One of the biggest sites for open source software developers SourceForge.net blocked Syria, Sudan, Iran, N. Korea & Cuba, as Arab Crunch reports. It seems that the ban was initiated by the US government authorities in order to put the developers from “black list” countries in the dark, not allowing them to contribute to open source development. Bellow you can see the message the users from the above mentioned countries see when they try to download an open source project.
The SourceForge.net Terms of Use (the most people never read) contains the following statements:
Prohibited Persons
You represent you are not a person on a list barring you from receiving services under U.S. laws or other applicable jurisdiction, including without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, detailed at http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/ListsToCheck.htm (or successor sites thereto). Users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, may not post Content to, or access Content available through, SourceForge.net.
The blocking event took place in January 2010, almost simultaneously with the US secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech about Internet freedom where she reported that “all of humanity has equal access to innovations, knowledge and ideas”. Ya, right!
The same ArabCrunch reported this week that SourceForge somehow reconsidered the ban by allowing project admins to unblock them, if they ” conclude that the project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions”.
How to unblock SourceForge
There are several methods you can use to unblock SourceForge. The main idea is to hide your real IP address and access SorceForge with a US IP.
The most handy solution is Hotspot Shield but you can use any other hide ip tool or VPN service. Here, on How-to-hide-ip.info, we often host giveaways and special offers. So, you are in need of such a service, keep an eye on How-to-hide-ip.info.
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5 Comments
HideIpAdmin,
Nice article indeed,I sure the people there will easily hide their IP and do whatever they want simple as that.SourceForge is a huge and important site when it comes to open- source projects and work.
I want to ask if there is any possibility of complete untraceable total anonymity/privacy?I know it sound’s obnoxious but my reply would be no because cyber-criminals could easily misuse it.
What’s your take?Should we really have such a perfect-anonymity/privacy…
@kingpin – I don’t think total anonymity is possible. There are so many tracking tools and so many weak points in the Internet architecture that such a goal is virtually impossible.
Also I think total anonymity is not desirable. As you pointed out, such a tool or service could be easily misused by certain individuals.
haven’t checked this site in a while, I don’t know where to put this so I’ll just post it here. This is new format sucks. I usually browse a few pages back, now I can only view the newest 6-7 posts. I understand some of the old posts may not be relavent, but it’s still nice to be able to read them.
@xvl260 – Thanks for your feedback. I will try to find a solution for this problem such that you can see older posts.
@xvl260 – For those preffering the older version I have added a new option in the main menu called Blog. Please give it try and let me know what you think.
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