But direct exchange goes two ways. Fixing a bug in your project does benefit the project specifically.

But that's one reason dumping the account of a PhD student in Canada is puzzling -- there is no evidence of exchange of value.

I suppose the argument is that the person in question visited Iran and presumably had to pay for food at some point and thus "did business with Iran" -- and that would cover the American vacationing in Cuba as well. And that's probably why they're not just banning IPs originating in the small set of sanctioned countries, and instead dropping users. But I don't like it.