11 ms·

> GitLab is not the only actor in this discrimination against Persian/Iranian people, we also blocked by GitHub, Docker, NPM, Google Developer, Android, AWS, Go

> GitLab is not the only actor in this discrimination against Persian/Iranian people, we also blocked by GitHub, Docker, NPM, Google Developer, Android, AWS, Go, Kubernetes and etc. US sanctions compliance most likely Edit: confirmed by Gitlab: https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1312183287402512384 https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1312183287402512384

skrebbel 6y ago
Also, nitpick, nobody's blocking Persians. I'm not Persian but if I go to Iran I bet I'm blocked too. I'm strongly opposed to these sanctions, and I also think GitLab should've given people notice so they could get their data out. But I'm not sure it's a good place to pull the racism card.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  I agree it's not racism on GitLab's part, but the U.S. officials behind these sanctions themselves do use phrases like that they want to 'choke Iran's economy', that is in the middle of a pandemic where people's respiratory systems are at risk, it certainly doesn't look good on their part. Also worth noting that GitLab has previously banned hiring from China/Russia, so it's no stranger to blanket bans of questionable nature. 1 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/gitlab-considers-ban-on-new-hires-in-china-and-russia-due-to-espionage-fears https://www.zdnet.com/article/gitlab-considers-ban-on-new-hi...
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    There is nothing racist about economic sanctions against a country which is in active conflict with our armed forces outside of their borders, which is actively engaged in psy-ops to destabilize American society. Economic sanctions against America would not be racism against scots/germans/west africans or whatever. You can argue against sanctions on all sorts of grounds, but the flimsiest is claiming that they're racist.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      > There is nothing racist about economic sanctions against a country which is in active conflict with our armed forces outside of their borders I think that singing about how you want to destroy the country, how you want to choke it etc. do prove racist tendencies. As for armed forces acting outside of borders, you cannot claim that U.S. armed forces are any more 'authorized' to be in these places than Iranian ones, can you? So in the end, it comes down to nothing more than the U.S. having the ability to implement these sanctions and Iran not, there's no 'principles' in it, just geo-politics. What is remarkable however is that this pandemic is a uniquely challenging situation even for countries not under sanctions, so placing new sanctions on the country, as was recently done, is plain inhumane.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ReptileMan 6y ago
    >I agree it's not racism on GitLab's part, but the U.S. officials behind these sanctions themselves do use phrases like that they want to 'choke Iran's economy', that is in the middle of a pandemic where people's respiratory systems are at risk, it certainly doesn't look good on their part. Oh come on. That is not scraping the barrel but the bare metal underneath for offense. And most people die of hearth attacks anyway.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    >Also worth noting that GitLab has previously banned hiring from China/Russia, so it's no stranger to blanket bans of questionable nature. I wouldn't consider not hiring from countries with aggressive foreign policies and non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens (including employees of said company) as questionable. GitLab's main job is to protect it's company and it's customers not to try to build some sort of utopian post-reality civilization.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      > countries with aggressive foreign policies If we go by that logic, the U.S. would get on that list. > non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens If that was indeed the standard to go by, I'd agree, but the list would then need to be much, much longer and possibly include even some traditionally democratic countries like Australia who have an actual law where they can force employees to secretly install backdoors. Saudi Arabia infiltrated Twitter and compromised some of its employees to obtain info on regime critics that could endanger their lives, as just another example. The list would by these metrics include well over half the world.
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        >If we go by that logic, the U.S. would get on that list. I put an AND in my statement for a reason, please don't cherry pick parts of sentences. >The list would by these metrics include well over half the world. That's like saying that if you don't want to die you should live in a cocoon and never leave the house, rather than just making sure to avoid the most dangerous activities. GitLab is blocking the countries it sees as the most risky and carry the least cost in blocking. I'm sure their lawyers would love to block half the world but that would cost them too much.
        amaccuish 6y ago
        > I put an AND in my statement for a reason, please don't cherry pick parts of sentences. As a non US-citizen, I don't really care if the US is democratic or not. People have voted and continue to vote for terrible things. What matters is what a country does. So actually the US would certainly be on that list. Unless your argument is, it's not evil if we all voted for it?
  - navaati 6y ago
    They also ban hires from France FWIW, but that's because they wouldn't touch our labour code with a 10-foot pole haha.
    - doomlaser 6y ago
