Iran here, which I think work on connection to Iran.
I don't think there should be any consequence to being Iranian, but I don't have a say in American politics.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#69Since MS owns github does the same rule ban happen if a company uses office365-onöline/azure - and one employee opens email from Iran?
Tangentially related but one of my guys when to Cuba when we were using G-suite and he couldn't access gmail, it seemed to be ip-blocked. Maybe Cuba has a very well known set of IP addresses and it's easy to block?
A company I used to work for got acquired by a US-owned organisation.
We were required to block traffic from sanctioned countries, and were allowed to use a Geolocation IP Database to do so. Lots of lawyers reviewed it, as well as external consultants.
Re: GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is GitHub supposed to do?
> What is GitHub supposed to do? Disobey the law, make a public statement about it, and deal with the consequences. This is not a new problem, it was treated by Kant a few centuries ago.
And if the consequences is that the police comes at their doors and ordering them to comply, then what exactly has Github achieved? It's easy to be a keyboard warrior and taking an idealistic stance.