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Comment by Ahmed90 | Hacker News Reader

These rules are so stupid and actually hurts no one but the poor individual developer, a few years ago I used to live in Syria before the events. I had to find 3rd party mirrors or VPNs for the stupidest shit... like Nvidia graphics driver, adobe flash player, Java runtime and silly stuff like that, some ISPs had public download pages where you can find these general utilities most of it was outdated but does the job.

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

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> 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3rd party mirrors and VPNs to access basic downloads which, even if it "does the job", can be severely outdated.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...

If you're trying to develop any technology which requires trade secrets or IP protection -> you should not be using a public SaaS.

But there's no reason quadcopter software should require trade secrets or IP protection. It could just as easily be open source, and yet it still sounds like the rules prohibit it.

From skirmishes in the 1990s crypto wars I can assure you plenty of open source software was export controlled.

In fact this was a drive for some of Cygnus' overseas offices: not to evade the law but to do development that could not be spoiled by accidentally exposing it to a person subject to export control laws. Stupidly, we could import that software into the States, but people there couldn't fix bugs in it, only file reports.

There is plenty of open source software thats regulated.

If you wanted to reach, you could say that anything that helps guide a vehicle to its destination is control technology, then apply that to something that flies and you're immediately under Aerospace.

You mean like this?

https://github.com/intel-aero

Or https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight

That's a pretty common sentence actually and is hidden away in the agreement text or the back of the manual on most things (drone bit looks new though).

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

Don't forget the old iTunes TOS.

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