Amusingly what you described translates to USA actions if you are from a country in the middle east. For example did you know that there are at least 5M emigrants of Afghanistan in Iran?
Not arguing about other nations actions, just a reminder that if you apply many western logic indiscriminately, the resulting bad actors are very different.
Unfortunately, everyday Americans' security is deeply impacted by the clowns with office desks in DC, since the 1990s.
It's not lost on me that I may lose living relatives living in the US because of Kissinger playing RISK for a living, back in the day.
Just as the clowns in government made horrible decisions and should potentially be legally in jeopardy for them, I can also say they are getting the venezuela one, right (at least for now).
The reasons for doing something and public justification, aka casus belli, are different things. Casus belli makes it cheaper to execute, but reasons are what actually drives them.
The clowns and the reasons that drive them are the same for Middle East and Venezuela. Does it make it any better that they happened to have a casus belli that you or I may sympathesize with, given that the reasons not in line with our values? Even a broken clock is right once a day.
The difference between casus belly and a state of war is:
Casus Belli is a 1-time event, whereas
State of War means ongoing action that is bellicose in nature.
So i chose my words wrong.
I'd argue that a state of war already existed, well before the events in the gulf. It just didn't involve formal military movements.
I think there were that many immigrants. I don’t believe they are so many living there now. Iran demonstrated pretty conclusively that mass repatriation is completely possible if you have a government that actually wishes to do so.
Lime is called "limoo Shirazi", meaning Lemon of Shiraz (a city). But you are right that both are usually just called limoo.
Limoo Shirin is a rather common fruit here, I didn't expect that it is not easily found outside Iran. Although it doesn't taste that good and is usually mixed with orange juice or consumed for health benefits (it's considered good for preventing/treating cold).
I heard that the normal yellow limes we can buy in Europe aren't as sweet as limoo shirin. however it seems to be the same plant, just a different cultivar. Anyway, now I have yet another reason to go to Iran
Just today, I received a text message from Google that my account has been disabled. The stated reason is "Spamming". I've been actively using this account as my main email for more than 14 years - back when you Gmail was intive-only. I rarely send any emails, and I'm sure my accounts has sent less than 50 emails in the past year. I don't know how an account with so few sent emails can be marked as spammer by any AI. But it was just the last day that I read the tweet saying files containing a "1" are marked as copyright infringement, so I shouldn't be so surprised.
Like the author I've also seen many such horror stories before, but always thought that wouldn't happen to me. I'm setting up my new email address on my own domain now, and encourage everyone to do the same. I'm still waiting for my appeal, so have not yet exactly checked how many sites I've lost access to because of Google login. Anyways, I will not make the mistake of using Google login or an email with domain not under my control for registering on any site again, even the least important ones.
I worked for an identity company for years and preached the dangers of social auth.. especially when there is little chance/process for appeal.
If Google kills your account, gmail and youtube are gone. Every social auth account is frozen. No clue what happens to your Android devices but your Play purchases are gone. Your Google Voice number disappears. It's a bad place to be. The story isn't any different for Facebook (Whatsapp, Instagram, Occulus), Apple (icloud, app store), and many many others.
And even then, I'm starting to see the same dangers for any centralized auth provider.
Social auth isn't that much better than email auth which is what social auth replaces. If you lose your primary @gmail there goes your accounts to everything. Some services let you change your email but most don't and your email is your account. Having all your accounts exist in a dead-man walking state isn't that much better.
Just a reminder for anyone not ready to ditch gmail...everyone should at a bare minimum be using https://takeout.google.com/ to export and backup their data if you use any google service.
Are there any services that can automate the Takeout process on a cadence? For example, every month or quarter initiate the takeout process and upload the results to Backblaze, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc?
