Hacker News Reader

Comment by freestate | Hacker News Reader

How about someone build a platform that is freely available that pushes to github from a not banned Location. Or just stop using github and create or find a truly free platform.

View on HN

Don't build a system to circumvent sanctions if you're within the reach of the US Government, AKA much of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit...

Just build it in Switzerland:

"3. The Requested State may deny extradition for acts which: (a) violate provisions of law relating exclusively to currency policy, trade policy, or economic policy; " [1]

[1] http://www.mcnabbassociates.com/Switzerland%20International%...

There's room for building instruments like this at a state-sponsored level in, say, the EU. The EU has already been working on a special clearing house that would help European businesses circumvent the US-imposed sanctions.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/system-circumvent-san...

You are not wrong on facts. The problem for Iran is that EU does not really seem to want to actually do anything other than words and vague promises. Instex was a promise of sorts, but UE chickened out ( for a good reason after most govn. representatives including Lindsay said something along the lines u either wiff us or against us ). One of the reasons Iran grabbed a ship was to pressure EU to make it an actual option and not a talking point.

This really is reason to start thinking about alternatives to github.

Now the vast majority of open source projects are controlled by Microsoft corporation which must obey the US goverent and this is the outcome.

Downvoted.

Github was subject to US law before MS took it over; gitlab is not MS-owned but had to do the same (not sure about bitbucket but I imagine it's similar).

Whether the #1 place to host open-source projects should be owned by a company that makes a closed-source OS is a good debate question but it's completely orthogonal to whether they have to comply with US law.

I'm not saying I agree either with the sanctions or with Microsoft running github, but I'm saying you can't blame Microsoft for the current administration's sanctions on Iran.

So why haven't all websites cut off these countries?

Why haven't the ISPs cut off these countries?

Github has acted because github is under the control of a giant corporation, Microsoft or otherwise.

So there's a line that runs precisely from Microsoft acquisition to cutting off countries from the world's largest open source repository. It's a direct outcome of the Microsoft acquisition.

A lot of pages have. Or at least they don't take payments from them. Larger CDN providers will maintain "US sanctions" blacklists which you can enable with one click. A lot of companies just don't care.

I doubt it - I would suggest the rapidly escalating tensions in the Gulf, combined with a much more activist / impulsive administration has caused this.

I don't think people actively contributing to open source ever cared about in which nation their code was hosted. Because it didn't really matter.

Now it is like an old grumpy grandpa you wanted to get rid off some time ago suddenly caught up with you and enforced some of the shittiest laws you could imagine.

But did they really need to enforce that block? I would imagine nobody would have noticed it and if github wouldn't be owned by a giant that enforces compliance to the letter, Iranian devs wouldn't be banned.

Not the fault of MS, sure, just saying that this is one of the disadvantages about the takeover.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com