GitHub and Trade Controls (opens in new tab)

> I guess the US is afraid that terrorists may develop weapons using Adobe flash player xD

This is a glib take on US sanctions regardless of whether you feel US sanctions are appropriate. Sanctions are just a weapon, they're not supposed to specifically ban things that are useful to terrorists. It doesn't matter if terrorists use Adobe flash player or not. What matters is that the bans make life worse for Syrian people and their government. Clearly, it's working, because even savvy Syrian developers have to scramble to find illegal/unofficial 3rd party mirrors and VPNs to access basic downloads which, even if it "does the job", can be severely outdated. Enough of a problem that you're coming to this forum and complaining about it.

It's also a huge waste of time for companies in the US, and to companies all over the world that use US-based services like GitHub.

> 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.

Not only is this sentence an affront to the English language, but I hope you aren't trying to develop any drone software on GitHub...

>I guess the US is afraid that terrorists may develop weapons using Adobe flash player xD

Don't forget the old iTunes TOS.

I suspect this is one of the things that Microsoft has more experience with, and we might be seeing their influence here.

This is like 95% of startups and companies who've raised under $100m USD.

ITAR has been in place for decades...

Shame should be directed at the sanctioned govts like that of Cuba that jail or kill people for political dissent. And shame on companies that help them. These regimes are unelected or sponsor terrorism, like Iran. They must not grow. It's a bad situation all around and there is no other peaceful alternative. Crippling these govts provides them with less resources to setup extreme surveillance grids and control, like China who has Muslims under total surveillance and has 1 million of them in a camp (they aren't trying to sneak into China). They also harvest political prisoner organs and millions of unregistered women are in hiding because of the 1-child policy (not too mention females are aborted at an extreme rate). Iran's people have a shot because it's hard for the govt to control them with limited resources. The Soviets were energized by not so bad relations with the West after WII. That gave them the build up for future proxy wars and destroying pockets of dissent, including entrenching the CPB and North Korea. And if we didn't resist and sanction, hundreds of millions would now be under the thumb of the Soviets and possibly under German Nationalist Socialists if the free world did not fight and sanction them too.

I believe Slack did this too; if you've ever signed-in to Slack within a country that is currently restricted, your account was just deleted without warning.

When you give every company a log of your rough location, it's not surprising they'll find ways to abuse it contrary to your interests. Information can't be used to hassle you if you're not leaking it in the first place. We're at the point where it's just basic laziness to not be using a VPN that decouples your network access address from what webservices see.

If you travel to a Forbidden Zone, find they block wireguard, and don't have time to set up obfsproxy, that's a much more straightforwardly manageable outcome than being arbitrarily messed with after your return.

TLDR, you can visit these countries with the right visas and paperwork and nobody cares if you're a tourist. If you visit for several months out of the year and clearly have a business relationship with these sanctioned countries, then you have problems.

There's no law saying it's illegal to develop on github specifically. If it's against the law, it's against the law regardless of github's policies.

Basically yes.

Wow! What kind of product was it? I assume it wasn’t a laptop or a general purpose server hardware.

Any SaaS run out of a first world country is subject to this.

AFAIK its probably not illegal to run your own Git/SVN server...

Yes it's new, my repos were disabled today

I would not be optimistic about that working as any kind of legal loophole to get around US export restrictions. I don't know any reason it would. (I am not a lawyer).

Svalbard has zero VAT and expenditure taxes, natural cooling and very few trading sanctions.

Policy lets you sanction individual regions of a country by saying the port of entry or destination port is subject to sanctions.

So you can take a ship with X to Russia proper, but not to Crimea. Or you can work with a Russian bank, but not a Russian bank based in Crimea.

It's like how Hong Kong is considered a separate territory, despite being a part of China.