Is GitHub Suspending the Accounts of Russian Developers at Sanctioned Companies?
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Is GitHub Suspending the Accounts of Russian Developers at Sanctioned Companies?
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"Russian software developers are reporting that their GitHub accounts are being suspended without warning if they work for or previously worked for companies under U.S. sanctions, writes Bleeping Computer:
According to Russian media outlets, the ban wave began on April 13 and didn't discriminate between companies and individuals. For example, the GitHub accounts of Sberbank Technology, Sberbank AI Lab, and the Alfa Bank Laboratory had their code repositories initially disabled and are now removed from the platform.... Personal accounts suspended on GitHub have their content wiped while all repositories become immediately out of reach, and the same applies to issues and pull requests.
Habr.com [a Russian collaborative blog about IT] reports that some Russian developers contacted GitHub about the suspension and received an email titled 'GitHub and Trade Controls' that explained their account was disabled due to US sanctions. This email contains a link to a GitHub page explaining the company's policies regarding sanctions and trade controls, which explains how a user can appeal their suspension. This appeal form requires the individual to certify that they do not use their GitHub account on behalf of a sanctioned entity. A developer posted to Twitter saying that he could remove the suspension after filling out the form and that it was due to his previous employer being sanctioned.
A GitHub blog post in March had promised to ensure the availability of open source services "to all, including developers in Russia." So Bleeping Computer contacted a GitHub spokesperson, who explained this weekend that while GitHub may be required to restrict some users to comply with U.S. laws, "We examine government sanctions thoroughly to be certain that users and customers are not impacted beyond what is required by law."
According to this, the suspended private accounts are either affiliated, collaborating, or working with/for sanctioned entities. However, even those who previously worked for a sanctioned company appear to be suspended by mistake.
This means that Russian users, in general, can suddenly find their projects wiped and accounts suspended, even if those projects have nothing to do with the sanctioned entities.
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I support "the current thing".
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Yeah war is a minor thing.
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Wars happen all the time and are easy to ignore if they are not happening to you personally.
Now World Wars, we've only had a couple of those...
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...yet.
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Not the solution to the world population that I expected us to pick.
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Has there ever been a difference choice made?
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This is off topic, but I would argue we have had three World Wars: the two to which you refer and the Napoleonic wars.
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I would argue we have had many world wars. The definition of world is what matters and it's pretty much set as "recorded by history".
By that the ongoing battles in the EU kingdoms, mass global colonialism, crusades... all wars fought across the majority of recorded civilized land.
And every great empire had to have constant endless battles to get to their size and when you consider the number of parties involved being a large percent of the known world; they were world wars over a very long time. These woul
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If it were any nation but Russia (and China). We would probably be much more military involved in fighting Ukraine, as it was a blatant attack to prevent them from entering NATO. However because of their nuclear arms that they have on stock, every nation besides Ukraine, cannot actively be involved in the war fair. So until Russia attacks a NATO Country, there is just a lot of middle man support for Ukraine, (providing arms, sanctions against Russia...)
This is very close to World War III, to prevent it, w
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So you're saying I should follow the law in one case, but break the law in two other cases.
You want me to go to prison for you.Why should I? You go to prison for your own damn self. Also fuck you for the expectation I pay the consequences for your actions!
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Business have been canceling people for years with no notice.
Fyodor was shut down by GoDaddy in 2007 with no notice. ffs, the damn company has a list of it on wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Parler was shut down by AWS with little notice.
I've personally seen networks cut in data centers and servers held for ransom by service providers in violation of their service agreements over customers who they decided they didn't like.
If you're in the cloud, or using infrastructure you don't control, you're operating at the whim of
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Amazon warned Parler repeatedly. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a... [cbsnews.com]
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"This case is not about suppressing speech or stifling viewpoints," Amazon's lawyers stated in a court filing. "Instead, this case is about Parler's demonstrated unwillingness and inability to remove from the servers of Amazon Web Services ('AWS') content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture and assassination of named public officials and private citizens."
Parler's refusal to moderate content resulted in a "steady increase" in violent content on the network, b
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Not commenting on the rest, but a) Parler was not shut down with little notice, as it b) repeatedly violated Amazon's TOS for AWS. Don't sign contracts you can't deliver on.
