"GitHub blocked all Iranian accounts without any prior notice and they don’t give us a chance to download a backup of our data. Here is a screenshot from GitHub support response to a developer who sends a request for backup"
https://bit.ly/2Omy63I

shame

This isn't entirely GitHubs fault.
This is a US law being placed on a US company, discrimating against a non US country.

As for the nuclear bomb theory, maybe someone was stupid enough to do that once?

Also: you do have non- cloud based backups right?

I fucking hate the US!

This only goes to show that the EU countries must develop our own infrastructure and stop relying on American companies ASAP.

@COD4 I always have my repos synced locally (The article is not mine, just quoted it).

And for the nuclear bomb thing, it tries to be a little sarcastic there.

@beleg no, that's actually in the controls policy.

Quote:

GitHub.com may not be used for purposes prohibited under applicable export control laws, including purposes related to the development, production, or use of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons or long range missiles or unmanned aerial vehicles.

But it seems, that isn't your problem.

This is

Quote:

On which countries and territories are U.S. government sanctions applied?
Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria.

For anyone interested in the full policy:
https://help.github.com/en/...

@RantSomeWhere the EU have their own conflicting laws as it is 😂

Let's protect the people's privacy with GDPR, oh hold up, let's set up a massive fucking surveillance system for all of the Internet!!

@acz0903 remember a few years ago, when someone threatened to take down the internet? Every EU politician and self-claimed IT expert laughed.

What if we built a decentralized gitlab? US and EU law are getting more and more restrictive. I think decentralizing could resolve that problem, isn't it?
And i don't think any 'embargo' should stop open source contributions.

@lumy the thing is that under EU law they would be forced to share it otherwise there would be fined.

@codex404 Share what? I'm not sure I understood you.
If it decentralized, everyone can share it.
They wouldn't be any private repository (setup your own gitlab for that).
But only public repository, replicated all over the world.
Am i missing something?

@C0D4 WTF, I just saw the "nuclear weapons" line.

It's one of those awkward moments when I don't know if I have to laugh or cry.

I've been talking.l with a friend (which i have a high value opinion)
And the main reason US does that would be to remove encryption access to this countries. Which would seem fair, but still seems unfair for random package that has nothing to do with encryption.

Technically, Git is a distributed and decentralized system. The rage about the acquisition of github by Microsoft and cases like this show, that we as developers may need to think a bit differently about how and where (and where in addition), we upload our projects to. I love github; but cases like this make me think, that we don't leverage the full capabilities of the technology yet.

@irene when you out it that way, I feel so much better now 😅

Is GitLab or Bitbucket banning repositories/users as well?

@NonImportant- No, they just ban IPs, they're still accessible via a proxy.

Closing repos is totally new.

@lumy you said that because both US and EU become more strict.
But for that distributed or not doesnt matter. In the EU anyone storing data added by a consumer should by law be able to supply it. If Github was an European company they would have to supply the data to the Iranians.

By law they are required to share as a European instance or data of European citizens

DevRant is by law required to supply the data I have put on here in a readable format and also it should delete the data on my request.
So yes the internet becomes more strict but in the EU it is in a good way.
The situation you are painting is not valid for the EU.

@irene I think not. GitLab access is just restricted by Google Cloud, which they migrated to like a year ago. I guess it is the case with bitbucket too. They could do this all long before if they really wanted to.

Also if anyone wants to help, it is much appreciated

https://github.com/1995parham/...

@codex404
Thinks for the reminder, I'm in EU France. And even if i know this law, i also now that everywhere I've been working we've never deleted any user data from db. They were marked as deleted, but still in db.

I though because France and EU were really close to USA we would have follow the embargo/blockage (can i say embargo in English?).

@lumy embargo is fine.

The EU doesnt follow the embargo. Its seperate companies doing it. If a company makes a million dollar in the US and 10000 in Iran then the choice isnt difficult. Either they stop their business in the US or they stop their business in Iran.

My uncle has a company who doesnt do any business with the US and does have business in Iran, he keeps trading with them.

@beleg That paragraph with nuclear weapons seems to be a standard clause in almost all end user licenses for larger software products. You can also find it in license texts for Adobe programs, Microsoft software etc.

@deadlyRants thats because US law prohibits any export that are to be used in nuclear weapon development and all American companies have to comply with that.

Including it in their terms is most likely just for clarity and simplicity, that way they can just point to the terms instead of having to explain how the laws work :)

@NoMad Probably this, probably that.

Can you read the article first FFS?

It is EVERY GODDAMN ACCOUNT connected to github from an Iranian range IP once, that means even if you do that via an Iranian proxy server, or push your code during a vacation in Iran, you should "file an appeal" to prove you are not are not Iranian.

Where are these terrible "rev guards" every one talkin about?

@NoMad You know, not many people travel to Iran anymore, guess who we must thank for this?

https://dhs.gov/news/2016/...

