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Programming United States

GitHub Confirms it Has Blocked Developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea (techcrunch.com) 100

An anonymous reader shares a report: The impact of U.S. trade restrictions is trickling down to the developer community. GitHub, the world's largest host of source code, is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the service, chief executive of the Microsoft-owned firm said. Over the weekend, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman wrote on Twitter that like any other "company that does business in the US," GitHub is required to comply with the U.S. export law. The confirmation comes months after work collaboration service Slack, too, enforced similar restrictions on its platform.,
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GitHub Confirms it Has Blocked Developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

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  • by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:37AM (#59005412)

    Will VPNs not just bypass the blocking of those locations?

    • Re: VPNs (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No. GitHub tracked down the accounts and blocked them by name. Any private repos they hold are unrecoverable.

    • and a huge part of being on Git hub is using your presence in that community to advance your career. If you have to use an assumed name you can't do that. This will hurt, maybe even cripple, the software industries in those countries.

      I'm especially pissed off seeing Iran on that list. They are very clearly trying to work with us while our administration is very obviously trying to start an Iraq style war for political gain.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    After Microsoft purchased github, it is now time to use another. Gitlab is one possible.

    Yes, yes, yes! Git is distributed, we all know, no need to remind! But there is more to github and gitlab than git! They provide many other services in easy turnkey packages.

    Microsoft is not a friend to open source. They will throw their weight around. Maybe you don't care about developers in those few countries, but they will one day use their control over github against something you do care about so Please move

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Gitea provides those same services in an easy turnkey package.

      • Wonder how that compared to GitLab.

        Usually, there are the Big Three: GitHub Enterprise (the de facto standard and expensive), Bitbucket (which is great if you are an Atlassian shop, but because of the Java backend, it is hardware heavy), and GitLab (which does OK and is the least expensive, but clunky at times.) I wonder how Gitea fits into this model.

        The fact it can run on a Raspberry Pi makes it useful for small shops.

    • This has nothing to do with Open Source or Microsoft. Github's headquarters are in the US so they have to comply with US export law. It would be the same if they were in France or Germany or China, as long as they have a presence in a country then that government can exert pressure on them.

      Get back to us when you have a Sea Stead and no government to interfere with businesses. But then you'll have no government to interfere with businesses, so you'll be getting screwed in different ways.

      • by jonwil ( 467024 )

        Ask Chad Elwartowski and Supranee Thepdet how well building in international waters actually works when you have a government that wants to come after you.

    • I tried to switch off of Github as soon as MS bought them, but found that other git hosters lacked the web interface. I don't actually know to use git and found it confusing to learn. I'm just a hobbyist coder that gets bored of projects for months at a time, so I really value the web interface that makes it simple to upload changes. Is there another service that has a good web interface for uploading changes?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:47AM (#59005464)

    Contrary to common belief, you don't need GitHub, or Internet, to use Git. And if you have to collaborate with other remote programmers, then there are many other options than GitHub.

    In either case, this is just another wake-up call: reduce your dependency on American (American-owned) technology, products, and services. They may all be used against you and your orgranization as a bargaining chip.

    • by kackle ( 910159 )

      In either case, this is just another wake-up call: Reduce your dependency on anyone else's technology, products and services. They may all be used against you and your organization.

      Fixed. Although, the idea is admittedly comical today.

    • If China (or anyone else) needs a good web front end for their git repos, Gitlab [gitlab.com] is open source. Anyone can fork it and host gitlab.cn or whatever. Some people even prefer it over Github.
  • . . . on that annual transparency report.
  • by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:56AM (#59005514) Homepage

    So, we don't recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea, so it's still part of Ukraine. And then we decide to sanction Ukrainians? Seems like a bad precedent to set against a nation that just wanted to join our social club in NATO.

