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.,
VPNs (Score:3)
Will VPNs not just bypass the blocking of those locations?
Re: VPNs (Score:3, Informative)
No. GitHub tracked down the accounts and blocked them by name. Any private repos they hold are unrecoverable.
Git hub's a community (Score:2)
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.
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People's careers are affected by social standings on GitHub? That seems... broken.
Re: There was a vote on Github???? (Score:2, Informative)
The US government and its export regulations. All US based corporations must abide by them.
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The US government and its export regulations. All US based corporations must abide by them.
The implications are very great, and in a matter of such enormous importance they are worth thinking through carefully.
Apparently the US government can forbid any US person or corporation to have any dealings with any specified foreign person, corporation, group or nation.
Now such a prohibition - as in the case of GitHub - can cause those foreigners potentially huge harm and loss. The law probably offers no relief, as the USA is a sovereign nation.
As far as I can see, the only safe plan is to avoid all depe
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Apparently the US government can forbid any US person or corporation to have any dealings with any specified foreign person, corporation, group or nation.
Twas ever thus. This is true for any nation with a functioning central government.
You don't do business with a nation that you are actively at war with. Make sense so far? And in modern diplomacy, there's this idea of sanctions, which are a step short of actual war. Compared to war, sanction are fairly mild, no?
Personally, I think sanctions against a non-democracy are stupid and counter-productive, but current world politics sees that differently.
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Try reading the entire post you're responding to. It's not long. When your attention span is shorter than a tweet, you've got ... squirrel!
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I have read it. Your post implies that the US is at war with Iran (or vice versa). This is only true if you mean that the US is automatically at war with any country that it imposes sanctions on. For an example of an activity that would not occur in a state of war, the US entered into, and then abrogated its part in the agreement to limit Iranian nuclear activity.
And as for the US being at war with Syria, and Crimea/Russia, I've perhaps not been following it in sufficient detail, but please forgive my sh
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You don't do business with a nation that you are actively at war with. Make sense so far? And in modern diplomacy, there's this idea of sanctions, which are a step short of actual war. Compared to war, sanction are fairly mild, no?
I have read it. Your post implies that the US is at war with Iran (or vice versa). This is only true if you mean that the US is automatically at war with any country that it imposes sanctions on.
Perhaps I need to use smaller words:
* War have no trade.
* War is bad, very bad.
* So good to have no trade before war, maybe avoid war.
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I can't speak to Crimea or Syria, but Iran has been at war with us since 1979.
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As the impact and harm from successive US government actions mounts up, foreigners, their organizations and their governments will inevitably begin to take steps to preserve their intellectual and financial investments.
You can bet this has already started since last year with the examples of ZTE and Huawei. No sane Chinese company would continue to rely on American suppliers for any other critical components/services, contingency plans would have been made by now.
Please stop using github (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re: Please stop using github (Score:1)
Gitea provides those same services in an easy turnkey package.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
You don't need GitHub (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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"Even if it is Lower Elbonia with a Raspberry Pi ..."
It would have to be waterproof though.
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That'll Look Great . . . (Score:2)
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How did we sanction only part of Ukraine? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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.
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They like to flaunt how they flout the definition?
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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
Re: How did we sanction only part of Ukraine? (Score:2)
That's like France sanctioning the state of Texas. You don't think that's at all unusual?
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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)
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?
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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.
so much for the promise of open source? (Score:2)
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.
Why the f**k?? (Score:2)
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.
Blockchain is coming for your business (Score:2)
what about them clouds (Score:1)
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
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Just another sanction (Score:2)
a legacy law (Score:1)
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.