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And how is github supposed to know who is an independent developer (who is not a part of the state and banned organizations), outside of their present policy of "fill out a form and we'll let you back in".
That's a serious question.
If you can think of a better way to handle this that doesn't break the law, I'd like to hear it. -
Remember when republicans cancelled The Dixie Chicks back in 2003? Pepperidge Farms remembers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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For just #reasons? Like invading a sovereign country and murdering it's civilians? This is not "cancel culture". This is not shunning or deplatforming someone just because of some wrongthink of theirs. It's a little beyond that.
I hate to say this, but I'm not sure there is any realistic way to punish a regime without hurting the people who prop up that regime, either explicitly via their actions, or implicitly via inaction. I don't hate the Russian people. Most of them are probably a decent lot. But they have a bad leader who is directing their armed forces in a brutal war on an innocent population. There's a price that needs to be paid for that, and I'm sorry to say, that price will largely fall on the people of Russia.
For what it's worth, a large number of very specific sanctions and penalties have been directed at Putin's family and other leaders. But by the nature of such things, that's going to hurt them far less than it would ordinary citizens.
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So github was the staging ground? Some software developers have planned out the whole invasion using a repository? Maybe their npm library is crucial to the war effort?
Just to clarify that: Is your purpose to punish someone, or to end a war? These are not the same thing.
Fun fact: Everyone who knows anything about international politics knows, of course, that outside pressure tends to bond a nation closer together and make them question their government LESS, not more. It is extremely rare for outside pressu
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As a matter of face, programmers ARE directly involved in this war. Not that any such justification is needed though. We're applying general economic sanctions to Russia, so that may include some services like Github, or at least some specific accounts at sanctioned companies. Russian banks and financial institutions didn't plan the invasion either. You seem to be missing the point of these actions entirely.
It's to punish Russia for their aggression. I'm under no illusion that this will actually force
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I believe I see it very clearly - but it has nothing to do with the war. It's an ongoing geopolitical conflict between rivaling capitalist blocks. The war just offered the opportunity to use sanctions that hurt your own country and that before the unwashed masses wouldn't have accepted.
At least we're clear about the purpose, finally someone said it. Yes, I can follow that argument. We don't want to join the war, but we want to do something, and we can't let them get away with what they've done, so let's hur
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>It's an ongoing geopolitical conflict between rivaling...
Umm, what exactly do you think war is? It's all rival governments vying for power in the absence of a sufficiently compelling motive for peace. When firing guns promises to be sufficiently profitable, guns get fired. If you can accomplish the same goals more cheaply by sanctions, propaganda, and other forms of manipulating the populace, those get used instead. But don't be fooled that the war wasn't happening just because shots weren't being f
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War is punitive. This is the main message. Offender may ignore it (thus you can't directly end war), bombing Lviv this very night, making more people killed, further pressing brave defenders of Mariupol with his brutality. Sanctions are expense. They do work, contrary to what you attempt to argue, albeit not immediately. Some code-keeping platform is not the direct stage of the war, but component, used by bodies, related to sanctioned entities - things are less random, than in your "arguments".
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Show me the historic evidence. Like I asked before: Which war can you name that was ended thanks to sanctions? I have a bit of an interest in history and I remember a couple uncommon ways to end wars. I cannot recall one where sanctions were the primary or even among the main reasons. But I'm not a historian by profession, so maybe there are a couple I just don't know about or where I don't have full information. Enlighten me.
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This action hurts Russia, and it hurts some Russian citizens. Meanwhile Russian war criminals have murdered thousands of civilians in the Ukraine, raped thousands, tried to starve ten thousands, have destroyed hundred thousands of homes. If GitHub starts killing and raping Russians, you can start complaining.
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I'm sure most of those war criminals have github accounts and are now terribly sorry to see them cancelled. And so many of those war crimes could've been prevented if only Github had acted earlier, right?
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Well, tell you what, he next time a Ukrainian mother has to be told that their child was killed because of the indiscriminate bombing from the Russians, I vote that your ass is there to tell that grieving mother. I am sick and tired of the Russian people believing the their own crap about wow is us, the world is all against us bullshit. It is their country and they need to take some responsibility for their apparent ambivalence to things. Because of Russia, people are going to die so if that is the case the
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At this point the most we can hope for the sanctions is the same thing that you hope for with, say, WWII strategic bombing. Instead of bombing their factories, NATO and the EU have left their factories unable to make war materiel and certainly in the modern era crippling their IT infrastructure as much as a possible is also advantageous. I doubt the sanctions will result in regime change with the way Russia is structured but they aren't making tanks or SAMs anymore, with more materiel to be added to the l
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Github is trying to comply with sanctions. It has nothing to do with cancel culture, you retard. All you anti-woke, anti-SJW types have to make everything about your stupid culture wars.
