Hamed Saeedi Fard, a software developer based in Iran, was banned from GitHub because the platform thinks that he was "developing nuclear weapons.”
Hamed was a GitHub member since 2012, but started becoming an active contributor since January 2019, when GitHub announced unlimited private repositories.
"I completely moved to GitHub. Everything was fine and I was happy. Although I participated in Hacktoberfest and they failed to send my t-shirt due to 'International embargoes' but I thought OK, at least I can use their free services, right? Wrong!" Hamed said.
One day, GitHub sent Hamed an email, telling him that his account was restricted.
The first reason that came to his mind was: Iran was a sanctioned country. But since he didn't have any financial transaction with GitHub, and used GitHub's free services like millions of other developers, he started speculating that something went wrong.
He started reading GitHub and Trade Controls page, as GitHub suggested, to look for answers.
And this was where he speculated that he was accused for developing nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.
"How? Really, How? By FREE private repositories? I mean let’s think about it: You think that some government agency would use a private GitHub repository as storage for military secrets?" he said on his Medium post.
Hamed then went to Twitter to ask Nat Friedman, the CEO of GitHub, about his situation.
Friedman answered, and GitHub made some changes.
To comply with US sanctions, we unfortunately had to implement new restrictions on private repos and paid accounts in Iran, Syria, and Crimea.
Public repos remain available to developers everywhere – open source repos are NOT affected.— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) July 28, 2019
Fortunately for Hamed, GitHub banned him not because he was developing weapons of mass destruction.
But unfortunately for him, it was because GitHub had to block all Iranian accounts.
And because the law doesn’t allow the company to give developers prior notice, Iranian developers, including Hamel who were caught by the ban, weren't given any chance to download a backup of their data.
Friedman added the company was not doing this by choice, and would continue to advocate vigorously with governments around the world for policies that protect software developers and the global open source community.
On July 28th, GitHub is quietly rolling back some of the restrictions for blocked users.
The restrictions are based on place of residence and location, not on nationality or heritage. If someone was flagged in error, they can fill out a form to get the restrictions lifted on their account within hours.
More info is on our policy page: https://t.co/fIobt1pU5E— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) July 28, 2019
The one Hamed initially spotted, was the removal of the 'Delete this repository' button. GitHub also made another update for blocked users, to allow them to make their private repositories public so they can clone them.
GitHub also added a 'close button' to the warning message, so blocked users can close the message.
The result is that, GitHub started to work for Iranian users.
GitHub in limiting its users' access from sanctioned countries isn't the first. Blackouts happened by U.S.-based companies, like Amazon AWS which also blocks access from IP addresses originated from Iran.
Some Google's products are also banned in the country. While Google’s Play Store is available in Iran, its functionality is limited as it only lists free Android apps. At the same time, many popular apps like YouTube are unavailable there.