      I didn't realize until today that Gitlab is entirely remote and has been since it was founded (long before covid) https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-deitch/gitlab-tips-remote-workforce.html https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-deitch/gitlab-tips-remote...
    - voltagex_ 6y ago
      Wait, what?
    - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
      Wait, I was under the impression that GitLab was originally a Dutch company (it appears to be American now)? Are the labor laws in France that much more lax than in the Netherlands?
- dessant 6y ago
  Some companies will block you despite having no legal obligation, because it's more convenient, than to apply the law in a sensible manner. GitLab is apparently such a company. > 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account? > No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/faqs/topic/1551 https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
  - diebeforei485 6y ago
    This refers to bank accounts. A restricted account would mean the account can be closed and cashed out, but not used in other ways.
    - dessant 6y ago
      The same principle applies to GitLab in regards to account closure, they don't have to close an account without any interaction because the user has at some point logged in from an Iranian IP address, and they can preemptively restrict an account and ask for proof of residence.
      - diebeforei485 6y ago
        Sure, but someone is being blocked while traveling temporarily, they can log in again once they travel back to their place of residence. I don't see why geo-blocking is unreasonable.
- mirekrusin 6y ago
  Fossil on something like ipfs/torrent sounds like a great solution (where tickets etc/the whole thing is embedded in the repo itself). Even for enterprise projects where we're hit by outages from time to time it feels like a great solution. What if sanctioned/blocked account has publicly used repository?
dogma1138 6y ago
Not likely but quite definitely, the price of violating US sanctions is quite high, no one wants to be at risk of being made an example of. Depending on the actual sanctions these might not require a blanket ban on paper but in practice there is no effective way of performing sufficient KYC for every individual from Iran to comply with the sanctions even if they only target specific individuals and institutions.
posnet 6y ago
Yep, usually gets picked up when a company ends up getting SOX compliance before going public. While OFAC sanctions are not strictly speaking part of SOX, every audit I've seen ends up putting them in place anyway.
616c 6y ago
Sadly to the point. I feel for Iranians in Iran (I know many, whether they call themselves Persians or Iranians as expats is their choice and I respect that). Having had the opportunity to meet the former in their homeland so so long ago, many Americans do not understand how grueling the sanctions regime system is for average Iranian citizens in their everyday; this is sadly a minor example as I saw based experiences a decade ago. It does not impact government officials as much as we hope, and the citizens are far, far less empowered to force government change to break free of a system sanctions hopes to disincentivize (I will not even waste time here, Google and look, even recent attempts lead to backlash). As a Westerner, and a lover of HN, I would love to see data-driven examples of sanctions actually working. Was South Africa are only positive example from US sanction strategies? I will go look, but this is one of many examples in Iran of us causing resentment and confusion for citizenry and not really helping. (For Americans, this is a not a red-blue problem if we talk long-term approach, all political parties have sided with sanction strategies in the long-term for a while: Cubans and Iranians we have punished and it has not really seemed to help us _in the long-term_ shifting their governments and policy objectives, but I would love to see evidenced counterpoints.) The first time I was struck by this perverting are efforts in explaining open society to citizens of countries with indifferent governments was a decade ago, when SourceForge did the same thing. We respect the rule of law, but to spite the faces of democratic cultural principles. Oh well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073903
- falcolas 6y ago
  What non-violent (yes, there is violence inherent in sanctions, but it is a rather different scale than war) alternative would you suggest for punishing a foreign country? EDIT: I see this question has been asked in other threads, but not answered. Whether Iran should be punished is a separate question (one on which I am personally too ignorant to hold an opinion about) from how should one country punish another.
  - umvi 6y ago
    Well in the case of authoritarian regimes, I would imagine trying to pump more information from the free world into it would be a more effective "punishment" that restricting information. In practice though that's hard. Most authoritarian regimes have state censors/firewalls to filter only information that is advantageous for the state.
throwaway4good 6y ago
So what do you use instead? Non US-alternatives or VPNs?
microcolonel 6y ago
Characterizing this as “discrimination against Persian people” is extremely dishonest. There are like half a million Persian people in America alone, as many as there are Wyomingites, who have the same access to GitLab as anyone else; this is a question of commerce between the U.S. and Iran, not a question of discrimination against Persians.
skywhopper 6y ago
I work at a SaaS company based in the US, and we’ve actively blocked a half-dozen or so countries for years, including Iran, because of sanctions. I’m honestly surprised GitLab wasn’t already doing so.

