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Comment by Navarr | Hacker News Reader

How does this work considering PHP is heavily made up of code from Zend (which was an Israeli company)

Can Iranian-built websites not use PHP?

It has nothing do with if you can or not. It depends on if you do something to attract their negative attention.

Once you're being "investigated" anything you've said or done, your entire history is up for grabs. If that's not enough, the "investigators" will create the "evidence" or find "witnesses" who can claim you've said/done horrible* things so they can quickly handle the punishment.

Astute observers will see some parallels with other groups.

* For whatever today's definition of "horrible" is.

> Astute observers will see some parallels with other groups.

I'm a little naive and curious about this. The examples that come to mind are HR departments I've worked with. What were you thinking of?

Godwin’s law is the first thing that I thought of.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Cardinal Richelieu is alive and well and living in the Tropics.

“Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.”

Arguably, maybe, I don't think the law in question is particularly... practical. It's purely political it seems and fairly arbitrary.

It's possible 'usage' might not be considered a relationship, but 'interacting' with a PR might?

But I'm trying to be practical and I suspect the law was not written by anyone intending to be practical.

There is no rule of law in dictatorship so your question makes no sense. The proper question would be "What are my chances of being repressed given my connections to the opposion|ruling elites?".

This is the only right answer here at this time. If you haven't lived in these conditions you don't really know how it works. "Plausible deniability" does not work. "Citing which laws make this legal" do not work. It doesn't actually matter whether or not Zend is Israeli or whatever. Forming some coherent reductio ad absurdum (ah ha! But if we followed your law then it is clear we would not be able to function at all! But we are able to function, a contradiction! This must mean your law is not to be followed!) will only welcome you to jail.

What you do is stay far from Sauron's eye. And if you're under Sauron's eye, you make sure you look loyal.

Depends if the Iranian authorities in question care about prosecuting/arresting the person in question, aka how connected is the coder to the government

In fact, this is a PR on a PHP-language repo!

They were an American company that took investment money from an Israeli VC, that doesn't make them an Israeli company.

The owners of Zend, Zeev and Andi are indeed Israeli making it a company under Israeli control for some time no matter what.

This whole story makes me sad.

I've been doing more googling and several articles refer to it as "Israel's Zend Technologies"[1] before the acquisition by Roguewave.

1: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/1.4891691

First rule about Iran. Nothing is logically consistent.

>Zend (which was an Israeli company)

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zend_(company)

>Zend, formerly Zend Technologies, is a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based software company owned by software developer Perforce.

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

>Perforce, legally Perforce Software, Inc., is an American developer of software [...]

Zend was bought by RogueWave who was bought by Perforce.

Zend was founded by Israelis, from that same article on Zend:

> Zend Technologies was founded by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski who, along with other Israeli graduates of the Technion, the Israel Institute of technology

I am currently assuming it was founded in Israel, but to be fair the article does not explicitly say where it was founded.

from the history section

> Zend Technologies was founded by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski who, along with other Israeli graduates of the Technion, the Israel Institute of technology, further developed PHP after its initial creation by Rasmus Lerdorf. The name Zend is a combination of Suraski's and Gutmans' forenames, Zeev and Andi.[citation needed]

Deliberately kept the citation needed, but still it is Israil origin which is enough for persecution.

Really? Did you somehow miss the whole section describing Israeli founders, Israeli VC, and the fact that it has been acquired not once, but twice since founding?

"was" an Israeli company is entirely accurate.

> What?

Probably confusion stemming from one of PHPs well known hebrew identifier names that ended up making some error messages useless: T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM .

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