@irene The ridiculous point is that you can't say if some company is going in accord with the sanctions or not. There are also plenty of major US services that are not restricted (till now at least). EU still [acts as if they really] try to bypass the sanctions. UNSC res. 2231, signed by US, says they're illegal. So it really seems like they just randomly decide to enforce them suddenly or let them be.

thank you microsoft

@NoMad github was us before MS bought them and would have had to comply anyway. Its not MS decision, on the contrary, ms along with many of the tech companies have fought the new restrictions to the point that trump have complained about them being unpatriotic

But they still cannot break the rules.

@NoMad its not about storing sensitive info in this case but trumps economic sanctions. The rules apply to any company doing business with iran, even if its just rubber ducks.

@Nanos anything GPL, MIT, BSD licenced. And WTFPL obviously.

@Nanos here's the thing: if you want to consume 25% of the world's resources while only having 5% of the world's population, then you just can't expect the others to drop their consumption willingly. You need an empire with the usual wealth pump from the periphery to the centre. That's what the US are, an empire. Though one in decline because of utterly incompetent mismanagement, and I'm not referring to Trump in particular.

@Nanos It's just actually no one in charge there wants peace.

@Nanos and also, how did Iran actually become like it is now? It started after WW2 when BP had enforced ridiculous oil contracts that meant Iran didn't really get money from their oil. All profit went to BP.

Iran said "eh fuck you" and socialised the whole shit. Since the UK basically had turned over their empire role to the US in exchange for kicking nazi asses, they left it to the US to grab the oil.

That's when the CIA killed democracy in Iran (which was a prospering and quite Western, liberal country by the late 50s) and installed the Shah puppet so that they could loot the oil. As usual with US politics after WW2, that blew back heavily, and then the Muslim fuckheads took over.

Then the US sponsored Irak's dictator Hussein to make war on Iran, but he didn't make it, and when he had passed his useful shelf life, the US thought they could at least seize Irak's oil easily. Well of course they blew it once again because "we take your oil and thanks" just isn't a stable mutual deal.

@Nanos US government

@Nanos because macro economic resource conflict doesn't manifest on a micro scale between individuals.

War isn't about hate, though hate can of course be useful to motivate one's own soldiers to risk their lives for ridiculously little gain.

@Nanos we don't. Look, if the US citizens consume 25% of the resources with 5% of the population, then going for equal share would mean that they would have to drop 80% of their consumption and thus living standard. There is no way that a majority of the voters would agree to that.

It's similar, though not as drastic with the first class US vassals in Western Europe.

Well, the least they could do, was warn us. I mean some people rely on GitHub for work or school. They granted people a service for free. They could give a warning so that people could at least download their code. Closing repos does not harm the government. Just us mere developers.

@hanieh-m On the other hand, it's good when devs learn the value of proper backups by the hard way so that they won't screw that up ever again.

@Fast-Nop Don't people use cloud providers and generally the cloud as backup? Since it's infrastructure is much more reliable?
When I here the word 'backup", I usually assume it means backing up on the cloud. If I can't trust the cloud for my code, what can I trust?

@hanieh-m "Cloud" just means "someone else's computer". Do you really think it's the best idea to backup your code on someone else's computer when you don't even pay them to do their job properly?

Github is for distribution and collaboration, but it should never ever be the master source of your repos. Do backups locally on several different media, and store them in different buildings.

@Nanos outer space mining is nonsense because it costs even more energy.

@Nanos nonsense pipe dreams. It won't harvest more energy than you need to bring up stuff. There won't be space plants. Mankind won't go to the stars. Given the Kessler syndrome, there wouldn't even be space travel if we didn't have resource problems.

@Nanos First, there is no oil in space, obviously. Second, even if there were, you would still need some sort of space shuttle to get the stuff down. Fourth, a space shuttle full of oil would fall down like a rock. Fifth, to get it up again, you need so much energy even when it's empty that the whole plot would be nonsense - you remember the two big launcher rockets, don't you? Sixth, space travel is reaching it's pull date anyway because of the Kessler syndrome.

Kessler syndrome means that the debris we have left in the orbit works like projectiles that damage anything we get up unless it's heavily armored - which would make its weight prohibitive for space travel.

@Fast-Nop I do know what cloud means. And I do have all my own repos locally. But I don't it's wise to keep using hard disks as backup when nowadays there are alternatives such as Dropbox and Google drive. The chances of something happening to my disks (getting stolen, getting corrupted, etc) are much more than the chances of such a thing happening to a cloud provider's servers.

@hanieh-m The chance is much higher that a for free provider tells you at some point that all data are lost and you can't complain because you havn't paid anything for the service.

Of course, you don't just store everything on a single backup medium and store that in a single building.

Also, what are Google, MS & Co using to store the data? Probably harddisks and SSDs.

@Nanos eh yeah sure, just some heat resistant containers that are produced in space in factories that are also produced in space. Or just using a lift some 10000 floors high, yeah sure thing. And bullet-proof hoovers.