skrebbel 6y ago

Also, nitpick, nobody's blocking Persians. I'm not Persian but if I go to Iran I bet I'm blocked too. I'm strongly opposed to these sanctions, and I also think GitLab should've given people notice so they could get their data out. But I'm not sure it's a good place to pull the racism card.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
I agree it's not racism on GitLab's part, but the U.S. officials behind these sanctions themselves do use phrases like that they want to 'choke Iran's economy', that is in the middle of a pandemic where people's respiratory systems are at risk, it certainly doesn't look good on their part. Also worth noting that GitLab has previously banned hiring from China/Russia, so it's no stranger to blanket bans of questionable nature. 1 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/gitlab-considers-ban-on-new-hires-in-china-and-russia-due-to-espionage-fears https://www.zdnet.com/article/gitlab-considers-ban-on-new-hi...
- microcolonel 6y ago
  There is nothing racist about economic sanctions against a country which is in active conflict with our armed forces outside of their borders, which is actively engaged in psy-ops to destabilize American society. Economic sanctions against America would not be racism against scots/germans/west africans or whatever. You can argue against sanctions on all sorts of grounds, but the flimsiest is claiming that they're racist.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    > There is nothing racist about economic sanctions against a country which is in active conflict with our armed forces outside of their borders I think that singing about how you want to destroy the country, how you want to choke it etc. do prove racist tendencies. As for armed forces acting outside of borders, you cannot claim that U.S. armed forces are any more 'authorized' to be in these places than Iranian ones, can you? So in the end, it comes down to nothing more than the U.S. having the ability to implement these sanctions and Iran not, there's no 'principles' in it, just geo-politics. What is remarkable however is that this pandemic is a uniquely challenging situation even for countries not under sanctions, so placing new sanctions on the country, as was recently done, is plain inhumane.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ReptileMan 6y ago
  >I agree it's not racism on GitLab's part, but the U.S. officials behind these sanctions themselves do use phrases like that they want to 'choke Iran's economy', that is in the middle of a pandemic where people's respiratory systems are at risk, it certainly doesn't look good on their part. Oh come on. That is not scraping the barrel but the bare metal underneath for offense. And most people die of hearth attacks anyway.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >Also worth noting that GitLab has previously banned hiring from China/Russia, so it's no stranger to blanket bans of questionable nature. I wouldn't consider not hiring from countries with aggressive foreign policies and non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens (including employees of said company) as questionable. GitLab's main job is to protect it's company and it's customers not to try to build some sort of utopian post-reality civilization.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    > countries with aggressive foreign policies If we go by that logic, the U.S. would get on that list. > non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens If that was indeed the standard to go by, I'd agree, but the list would then need to be much, much longer and possibly include even some traditionally democratic countries like Australia who have an actual law where they can force employees to secretly install backdoors. Saudi Arabia infiltrated Twitter and compromised some of its employees to obtain info on regime critics that could endanger their lives, as just another example. The list would by these metrics include well over half the world.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      >If we go by that logic, the U.S. would get on that list. I put an AND in my statement for a reason, please don't cherry pick parts of sentences. >The list would by these metrics include well over half the world. That's like saying that if you don't want to die you should live in a cocoon and never leave the house, rather than just making sure to avoid the most dangerous activities. GitLab is blocking the countries it sees as the most risky and carry the least cost in blocking. I'm sure their lawyers would love to block half the world but that would cost them too much.
      - amaccuish 6y ago
        > I put an AND in my statement for a reason, please don't cherry pick parts of sentences. As a non US-citizen, I don't really care if the US is democratic or not. People have voted and continue to vote for terrible things. What matters is what a country does. So actually the US would certainly be on that list. Unless your argument is, it's not evil if we all voted for it?
- navaati 6y ago
  They also ban hires from France FWIW, but that's because they wouldn't touch our labour code with a 10-foot pole haha.
  - doomlaser 6y ago
    I didn't realize until today that Gitlab is entirely remote and has been since it was founded (long before covid) https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-deitch/gitlab-tips-remote-workforce.html https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-deitch/gitlab-tips-remote...
  - voltagex_ 6y ago
    Wait, what?
  - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
    Wait, I was under the impression that GitLab was originally a Dutch company (it appears to be American now)? Are the labor laws in France that much more lax than in the Netherlands?
dessant 6y ago
Some companies will block you despite having no legal obligation, because it's more convenient, than to apply the law in a sensible manner. GitLab is apparently such a company. > 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account? > No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/faqs/topic/1551 https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  This refers to bank accounts. A restricted account would mean the account can be closed and cashed out, but not used in other ways.
  - dessant 6y ago
    The same principle applies to GitLab in regards to account closure, they don't have to close an account without any interaction because the user has at some point logged in from an Iranian IP address, and they can preemptively restrict an account and ask for proof of residence.
    - diebeforei485 6y ago
      Sure, but someone is being blocked while traveling temporarily, they can log in again once they travel back to their place of residence. I don't see why geo-blocking is unreasonable.
mirekrusin 6y ago
Fossil on something like ipfs/torrent sounds like a great solution (where tickets etc/the whole thing is embedded in the repo itself). Even for enterprise projects where we're hit by outages from time to time it feels like a great solution. What if sanctioned/blocked account has publicly used repository?

