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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

A great time to finally consider self-hosting.

Do you understand how long, you can go to jail for violating sanctions?

GitHub understands that and they are within their right to take down repositories that are violating sanctions. So you're talking to projects like Tor, Signal (who repeatedly attempted to violate sanctions [0]) Matrix, etc which have been used to evade sanctions.

For any project that is self-hosting, like Tor which allows criminals, scammers and money launderers to access the internet and the 'dark web' and bypass sanctions with high anonymity and are self-hosting at [0]. Perhaps the FBI should 'take them down' immediately?

What are they waiting for then?

[0] https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-on-the-front/

[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/tpo

There's no disobedience like civil disobedience. All the best things in life are illegal. Long live anarchy! Fire to the prisons!

Information wants to be free! ACAB! Eat the police!

Who are you gonna call when someone comes to eat you? Surely not the police.

If you're an international criminal conspiracy you should definitely consider it.

You do realise what you have just said was incredibly silly?

I hope you weren't part of the 'criminals' crying about youtube-dl being suspended by GitHub in 2020: [0].

So GNOME [1], WireGuard [2], The Linux Kernel [3], Mozilla [4] and ReactOS [5] and Tor Project [6] are all 'criminals' for self hosting their own projects on their own servers rather than being forced to host it on GitHub?

Surely they all know that GitHub can take their repositories down for any reason. If they all announced that they are going all in on GitHub, what is the whole point of supporting 'free software' in the first place?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME

[2] https://git.zx2c4.com/

[3] https://git.kernel.org/

[4] https://hg.mozilla.org/

[5] https://git.reactos.org

[6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/tpo

What if I'm just a OSS author? Do I need to consider it too?

Judging by what's happening right now, if I'd live in the US, I'd definitely be concerned right now. I hope I'm not gonna be put on a list of sanctions just because I chose to publish my software as MIT and some criminal happens to use it.

Are you making software that has the explicit stated purpose of facilitating illegal money laundering, like these crypto mixers openly say they do? If not, then you don't have anything to worry about from these sanctions.

Tornado Cash has never been for the "explicit stated purpose of facilitating illegal money laundering" but for being able to remain private about what transactions you make on the blockchain. As long as you file your taxes correctly, it wouldn't be illegal to use services like Tornado Cash.

Plenty of people use services like that to move funds from their cold wallet to their hot one, in order to not make visible to the public how much funds they have. Again, as long as you properly file taxes, this should not be a issue.

And yeah, some people do work on privacy-preserving services that can and will be used for bad purposes. Anything involving E2E encryption is usually made for privacy reasons, is this bad enough for you to say the same thing about it? What about things that can be used to skirt copyright like youtube-dl, do they deserve the same treatment?

> Tornado Cash has never been for the "explicit stated purpose of facilitating illegal money laundering" but for being able to remain private about what transactions you make on the blockchain.

Isn't that literally what money laundering is?

> As long as you file your taxes correctly, it wouldn't be illegal to use services like Tornado Cash.

IIRC, money laundering businesses pay their taxes too (e.g. the Breaking Bad car wash pretended the drug profits came from washing cars, and paid taxes those "car washing" profits).

No? "Money laundering is the process of concealing the origin of money, obtained from *illicit* activities such as drug trafficking, corruption, embezzlement or gambling, by converting it into a legitimate source." [1]

If the funds you're shielding via something like Tornado were legitimately earned by you, it's your right to do whatever you want to protect your privacy (as long as you report the proper tax paperwork to the government, otherwise it can turn into tax evasion).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering

“Are you doing anything illegal? If not, then you don’t have to worry about surveillance.”

This isn't warrantless surveillance, it's people breaking the law in the open. You can believe tornado cash should be legal but still, be realistic: Most OSS doesn't have tornado cash's risk profile

Is it really this black and white?

It seems that regulators can change their position at any time. See the recent example PredictIt.

Yes, if your business engages in plainly illegal activity that relies on a letter of exemption from the relevant regulator, and if you don't abide by the terms of that letter, then the evil government might capriciously decide to shut you down.

Actually you can just hide it in another repository.

Steganography makes fools out of infotyrants.

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