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      We don't do anything else we say we do writ FP either. The State Department is LAWLESS. I mean we are not supposed to continue diplomatic relation after coup takes place; but after the extra-constitutional removal of Mohamed Morsi; we did not so much as close the Embassy for the afternoon!

      Now I grant you there was nothing good about the Muslim Brotherhood effectively controlling Egypt but we like to claim that we are nation of laws and so we ought to follow them. CONgress should have passed legislation r

      • by _merlin ( 160982 )

        Why do commenters on slashdot and reddit not seem to understand the difference between "flaunt" and "flout"? They don't mean the same thing at all.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Nope, you didn't sanction Ukrainians, you sanctioned Crimeans for playing along with Russia's annexation based on a referendum that was against the constitution of the country, the kind of democratic vote that only happens because your neighbour has weapons and because you're having a spat with your local government. The sanctions were exclusively targeted at those who broke the Charter of the United Nations and are directly very narrowly at local business interests to prevent another country and the local

      • That's like France sanctioning the state of Texas. You don't think that's at all unusual?

        • If Texas and Texans alone did something that was unconstitutional in the USA and adjoined with Mexio, then I imagine not only France but much of the rest of the west would sanction them as well.

          You are not alone in this. Most of the world has sanctioned only the Crimean peninsula for their direct involvement in what happened. Remember this didn't actually start with Russia, they only came into play when Crimea already done f'ed up.

  • Lost Appeal? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Monday July 29, 2019 @10:18AM (#59005628)

    And with this, I think MS/GitHub, and a lot of other US-based Cloud service companies, have lost a lot of appeal. Not necessarily because of their policy decisions (force on them or not), but because outside policies can affect their usefulness, functionality or availability.

    How many companies right now are re-evaluating their use of outside services which, at the whim of any politician, can suddenly become unavailable - can they afford the downtime? The potential loss of data? The consequential reputation damage from resulting outages?

    • And it's rather trivial to put up your own remote repo. So why people use cloud services for remote Git repos is something I realy don't understand.
      • And it's rather trivial to put up your own remote repo. So why people use cloud services for remote Git repos is something I realy don't understand.

        Probably because it creates a community. People can share and help one another. Yeah if you are just trying to share a bunch of code with a few people to work on a project together you do not need git hub. If you are trying to find a solution to a problem or share ideas with the masses then you need a platform like git hub.

  • if access to open source depends on the whim of the power and money grubbing scum in Washington D.C., then maybe piracy of closed source is best in such a world.

    Sure, Iranian government is evil, one could argue the U.S. one is worse and has bigger body count and more destroyed lives. We did pay Saddam billions and gifted him with dual use tech to gas Iranians, maybe that's the bigger evil done in that part of the world.

  • is the world's defacto standard free and open source code repository sitting on servers owned by a US corporation and censored by some lunatic regime?

    Can't we decentralize this sh*t in this day and age? This is really pathetic. And dangerous.

    The US of A does not run the world! I sure as shit didn't get a vote in the mail for the position of world president/US president.
    And to the extent it thinks and acts as if it does run the world (undemocratically), it needs to be prevented from doing so.
  • It won't be long before non centralized, non permissioned, non authority, blockchains take out these companies one by one.
  • Github is not that bad, as long as someone has a cloned copy of their repo it should not be a big problem to move it. And to get access to those other repos, I would guess a VPN will do.

    But with all the trend being to build your stuff on top of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, ... What happens when these platforms decide to stop you from using their services and all your products are dependent on their services? You cannot just switch the whole system from their proprietary API's and functionality in short time..

    T

  • Sanctions mainly hurt individuals. The rich and powerful in those countries are unaffected.
  • Another stupid law left over from the days of having export controls to protect people using weak, government-mandated encryption.

    What did Iran do to us? Oh right.. trump's ego was harmed while our democracy flounders under his ham-fisted rule.

"I shall expect a chemical cure for psychopathic behavior by 10 A.M. tomorrow, or I'll have your guts for spaghetti." -- a comic panel by Cotham

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