You are aware that Star Trek isn't supposed to be a documentary? ^^

@Nanos LOL that's a classic subsidy tomb, nothing more. The actual purpose of the device is to channel money from the taxpayers into some companies, and that's the only part that actually succeeds.

You'd have to shoot up so many of these things that this alone makes it absurd. Also, nobody will pay for that. And even if so, that would just make space travel financially unfeasible.

I think you've been taking way too much of the tech kool-aid.

What are you kidding me!!!

@Nanos well yeah to close that whole nonsense thing up: I'd be willing to bet 2000 EUR that we will NOT see world resource peace (discounting religious wars) through space mining, space factories, space containers and hoover satellites.

Not now, not in 10 years, not in 30 years. Actually not even in 200 years, but I'll likely be dead in 40 years and would want to spend the money before that, you know.

@C0D4 how to make github repos cloud based backups??

@NoMad possibly, but its all about how good pal you are with trump, and most tech companies are not very fond of him as his actions cause them problems as they are very international.

@moktar create a repo
Navigate to a folder on your computer ( I wouldn't recommend using c:/ or /home) have some common sense here.

# Git init
#git remote add origin <url>
# git add .
# git push -u origin master

🤷‍♂️

Well if you hosted your own code on a local server or rented space rack space at a data center and put your own hardware on the racks you wouldn’t have this issue...

I don’t get this fascination with cloud solutions.. specifically cloud solutions not run on your own cloud...

It’s laziness on the developers / IT.. disguised as redundancy protection, worst case event protection etc... the laziness is in regards to maintenance.

Never would I allow another company to control access, host etc my company’s data.. I will either use our own servers locally or use space at the pyramid data center down the road..

@QuanticoCEO
I like your thoughts. We should never rely on others unless it is impossible or our own solution is horrible.

I have one thought.
Which country's laws does DevRant abide by?

@Nanos My sense of backup is burning it on DVDs :)

@Fast-Nop @Nanos indeed. Post scarcity is just one factor in world peace. Changing to a cooperative mentality will take a dozen generations. Breeding out hate/racism/ fear that someone is coming to wreck your way of life might take another dozen. It’s been a zero sum game for humanity for a long time. I must get my piece of the pie because there’s only so much pie to go around. Only recently have we realized we can make a bigger pie.

I also agree that I think we will conquer space debris.

We can manufacture plastics from hemp and corn, and manufacture combustibles from carbon sequestration. We don’t need to rely on fossil fuels forever. If we change our supplies of building materials and shift to renewable fuels, we can sustain with what’s on Earth for a much longer time. In that time we can get better at space travel and asteroid mining becomes more feasible, leading to even more space travel possibilities because parts don’t have to come up from Earth’s gravity.

The question becomes can we not destroy ourselves by war or run away greenhouse before we get to that point?

@lumy the "decentralised github" is actually the best idea I've heard in a while.

Here's a speculation on how it could work:

Imagine:
1. A Website with multiple alternative Domains.
2. Networkofcheap 15$ Pi zeros with enough space from contributers around the World.(hosts)Get them a free subscription or something.

Now imagine the website as a GitHub-like platform.
The hosts would communicate with both the Website and other hosts. The website and the hosts would always have Information where
1. Each host is located.
2. How much storage space it has.
3. How much Downtime it has.
4. Files stored on it.
Let's say, a Developer wants to create a repo. The Website would send a request to 5 Random servers: "create this new repo!". The hosts would constantly exchange files, and every Host would regularly broadcast which files he has, and which he hasn't.
If files get requested, the website will choose a host based on the requesters location. Requester grabs repo from host. Limit > no detail

Maybe make the Webseite a client for desktop & Mobile.

Things I missed:

+ For fuck sake , encrypted user data should be stored in a more centralized network with some (performant!) dedicated Hardware since there will be a lot more load than in regular hosts.
+ Add encrypted private repos (charge for them?)(possible motivation to host?)
+ Make the Software running on the host osrc
+ Extra features with extra plans
+ Support other host hardware (possible Windows, BSD, OS X integration?)
+ Get the load every host is facing to reduce load on the individual host.
+ Send a heartbeat every minute or so
+ Host ranking by:
- Network Speed
- Hardware
- Network integration
- uptime
- Load
+ Make the software as lightweight as possible
+ Redundance is the key.
+ split the data into 8GB snippets
+ Lots of other stuff I forgot
Also @irene is right, Hardware is expensive, but we do not supply it. An old imperformant server could transform into a valuable host this way.
Finally got to express it

For security & safety, the most engaged 20% of hosters should monthly backup, 10% Weekly, 5% Daily, 1% Hourly, and the more powerful, dedicated should constantly write onto backup drives which should be backupped every month.(Assuming that it had gained traction, of course.)
This way, we could theoretically guarantee data retrieval in case of Hardware failure if it was saved within 24h before the failure.
This way we could advertise it is the most secure platform for development.

@TheOneFuzzyBit I really like that idea