You need to do a post-mortem on this. What exactly did Aurelia do to trigger this to start with? A contribution from a sanctioned country? A github issue posted by someone from a sanctioned country? How exactly are open source projects supposed to avoid this possibility if they don't happen to literally be Rob Eisenberg? How many other project repositories have been disabled because of this problem? Is Github doing a review of the processes? Highly doubtful Aurelia's the only one affected, but it might be the only one so far to be able to make it to HN front page.
Fun fact. My friend works in a bank. In this bank its account has a factory that produces curtains. Now, curtain in Polish is "firana", and any time those guys are doing a bank transfer it is thrown into some kind of lengthy manual processing mode because company name contains dreaded word "iran".
We had to remove products containing any and all references to Cuba and Egypt from our Shopify store to avoid PayPal suspending our account. All of the products are American made, produced in the US with local ingredients. For example, a raw flavour compound called “Cubano Style” or an eliquid brand called “The Great Pyramids” (fictional examples but in line with the real products.)
Only the thing was that PayPal wouldn’t actually confirm exactly what was triggering their automated system, we had to infer that ourselves by looking for commonalities between the flagged payments. Even when we identified the problem they refused to give any confirmation at all other than to re-enable our account.
Yea, there's a real lack of information in Github's response. I hope we get something more complete.
But really, if your project is mature enough and you have the bandwidth, just host it yourself. Gogs, Gitlab, cgit .. lots of FOSS implementations to choose from.
I agree. This is the second story list this we have seen come across the front page of HN this week. I'm glad they sorted it out quickly, but it is almost certainly a result of Mr. Eisenberg's high profile.
We saw another story like this come across the front page this week. The author is less well known (also happens to reside in Russia), and claimed that he had trouble even getting an e-mail response from the given support pathways for appeal. Sounds like it eventually got sorted out, but not without much waiting and effort from the maintainer.
So when GitHub CEO Mr. Friedman jumps in and pats himself on the back for getting this account restored in less than an hour, I can only roll my eyes. To try to sell it like this is an 'average' response to these type of appeals is a little disingenuous.
If I were starting a company today, I would absolutely self-host my repository to guarantee my business is never harmed by some automated flag that could total lock me out of my own work. We use GitLab Community Edition at my company. It is fantastic, and we are in full control.
