amiraliakbari

Also me, as someone who is living in a place that US may drop bombs on because the models may think it is a military target, or even a higher priority target like a girls school.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The free tier doesn't include SSL monitoring, but has many other useful free features.

I guess those are Django's default password policies and not specific to this project.

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.

I haven't checked their TOS, but practically there isn't any limitations in getting certificates from Iranian IPs or for ir domains. If there is any problem, it is that browser vendors/root CAs/etc are not willing to trust CAs in those countries.