You need to turn that system off. Right now. This isn't a request. | Hacker News Reader

You need to turn that system off. Right now. This isn't a request.

twitter.com

83 pointskeewee725 comments

Full text of the Tweet:

> Hey @github, back when I worked for you, you implemented a way for the Russian government to block repos they didn't like. I processed quite a few of those requests.

> You need to turn that system off. Right now. This isn't a request.

It's a random Tweet from a pseudonymous account, so take with a huge grain of salt.

The "I processed quite a few of those requests" line makes it sound like this wasn't actually an automatic backdoor for Russia to remove repos, but something like a manual form that went to human review.

Russia blocks sites that don't comply with their local laws, so I would assume this only makes the content unavailable to Russian users rather than, you know, letting Russia randomly remove GitHub content for everyone without recourse. It's obviously unpopular to have a website block content for any users, but the only other option is having the entire site be blocked for users of countries who do this.

> It's a random Tweet from a pseudonymous account, so take with a huge grain of salt.

The same username started the github/dmca[1] repository at that time. The tweet sounds plausible to me. If only because it is completely normal to block (within russia, geo-blocking) for the russian government, otherwise you will be banned in Russia.

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/794fd2415b09b11f8a5458...

What is "This isn't a request" supposed to mean? Because this person no longer works at Github and has no claim over the code they wrote while there. They therefore have no power in that decision so it can't be a demand. It seems to me to either be a request or a threat of some type of retaliation if they don't act.

The person doesn't claim to have written the solution, just that they were responsible for working some of the requests. Guess arbitrary censorship wasn't something they disagreed with then. It is an odd phrasing. Maybe it is written in the style necessary for public shaming.

It means that in the writer's opinion, Github needs to do it for an unspecified reason.

A lot of people write "you need to do x" as a sort of command, the unspecified reason being the writer's preference. "You need to do x because I want you to". In this case I can imagine other possible reasons. Reasons about which one would want to be discreet.

Nah people are just rude. Look at how the vice prime minister demanded Elon Musk to send him free stuff while simultaneously making fun of his space plans. Apparently when there’s a conflict everyone must follow every semi-related request on Twitter. I guarantee that thousands of people are shaming private companies into “canceling” Russia right now, including cutting internet off to private citizens who are not in a position to protest the war.

Every single Russian citizen is in a position to protest the war, they are just too spineless

What the f*ck? And he's only mentioning this now and demanding (?) they turn it off?

Best time for maximum exposure?

Gotta get those virtue signal imaginary internet social points.

I think it's not really any kind of virtue that they are signalling, but merely conformism to the moral fashion of the day.

This is how they look at free speech: https://twitter.com/nrr/status/627606068546437120

(I agree with them that Github probably shouldn't comply with censorship requests though, if they can)

> This is how they look at free speech: https://twitter.com/nrr/status/627606068546437120

Not necessarily. It's probably more how they view people who yammer on about free speech, which is a totally different thing than free speech itself.

Also, how exactly did you come to have a six year old reply-tweet to make your comment?

> Not necessarily. It's probably more how they view people who yammer on about free speech, which is a totally different thing than free speech itself.

Maybe, if you are being very charitable.

> Also, how exactly did you come to have a six year old reply-tweet to make your comment?

You can search the tweets of a Twitter user by using "from:<username>".

>> Not necessarily. It's probably more how they view people who yammer on about free speech, which is a totally different thing than free speech itself.

> Maybe, if you are being very charitable.

No, you don't have to be "very charitable." Many if not most of the people who yammer on about free speech tend to be obnoxious for various reasons (e.g. by using "free speech" as justification or defense of personal bad behavior, or responding over and over with the same dogmatic points that everyone has seen a million times). It's a mistake to infer any particular view about free speech itself from annoyance with those types of people.

For context, Russia has a special government service [0] dedicated to censoring the websites they don't like. They maintain a list of blocked IP addresses, and the Russian ISPs are forced to block access to these, or face revocation of their license.

Companies/websites that want to have business in Russia are hence forced to comply with the government's request to block the content Russia doesn't like (for Russian users), as otherwise Russia will simply blacklist the entire site (or other owned sites, since the legal framework for this is deliberately very vague and allows blocking anyone on a political whim).

Talking about slippery slope, it started under the guise of protecting the underage from child molesters et al, and very quickly descended to blocking opposition to Putin's government.

Also for context, the IT/software crowd in Russia is much more liberal/pro-Western values, since they speak English, are able to read international news, setup VPN, etc. As much as we all hate what the Russian government is currently doing, pouring that anger at random developers, that mostly share the westerners' views is plain stupid.

If you want the decision makers to feel the pain, go sanction the oil/gas industry. It's owned by the inner circle that has much more influence on the policy than a random IT guy from a cheap outsourcing firm in Moscow.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Service_for_Supervisio...

> go sanction the oil/gas industry

Good luck with enacting real sanctions. Europe is basically helplessly dependent upon Russian oil and gas and they know it. Europe has a very painful choice to make right now.

I'm honestly surprised no one has blown up the natural gas pipelines yet.

Not sure how vulnerable the oil infrastructure is.

Ukraine doesn't want to piss off their allies in the rest of Europe by blowing up the pipelines. They don't have the military capacity to strike oil infrastructure inside Russia. Russia obviously won't blow up their own pipelines.

Not all the pipelines pass through Ukraine either, so it's not like they can cut off the flow entirely.

I recently read that the US is exporting more LNG to Europe than it's getting from Russian currently.

Not to defend any countries, but national blocklists are used by plenty of other countries, including free ones like Italy. The difference is just that Russia blocks dissidents too.

I think you'll find that that is...

Companies/websites that want to have business in Russia choose to comply with the government's request.

They are not forced to do business there.

I thought GitHub was for all developers in all countries. They even secured a license from the US government to operate in Iran. [0]

Should we just take this user's word that a system like this exists?

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25648585

Now that's a wise suggestion that would also benefit actual public.

Someone is exaggerating here:

> Restrict them to repos primarily written in Perl.

I'm pretty sure that's a violation of the Geneva convention

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