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Like invading a sovereign country and murdering it's civilians? This is not "cancel culture". This is not shunning or deplatforming someone just because of some wrongthink of theirs. It's a little beyond that."
A little different? More like "a lot worse", you're talking about deplatforming people based on their background. Second, if you're an American then you have no place to reprimand any other for their country's illegal invasions. and finally, Ukraine has not been a sovereign state since the US' cou
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I'm not sure if I would like to help or support anyone who supports this kind of human rights abuse and disregard for human life. Those that do not support these things will presumably be too busy protesting the actions taking place to have time to use GitHub anyway. So in summary there's zero loss, assuming that after Russia returns to abiding laws and respecting human life GitHub restores access and repos.
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Compliance with sanctions aren't political, dipshit. Github has not choice in the matter.
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Welcome to next level woke, I guess? Seems now businesses will just cancel you because #reasons.
Yes, yes they will [imgur.com]. Wokeness can be childish.
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+1. Want life to go back to normal in Russia?
Simple. Kill Putin.
Yes, that's easier said than done. Either find a way, or make one.
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Ramzan Kadyrov is a likely candidate to replace Putin should he die.
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Then kill him or her, too. Eventually nobody will want the job.
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Given the narrative we've all (outside Russia) seem to have been fed thus far, this might seem like a potential solution (though simply removing him from power would suffice without the extra threats of death). However, you're making some mental leaps
1 - You're asking an already heeled population to actively revolt while they already actively consume advertisements for the power of their own government across their "trusted" media outlets.
2- You're assuming the next ruler to take hold would not hold similar
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What pertinent facts are you looking for? Should we have Joe Rogan "look into it"? Maybe all those innocent people aren't really dead? Maybe there is a reasonable explanation for the slaughter and we should just get over it? Is this another witch hunt?
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There is a long list of people knowledgabe about the facts that have given interviews or published articles in the past weeks detailing the history of the conflict in Ukraine, which goes back more than a decade. It isn't as simple as the "evil russians attack peaceful neighbour country by surprise" narrative wants you to believe.
No, that doesn't excuse the war in any way. But it shines a light on how many powers are involved and how much was done, especially by western players, to push the situation towards
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Putin steals a lot of money. The oligarchs steal a lot of money. Yachts, panama accounts, palaces, mistresses. His popularity was declining. A war, along with total media control allows him to regain popularity. Us vs Them. Nationalism saves him, Same thing happened with his bombings and Chechen war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
You can hide behind the endless confusion that ethnic nonsense brings, or you can deal with the greed and psychopathy of individual human beings. Russians are people. Ukrainians are people.
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That is true.
So you're saying it's not just the US, it's also Putin who was basically using the opportunity?
I don't recall I ever doubted that.
I do. I just don't ignore that our leaders aren't exactly saints, either. There WERE opportunities to avoid this bloodshed. At the price of a bit of pride and geo-political grandstanding. Apparently, everyone was more happy to let thousands of civilians die than pay that price.
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Well, I'm glad you think it's that simple. Maybe it is, who knows?
Problem is, if we make "canceling whole countries" a thing, it isn't going to stop here. What about people who imagine that Israel engages in "apartheid"? Pretty trendy position, and pretty strong crossover with those who run social media companies, tech companies, etc. Who will be next on the cancel list?
Yes, principles are inconvenient, and they limit our arsenal. That's kind of the point...
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Punishing nations for their behavior isn't a new 'cancel culture' activity... war and sanctions have a history as long as civilization. Have a casus belli acceptable to your peers has always been important.
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roughly, yes.
He's still a bully. But western nations have ignored his clear "do this and I'll shit my pants and do something stupid" messages for well over a decade now. At the very least, our leaders are idiots and a couple of the dead are on their hands.
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The message that Putin has been sending to the West, that the West has ignored, is that his aim is to rebuild the Russian Empire, no matter the cost.
