It's not US, its the man is from a country under lots of international sanctions (for good reasons), that may have been to places with even more sanctions. The US laws prevent companies from doing business with those regions (again, for good reason). So GitHub actions are probably based on some intel, and they blocked account only to comply with lay and not to get fined. I mean, with all you know the man could have been to Crimea.

What if he was simply an independent FOSS dev coding from say, Moscow? How is the flag fair for that? With no explainations? There are a lot of good “international” devs coding away from Russia because thats where they live (and many of them oppose their cretin leader). What are we doing here, random flagging them? Why not simply ban these countries so at least these people don’t waste their resources...

I am not sure if it is possible but (not FOSS) competition could use this flagging mechanism to prop their own business.

I’d say this type of brhaviour from GH is somewhat abusive. Had they given an explaination that such and such rule was violated I’d be a lot more forgiving... Just my 2c

Its unfortunate, but that's not Github's problem. If the Government imposes sanctions against other nations, companies have to follow them.

How about some explanation? I understand why they’d do this but no explainatin is quite unfair and honestly dissapointing for the community

Yes of course, but as your parent says, if that is why, Github should just say so.

> I mean, with all you know the man could have been to Crimea.

My god, not Crimea, where all the crime is produced and then shipped all over the world.

The whole process is still messed up, even if he had been to Crimea, Iran or, god forbid, Cuba. No explanation why, no ability to challenge the flagging (yes, a form exists, but apparently it goes to /dev/null) etc.

Crimea was unilaterally annexed after a military invasion; the sanctions are intended to maintain the idea that it belongs to Ukraine, not Russia.

I actually don't object to sanctioning the area - it is less aggressive than sanctioning all of Russia, and Russians entering Crimea against the wishes of the Ukrainian government could be seen as invaders. After all, the original invasion was done under the cover of "mercenary separatists" who did not identify themselves as the soldiers that they were. And let's not forget, those "separatists" did also shoot down a civilian airliner with a Russian anti-air missile, killing hundreds.

Personally, I would prefer that organizations like Github remain impartial to this sort of thing, but they aren't discriminating against Crimea in particular; they're applying the same "it's out of our hands" attitude as they do for developers from areas with similar sanctions, such as Iran.

I just thought it sounded a bit extreme to make a potential visit to Crimea sound like "he may have thrown toddlers into a volcano". I get the "our hands are tied" argument, but even then, communication should be clear and honest and not follow Google's support handbook.

RE github staying impartial: yes, that would be nice. I suppose there would be a market for independent countries to do this, but I doubt it's large enough to outweigh the damage done by resisting the pressure of the big players.

Yeah, it's a fair point, but this seems reasonable to me if you accept that they are already looking at peoples' login locations and trying to keep their platform civilian.

If a nominally-Turkish user started regularly logging in from Syria, I could see there being the same sort of military/security concerns. And I could see that user getting just as indignant if they were, say, an aid worker.

Is it right? Probably not, but it seems understandable when state-sanctioned violence is involved.

I agree that Github (and like every other company) must be forced to tell the reason for blocking people.

But the process being messed up is 100% up to the government, Github has nothing to do with it.

How so? Github could simply say "we're required by law XYZ to hide your account. If you feel this is an error, please click here and reach out to our specialists who will review your case".

Instead, they chose the Google route and simply offer zero support and no way to challenge the (likely automatic) decision. I doubt that secrecy is part of the law, if their reason even is a law.

Github will not, of course, miss any one user. That doesn't mean that every user shouldn't act on their own conscience and pragmatic evaluation, nor that such evaluations don't accumulate to a larger effect.