This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.
http://sourceforge.net/blog/clarifying-sourceforgenets-denial-of-site-access-for-certain-persons-in-accordance-with-us-law/ I believe Google Code takes a similar line? http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/10/google-blocks-chrome-browser-use-in-syria-iran287.html Of course, as FPI is incorporated in the US, we can't take this into account when deciding on hosting options... This is really cover-your-legal-posterior nonsense, nobody really believes that Iran doesn't already have all the crypto code they could ever want; so I would imagine we can get away with our current policy of not doing anything. (It is ironic that the US government has sought to fund stuff like Tor on numerous occasions specifically for the purpose of use in these places!) There are however good reasons not to use Sourceforge (it's slow, you need to register, it's not too user friendly, even Ian had problems), or Google (it's not MediaWiki) for our new MediaWiki wiki. We can host that on osprey. We can continue to host mailing lists on osprey. As regards hosting files, Google Code seems to work well, apart from the issue that it is not accessible to Iranians etc, and sporadic reports of download issues. Finding somewhere else, with sufficient performance and without more clicks and more advertising, might be difficult, and we'd probably need to have a reason other than circumventing ridiculous US laws... -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 835 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20100127/e619a4f2/attachment.pgp>