If you buy his message that he is only concerned about NATO expansion, then you're just one of his useful idiots. He doesn't want NATO expansion BECAUSE it is a threat to him in rebuilding a Russian Empire. NATO expansion is a threat to him taking back Ukraine, and then the Baltic states.
No matter what happens with NATO, he was always going to try to take
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And what about the next guy, Mr Short Sighted? And why didn't you just kill Trump? And who's going to kill you when you do something they don't like?
Find a new role model.
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If Trump had chosen to invade Canada, losing a double-digit percentage of our military forces in the process along with 20,000+ of our troops, then yes, I would have advocated killing him, too.
I have no use for Trump but at least he didn't start any wars.
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No, he just tried to break down NATO on Putin's behalf so that Putin could start this war.
How's that working out for not getting the US involved in wars? Or does Trump's actions magically have no link to current events simply because the title of President is on someone else now?
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It is against international law to murder a head of state. Even during wartime. The only thing you can do is bombing/attacking his supposed location.
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It's also against international law to start a war with the intent to genocide. It is also against international law to assassinate political opponents in foreign countries.
Also why would it be against international law for one of Russia's citizens to assassinate Putin?
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How does that work? Honest question.
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It covers any business that provides a service.
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Sanctions aren't a punishment in the way prison is - it's not a retribution thing meant to hurt the specific entity that did the bad thing. Instead, it's a pain compliance thing meant to cause enough damage quickly enough that the entity that did the bad thing is forced to stop doing that thing. As such, they are intentionally indiscriminate to be effective. So that's not really a problem, _per se_ (within the limited conversation around how sanctions are intended to work and not if they really do or not
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If your project gets wiped because of Github, you weren't using Git correctly.
Also insert old adage about the cloud and someone else's computer.
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If your project repo gets wiped out, sure. If your project issues, plans and pull requests (as opposed to branches) get wiped out then you are using GitHub in exactly the way it's designed to be used.
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Not a fan of GitHub at all (prior to all this). But I did follow a project on there called libmdbx. It was a fixed up version of LDBM (used in OpenLDAP). The original LDBM had some cases where it could leak pages and this fork fixed them.
It is open source and was nothing beyond a library useful to any application needed an ACID compliant key-value store. While the code is definitely "Russian" in style and the principal developer is Russian - it was like any other community project.
I used this library-
Do you have any reason to know that it was taken down by GitHub rather than by the developer himself? If it was by GitHub do you know that it was a removal of the project rather than the developer's account which the repo was linked to? The only explanation that I can find is that it's "mysterious". Maybe the developer is protesting against GitHub?
I found that there's already a restored clone [github.com] which has clearly been allowed by GitHub so this doesn't seem to be doing that much harm. I'd suggest that they s
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Recently a company that I worked with went through a security audit. When we debriefed, the security risk about having services with US company (they used google for their mail, which is not so cheap and not that good) was highlighted. Because it has become a security risk at this point, any account being suspended for whatever reason can disturb a company. I live in a country where the people can't vote for executive power, they vote for parliament which choose the executive power, knowing that to present
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Quote: "There was not a single reason for idiotic GitHub to take it down. "
How about... Abiding the Law as reason? Or have you lost all reason and became a lawless thinker?
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On the positive side, GitHub didnâ(TM)t kill the developer, didnâ(TM)t rape his wife and children, and didnâ(TM)t bomb his home.
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Previously worked for?
We were previously able to recognize the purpose of asylum, and allow those who are suffering to actually escape the hell. Now it seems we ensure that hell remains branded on people forever. Kind of like a 21st Century Star of David.
Yeah, this IS the epitome of Wokeism and Cancel Culture. Like anyone should be surprised people also refuse to see Hypocrisy or History.
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The dangers of turning the Internet into a growingly centralised model, both from an ownership standpoint, whereas a few companies own the majority of the web, and from a technical standpoint, whereas peer to peer and commodity protocols give way to client-server and complex ones, were known. No one cared, and now the Internet, supposedly designed to survive nuclear strikes, isn't able to survive politics.
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Well, I'm sorry, but the collateral damage of a few Github users being shut down pales in comparison to tens of thousands of dead civilians.
Putin enjoys widespread support amongst Russians in Russia... maybe because of propaganda, but still. So I have no problem with this sort of collateral damage.
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