As the CTO of a local exchange in Iran, I can confirm that many average people here are using cryptocurrencies for many reasons including countering inflation. We even have farmers and other low-tech workers using our platform. Buying USD is not that easy here and many people simply use an exchange to buy and save crypto, without needing to do any on-chain transaction at all. Many use crypto when local stock market is not doing good for having profit on their normal savings. Even a non-trivial percent of our users identify themselves as full-time traders. Additionally because of US sanctions many are using crypto to transfer funds to their relatives over the borders, buy games/VPS/VPN/etc, receive remote salaries, or even accept donations for completing GitHub issues.
The local or the US government may oppose some of these actions and consider it illegal, but many normal people just use crypto to have a better life regardless, using their hard-earned money, for normal savings or completely ethical personal financial purposes. Those who want to launder money or evade taxes already had access to more efficient ways and presumably are still using them.
> Buying USD is not that easy here and many people simply use an exchange to buy and save crypto, without needing to do any on-chain transaction at all.
So people are using IRR to buy “crypto” on an Iranian exchange, without any on-chain transaction? Does the said exchange even have real crypto backing these accounts? If so, how did they buy it, since there's probably no-one out of Iran that would offer bitcoin or anything against rial.
On a side note, because the majority of today's use of crypto is intermediated by exchanges (which are banks, really) I'd really love to know how “leveraged”[1] they are: that is, how much of the crypto there customers have on their bank account they actually own on-chain. It could still be 1/1 at this point, but it would be surprising given they have no regulatory requirements and it's such an easy way to make money.
[1]: yes, I know, this isn't the proper term, but I just can't recall it right now.
The parent mentioned high transaction fees, that for some people may equal their whole savings. For these people, the best option is just to trust the exchange. But people with even moderate sums can and do transfer their cryptos to their own wallets. We support multiple networks and withdraw methods and transfer fees can be as low as less than a dollar. In fact our daily deposit and withdraw rates are usually comparable.
Is the crypto real and backed? As far as our exchange (the biggest in the local market) is concerned, totally yes. Aside from matching local request and demand and local mining, there are big providers that can provide USDT/USD inside or outside Iran. Then you can exchange them on many international exchanges ignoring all limitations. As I said above, there are many traditional ways of bypassing laws/sanctions and big players actively use them. The cryptocurrencies and exchanges are just creating platforms for ordinary people to have access to it.
There are inevitably “banks” and large holders/miners/etc, but the best thing about crypto is that anyone can be their own bank and trust no other person, or even mine their own money. Just as you can setup your own blog as well as using big platforms.
The regulation is in its early stages, but even here exchanges use KYC to prevent really bad actions like laundering stolen money. The trust is also more reputation based than regulation based. If an exchange is operating for a long time with known founders, and was able to satisfy all withdraw requests even in low markets when everybody was getting their money out, people tend to trust it. Our users usually do not even tolerate a minute of downtime. But of course good regulation (if there is such a thing and governments are agile enough to provide it) can help to prevent frauds that may happen in any market, including crypto. But probably making everyone more knowledgeable, with a light supporting regulation, is a better approach to preventing fraud.
> As I said above, there are many traditional ways of bypassing laws/sanctions and big players actively use them. The cryptocurrencies and exchanges are just creating platforms for ordinary people to have access to it.
I love how casually you're bragging about “delivering money laundering and corruption to the masses”. I sincerely hope you end up in jail some day.
It is just normal consumers doing things that are already accepted, even if not explicitly declared. For taking any substantial amount of money out of a bank anywhere in the world, there are tight controls and nobody can sell oil or deliver large stolen money trough crypto. But how it is different that a person can directly buy an Xbox game with crypto instead of buying it from a reseller? The reseller already did the same thing - somehow move USD to another country, buy the game and sell it inside the country. I'm saying that the crypto is just removing some proxies and traditional processes and is not providing any new way of doing bad things that were not possible before crypto.
It's like saying that Uber is causing global warming. If you really care about global warming, just regulate using cars and force EV. If for whatever reason no one cares about regulating cars and everybody already uses them, disallowing an electronic method of renting cars does not fix any real problems.
