#GitHub is blocking users based on national origin, citing US trade controls law restrictions....
People from #Iran, #Syria, #Crimea, #Cuba, and North Korea woke up one day to lose access to all their public and private repositories. There's reporting that even people *who traveled* to any of those countries in the last 2 years are losing their data...
And #GitHub has not said ONE WORD ABOUT IT.
@vickysteeves This isn't really a Microsoft thing. It's a US export controls thing, and blocking like this has been going on for at least two decades. It was a problem on Sourceforge when that was popular.
The lesson - which people never seem to learn - is that you shouldn't let a US based company gatekeep participation in your software project.
Also in purely legalistic terms it still makes no sense. "export" of software? It's not like exporting bananas. But in the last couple of decades nobody has challenged this in the courts, and because orgs like EFF are US based they just don't care.
@skarabrae @vickysteeves Whether you blame Microsoft or you blame the US, the remedy is the same: stop using #github.
I'm happy to see yet another reason to get ppl off github.
@vickysteeves @skarabrae #Github has recently started imposing forced chronic 2FA logins, which is absurdly cumbersome & disproportionate to the risks considering a compromised account does not imply a compromised GPG key. A dozen or so other reasons to condemn GH: https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/843