dogma1138 6y ago

Not likely but quite definitely, the price of violating US sanctions is quite high, no one wants to be at risk of being made an example of. Depending on the actual sanctions these might not require a blanket ban on paper but in practice there is no effective way of performing sufficient KYC for every individual from Iran to comply with the sanctions even if they only target specific individuals and institutions.

posnet 6y ago

Yep, usually gets picked up when a company ends up getting SOX compliance before going public. While OFAC sanctions are not strictly speaking part of SOX, every audit I've seen ends up putting them in place anyway.

616c 6y ago

Sadly to the point. I feel for Iranians in Iran (I know many, whether they call themselves Persians or Iranians as expats is their choice and I respect that). Having had the opportunity to meet the former in their homeland so so long ago, many Americans do not understand how grueling the sanctions regime system is for average Iranian citizens in their everyday; this is sadly a minor example as I saw based experiences a decade ago. It does not impact government officials as much as we hope, and the citizens are far, far less empowered to force government change to break free of a system sanctions hopes to disincentivize (I will not even waste time here, Google and look, even recent attempts lead to backlash). As a Westerner, and a lover of HN, I would love to see data-driven examples of sanctions actually working. Was South Africa are only positive example from US sanction strategies? I will go look, but this is one of many examples in Iran of us causing resentment and confusion for citizenry and not really helping. (For Americans, this is a not a red-blue problem if we talk long-term approach, all political parties have sided with sanction strategies in the long-term for a while: Cubans and Iranians we have punished and it has not really seemed to help us _in the long-term_ shifting their governments and policy objectives, but I would love to see evidenced counterpoints.) The first time I was struck by this perverting are efforts in explaining open society to citizens of countries with indifferent governments was a decade ago, when SourceForge did the same thing. We respect the rule of law, but to spite the faces of democratic cultural principles. Oh well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073903

falcolas 6y ago
What non-violent (yes, there is violence inherent in sanctions, but it is a rather different scale than war) alternative would you suggest for punishing a foreign country? EDIT: I see this question has been asked in other threads, but not answered. Whether Iran should be punished is a separate question (one on which I am personally too ignorant to hold an opinion about) from how should one country punish another.
- umvi 6y ago
  Well in the case of authoritarian regimes, I would imagine trying to pump more information from the free world into it would be a more effective "punishment" that restricting information. In practice though that's hard. Most authoritarian regimes have state censors/firewalls to filter only information that is advantageous for the state.

throwaway4good 6y ago

So what do you use instead? Non US-alternatives or VPNs?

microcolonel 6y ago

Characterizing this as “discrimination against Persian people” is extremely dishonest. There are like half a million Persian people in America alone, as many as there are Wyomingites, who have the same access to GitLab as anyone else; this is a question of commerce between the U.S. and Iran, not a question of discrimination against Persians.

skywhopper 6y ago

I work at a SaaS company based in the US, and we’ve actively blocked a half-dozen or so countries for years, including Iran, because of sanctions. I’m honestly surprised GitLab wasn’t already doing so.