If you think anyone cares about these use cases, why a company like Apple does not simply block Iranian network providers on iPhones to prevent any illegal selling of iPhones here? There are a many many people in Iran that are using iPhones and other products that are not supposed to be used here, all of which are imported using the same methods that I said exists and are being used. Does allowing use of such products "money laundering and corruption" and you are hoping for Apple managers to end up in jail? The services I said are being used are all of the the same kind, normal services used by normal people. That's not even considering the debate that does a country like USA has the right to define what is a crime in another country or not.
There's a pretty big difference between “not actively policing your market to avoid money laundering” and “creating a business dedicated to money laundering”. We can argue that the first is irresponsible (because most of the times, the company is aware of what's happening) but the second one is in another league.
And I don't really know why you bring the USA here, this isn't harming them in any ways (Otherwise, you can be sure that iPhones would be bricked there for instance), this is harming Iran.
Access to public repositories was not blocked, so those who wanted to work with open source projects were unaffected. For a while after the GitHub block, many used GitLab. In fact many people who needed private repositories were already using GitLab because of the limitations of GitHub private repositories and its pricing. Also many companies in Iran are using a self-hosted GitLab. After recent blocking of Iranian accounts on GitHub and GitLab, even more companies started using self-hosted GitLab.
The blocking of GitHub accounts was unexpected and presumably took into account the usage history, so many accounts were blocked and had no further access to their private repositories and gists even if they used VPN after that.
GitLab was blocked in Iran after they migrated to GCP, but was accessible with VPN. A few month ago GitLab also started blocking some Iranian accounts, so our company moved all of its repositories to a self-hosted instance just to be safe.
Are there any obstacles to creating a github clone for Iran, outside of a viable business model? All these ghettoes of company private gitlabs are of no use to an Iranian software industry. Arguably it is even detrimental to Iran's national security.
Speaking of which [the industry], wtf? I left Tehran in 79, and I must tell you, AmirAli, that I fully expected Iran to be a software powerhouse by now (if not earlier), given the national propensities and talents, and the lack of an artificially imposed barrier to starting up an industrial/technical sector, and fairly open access to technical literature. Can you shed light on this?
Talented people are found everywhere around the world, and many are in Iran for sure. But what exactly made you expect a theocracy becoming a software powerhouse?
> In fact many people who needed private repositories were already using GitLab because of the limitations of GitHub private repositories and its pricing.
Today I learned how similar to Iranians I am.
> many accounts were blocked and had no further access to their private repositories and gists even if they used VPN after that.
Your account is unable to access _any_ private repository after being flagged as being from a sanctioned country. That's regardless of where you're actually accessing your account from.
While you could create a new account, you still couldn't grant that new account access (since you can no longer access private repositories from your primary account). Also a new account still runs the risk of getting flagged if you accidentally access the account without a VPN enabled just once.
Riot (Matrix to be precise) only supports E2E encryption for one to one calls. Group calls are handled by a Jitsi backend and are unavailable in E2E encrypted conversations with more than two members.
It's not a new problem and MIME was intended to give people the choice. Not everyone likes plain text emails or terminal email clients. The solution may be forcing email senders to include text/plain as well as text/html.
You really misused the term "coin". In Bitcoin protocol you don't "put value" into something named a "coin". "Wallet" is far more widely used and well-defined.
The OP didn't misuse the term "coin". In Bitcoin it refers to the value of a single input or an output. When the OP says "Plunking this much value into a single coin seems like an odd strategy at best" they mean "Plunking this much value into a single unspent transaction output seems an odd strategy".
"Wallet" is widely used and well-defined, but it doesn't refer to something that can be observed in the blockchain. In the blockchain we can observe keys and scripts; a wallet is a usually-encrypted data file containing a potentially large number of keys.
Not arguing about other nations actions, just a reminder that if you apply many western logic indiscriminately, the resulting bad actors are very different.