You can disagree with the sanction while still being understanding of GitHub trying to cut ties with the sanctioned entity. Or be critical of them being heavy handed in their compliance but agree with the sanction in general.
Plenty of organizations in the past have chosen what side of this conceptual line to stand on.
One can end up looking like the EFF with a long term, very strong reputation of standing up for clear boundaries of what’s right in the legal<>code context and go to court over it, or you can end up looking like GitHub.
When you're a donation based non-profit, it's easy to "stand up for clear boundaries". In fact, it's literally your purpose.
When you've got >$100Bn of profits on the line, it's a little harder - and you have a different purpose (i.e. to make money).
Perhaps there is some grey area as to what qualifies as a service being provided to that entity. Is my fork still a service being provided to them? Or is it a service being provided to me? But that is still something useful to the sanctioned entity, so am I now providing them a service? In which case GitHub is still a party to providing them a service.
There's a massive difference between "nope, I won't comply with the law" and "I think this law is a bad idea, let's go to the courts to see if we can do something about it". And GitHub has done the last, too, to restore access to Iranian developers for example.
I don't agree with a lot of things in the world, but the only thing I wish for them is for things to get better, not worse.
The funny part is he's contributing to the problem, as in not realizing it's the working class vs the rich, not the left vs the right.
Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.
Also, Ethereum has been "soon to be env-friendly PoS" for years now. Let's revisit that if and when it actually happens.
In a country where a dictator can make you starve with a snap of the fingers, cryptocurrencies are vital to survival. So even 10x more energy 'wasted' on such an indespensable service would still be a bargain I'd take.
In a country where a dictator can make you starve with the snap of the finger, what are you going to do, eat your virtual coins from your jail cell? Technology is notably not a solution to social problems
If there will ever be an uprising, it'll be funded with nothing else but cryptocurrency.
So yes, cryptocurrencies are worth every watt of energy they use.
Yes, you’re correct, the judgement is about what the energy is used for.
Bitcoin alone is estimated to use 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually.
The US Department of Energy estimates that there are 80 million households with dishwashers in the US (although they believe 16m never use them, but we will ignore that). It appears that the average dishwasher uses 251kWh annually (at the avg of 215 cycles per year).
So this would put the US annual dishwasher power consumption to around 20 terawatt-hours. This would mean that the rest of the world would need approximately 518 million household dishwashers used 215 times a year each, to make up the rest of the power usage for just Bitcoin.
When you start factoring in the size difference in dishwashers between countries, the power usage differences between 120v and 220v in different parts of the world, the overall adoption rate of dishwashers etc... it makes it hard to believe that they could compete with crypto power usage.
Bitcoin just consumes extra energy, not makes an existing process more efficient.
The switch has been delayed 6(!) times since 2017. It‘s perpetually happening “soon”. I believe it when it’s actually live.
I'm grateful to live in a society where this is not a "problem", but I don't take it for granted
Seems like every celebrity and talk show host was pushing NFT's, be it Kardasians, Kimmel, Fallon, even Bill Murray released a collection 1 month ago. Ultra stars like Tom Brady to Mark Cuban were investing and (still) talking about crypto companies they are heavily invested in. Half the superbowl ads this year were advocating for people to waste money on crypto.
What is the name of this sanctioned entity that GitHub supposedly cut ties with?
You'll note that none of the developers who had their accounts suspended were themselves sanctioned.
As far as I know, Tornado Cash is not a legal entity either.
It seems like it's always been a tiny minority of idealists who put their own lives on the line to do what they believe is right in the face of the beast bearing down on them.
The majority has always been (and probably will always be) weak minded corporate yes men.
What is distasteful is the so called "hacker" community being filled with corporate yes men.
Also: GitHub is a private company. It's their real estate, they can do what they want with it. If they wanted to keep it up, they could have.
They didn't want to.
A legitimate example of free speech. Zimmerman published his code in the appendix of scholarly book, in addition to posting online in source & binary form.
> - Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 years in prison and a lot else for downloading from JSTOR programmatically
A terrible example, and not comparable to your first example. Swartz gained physical access to a network room he was not supposed to be, inside a building he was not supposed to be, connected a laptop to a LAN he was not granted access.... When you say programmatically, you must mean the parts where he proceeded to download JSTOR using his laptop? Has was criminally trespassing, accessing a network he knew he wasn't allowed to access. The tragic outcome was due to... hate to say it, he had well known mental issues that amplified the stress he felt when being indicted for a crime he knew he was guilty.
So I get what you're saying, but you might want to limit your examples to abjectly reasonable ones that withstand scrutiny. Otherwise it might look like a bandwagon, generalization, or even false dichotomy.
I remember those events clearly and even JSTOR, the "victim" in the case, backpedaled on the prosecution before he committed suicide. He was driven to suicide by an overzealous federal prosecutor trying to make a career for themselves.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/swartz-didnt-face-pr...
Or, if you blame the prosecutor for driving him, do you also blame his friends and family for not being supportive enough?
Moreover, judges don’t care about prosecutors or what they think. And, sentences are largely determined by sentencing guidelines.
Rich white kids with no prior convictions don’t go to prison for stealing library books.
This doesn't mean that any/all measures taken against them are automatically justified, but it's large-scale crime, and it's not in the realm of "information wants to be free", it's actual money laundering, for actual criminal cartels and actual rogue states.
The automatic opposing of govt sanctions is pretty shameful for a nuanced technical audience.
But they do understand it, quite well. It launders money, there is no legal use for a money laundering machine.
No, this still isn’t a valid use.
Cash cannot be so easily laundered as literally sending coins to an address and waiting a few minutes. Laundering cash requires physical infrastructure which can be tracked and monitored.
People like you are why crypto is dying. Not everybody needs to anonymously buy drugs online. When non-crypto bros here things like this they mark you and your project as criminal.
Here's an analogy: Is it hypocritical to say "we shouldn't punish people who sell marijuana," but also say "we should punish people who sell heroin?"
Maybe you disagree with the person's preference for what should be punished, but saying "we should punish this behavior but not that behavior" doesn't make a person a hypocrite.
Would you stop the above chain of events at the very first link? Would you say: "We can't ban trojans because it's code, and code is speech, and speech is either free or its not?"
Is not a comment on free speech or not. There are rumors of government sanctions for this specific case, but the typical deplatforming is more like getting kicked out by the bouncer.
- Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The case escalated and was eventually dropped, included POTUS attention.
- Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 years in prison and a lot else for downloading from JSTOR programmatically
- Clifford Stole spent several years being ignored by every govt agency under the Sun, except for CIA, for finding, attributing and then exposing a widespread KGB hack of govt systems in the 80s
- L0pht testified in front of congress to expose significant internet security risks that were otherwise ignored.
I’m not saying Tornado Cash and related devs were doing a purely moral action. But the automatic siding with the heavy hand of govt sanctions on code the govt doesn’t really understand is pretty shameful for a nuanced technical audience.