Comment by dngray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dngray | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm from a US-friendly nation but I get terribly sad when I hear things like this.

Contribution to the free software world should transcend where someone is from whether it be China, Russia, Iran or whatever new "enemy" our leaders decide.

As much as I dislike Facebook for privacy related reasons, maybe it's time that more tech companies setup a Tor Hidden Service and not ask where people are from.

Could this be used to protect them against having to implement sanctions against various countries if they don't actually know where their users are from?

It would also make blocking those websites difficult by repressive regimes too. They could implement the ability to upload a private PGP key so email notifications can be encrypted end-to-end, Facebook also allows for this.

The impending bifurcation of the Internet is something that I hate to think of, but it seems something a lot of governments are hell bent on, particularly with their insistence on "backdoors in encryption". One country's back door will be another country's vulnerability.

Now I think I will go and and donate to Tor Project to make myself feel better.

Would that really change anything? I think what we’re seeing is the inevitable result of the internet and tech companies becoming the most important aspect of modern civilisation. We’re not a bunch of hippie geeks fooling around with open tech anymore while the political level largely ignores us. With almost everyone in the world using the internet for hours a day, regulation was simply bound to come.

Not knowing where your customers come from isn’t going to make the regulation go away, but it might make your entire company illegal.

It’s not something I think is good by the way, but the regulation and legislation is likely going to get more and more restrictive as our governments catch up.

> Would that really change anything? I think what we’re seeing is the inevitable result of the internet and tech companies becoming the most important aspect of modern civilisation.

I think what we are seeing is the implementation of authoritarian governments, something that has been on the increase nearly everywhere, in the last 20 years.

People have in the developed world had it, too good for too long. Complacency and populism is what led to this.

We voted in "strong leaders" and this is what we're gonna get, strong policies that might not really be all that smart.

What these policies forget is a lot of general citizens don't have much choice over the regime that leads them. They are just often people doing their thing.

Free software is actually something which brings us together, as it's about what we do and have in common, rather than race, religion or politics. I think that's why it feels so awful.

I’m Danish and in our very recent election we voted the authoritarians and populists out, by a large margin. Margrete Vestager is from a very liberal (as in free) Danish party, and she’s pushing some of the toughest regulations on big tech companies that we’ve seen in years.

So I’m not convinced it’s really authoritarian. We have a big scandal right now in Denmark, because a company secretly sold jet-fuel to Russians and that’s been illegal since sometime during the Cold War. Because other industries have been regulated on what they could trade with our “enemies” for decades. The tech sector somehow snuck under the radar on this, but that sneaking has certainly ended, and it’s now being regulated like any other industry.

I mean I could certainly be wrong, but I really do see it as governments being governments. When I was a child there weren’t seatbelts or airbags in cars. Automakers didn’t suddenly start putting them there because it was the right thing to do, or because it’s sell more cars. They did it because regulation forced them to do it and then they later turned safety into a marketing point.

> Margrete Vestager is from a very liberal (as in free) party, and she’s pushing some of the toughest regulations on big tech companies that we’ve seen in years.

Then it's the illusion of freedom. Free when they declare freedom, but not when they don't.

Code doesn't have color, race or politics. It is something that brings us together and we have common ground over. We argue over whether it is good code or bad code.

The fact is embargoes do nothing to benefit anyone here. All it results in is less code being available.

Also it is the very thought control, ie a Government telling me how I will make my code available that annoys me.

I didn't vote my government in, and I don't particularly like it when that Government tells me I cannot communicate, or express my intellectual creations with the people that I want, just because I was born within it's borders.

Code is political, to the degree it matters. See: Bitcoin, Stuxnet, Intel ME, Facebook, Google, missile guidance systems, the Enigma machine, etc.

I don't think things like censorship are restricted to authoritarian, populist, or right-wing parties. It's just the reasons differ. Right-wing parties will censor the internet to "stop terrorism" and "protect families and children", left-wing parties will censor the internet to "fight hate speech", but the end result is the same.

Only problem with your theory is that the number of fully-embargoed countries by the US has decreased over the last 20 years, and all of the still-embargoed countries except for Crimea have been on the list for longer than 20 years.

We started the sanctions on Venezuela in 2014. Why bother posting such obvious nonsense?

Venezuela is not fully-embargoed. The fully-embargoed countries are Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria.

This is quibbling over terminology. Venezuela is in a deep depression caused by USA sanctions. Moving them from one list to another would make no difference to the daily experience of the average Venezuelan.

This lawyering also completely undercuts your original "nothing to see here; move along people!" argument.

US sanctions worsen the already bad economic situation but to claim the problem is caused by US sanctions is extremely misleading. We were already seeing severe shortages way before the 2014 sanctions (which were placed on individuals, anyway). The reasons are too complex to put in a short snippet.

Crimea and Venezuela are hard to compare. While there's the common point of having an authoritarian government, they're different in many other factors such as public support of the government, geography, pre-existing economy and timing and severity of the sanctions.

Though this is very true for both, I think:

> What these policies forget is a lot of general citizens don't have much choice over the regime that leads them. They are just often people doing their thing.

and from the POV of the authoritarian government on the sanctioned country it makes sense to double down upon receiving sanctions because the sanctioning country(ies) don't have a bigger stick than that (unless they resort to military aggression).

GitHub is not blocking Venezuela. The list a country is on is more than just a matter of terminology.

It is just a matter of time. We've been ratcheting up the sanctions regularly, which, again, contradicts your "no problems here!" argument.

> Could this be used to protect them against having to implement sanctions against various countries if they don't actually know where their users are from?

No. That you don't know where an export-restricted good is going when you sell it or give it to someone is not an excuse. If you gave them the stuff and they take it somewhere embargoed, it's still on you for supplying the goods.

I will bet good money that a court will not be impressed by your deliberate choices to avoid being capable of meeting your obligations under the law. That's the sort of clever hack that makes judges quite angry, rather than the sort that makes them go "You got us!".

The issue would be what happens if russia declares some manner of war on us. Your contributors and maintainers are now citizens of a hostile country who might actually believe in their aims.

I think people have a naive cosmopolitanism that assumes knowledge work transcends state loyalty, but there are reasons that it may not do so nor is it safe to rely on the current model of peace to persist.

USA is major enemy for Russian Federation for decades. Many fighters in Donetsk region came from RF and believed that they are on war with USA. Many examples of their direct speech is available on YouTube.

I personally know some contributors to FOSS, which are helping Russian FSB in their war against USA, by consulting them or by implementing tech to help find dissidents and American spies. For example, Michael Shigorin: https://www.opennet.ru/~Michael%20Shigorin

Reply on news.ycombinator.com