"originating from" is an interesting phrase as far as the internet goes and people's mobility.
Is that when the account was first used? Majority of use related to IP? Something to do with the email address?
Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
21–30 of 638 posts
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iran's been on my list of "wanna go" destinations for a while (Food and architecture mainly). Looks like I'd have to choose between that and having any connection with a US based company. Great.
Everyone I have ever met that has been to Iran absolutely raves about it. I've never met a single person that didn't extend their stay, and doesn't rate it as hands down the best country they have ever been to. It's very, very high on my list. But if you have an American or British passport you currently can't go without an escort. (I'm an Overlander, I drove AK-Argentina and am now driving right around Africa. I've…
Iran is an amazing country and the people even more so, never ever met people more kind, giving (even when they don't have anything they give you all they've got), helpful, funny and down to earth. The fauna, flora and architecture alone is worth it, the people is just the icing on the cake.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#23Smart move. This shouldn't surprise anyone that makes a point of avoiding US prosecution and jail:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/07/huawei-cfo-accused-of-frau...
https://www.bassberrygovcontrade.com/iran-sanction-violation...
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#24A couple of our employees from Syria also got blocked today. They were using Slack from Syria though. EDIT: I don't understand why they ban/block the account rather than "simply" block access from IPs from the country. This seems really strange and overreaching.
> They were using Slack from Syria though. This doesn't excuse anything. People in Syria are people too. This is similar to how people were calling for websites to block access to Europe over the copyright thing. The internet is a place where you don't even need to have a nationality. It is a place where we can all exist as pure thoughts. Why are we letting politics fuck it up?
The Syrian ban comes from a U.S. federal sanction. Not arguing that the sanction is right, or that Slack is correctly implementing its adherence, but this is not a similar situation to people calling for a boycott to make a point.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#25A couple of our employees from Syria also got blocked today. They were using Slack from Syria though. EDIT: I don't understand why they ban/block the account rather than "simply" block access from IPs from the country. This seems really strange and overreaching.
> They were using Slack from Syria though. This doesn't excuse anything. People in Syria are people too. This is similar to how people were calling for websites to block access to Europe over the copyright thing. The internet is a place where you don't even need to have a nationality. It is a place where we can all exist as pure thoughts. Why are we letting politics fuck it up?
What about fines and jail time?
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#26Why don't you use a free alternative as Matrix? If you self host, then you are the only one who controls who your users are.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#27Saudi Arabia is a large investor in Slack. Probably doesn't mean much here, but you never know.
United States sanctions: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#28"originating from" is an interesting phrase as far as the internet goes and people's mobility. Is that when the account was first used? Majority of use related to IP? Something to do with the email address?
I would probably guess it's geolocation at time of registration.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#29From a technical standpoint what they're saying is if your IP matches any of these countries, we cannot allow you on our services. It's got nothing to do with ethnicity if a Puerto Rican guy from Orlando goes to Iran and gets banned, it's all about the IP not the person.
Seems they might want to tone down their bans starting from the moment the policy came to be vs doing it from the dawn of Slack's time, not sure how the policy is written and I'm not a lawyer so maybe they went off from legal advise.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#30In this modern age it seems it's not safe to list anything which might come back to haunt you, including ethnicity.
Face recognition will solve that for you.
Or just plain name checking.
One of the personal projects of mine was to put on a map the nationalized buildings that used to be owned by Jewish owners (I live in a former Easter-European communist country, we did nationalize a lot of stuff immediately after WW2 ended). That was pretty simple: I just got the nationalization order/law from back in the day (it included the names of the building owners and the addresses), I inputed it in a database and then I matched those owners' names against a public database containing only jewish names, meaning this one [1]. It was a lot more difficult to exactly geo-locate those buildings on a map (a lot of street names had changed in the last 70 years) than it was to guess the ethnicity of a lot of people on that list.
Again, this was part of a personal project that I had built in order to better know the history of the local Jewish community, but I could see the same "technique" (meaning just plain name matching against a known database with positive ethnic identification) being used for nefarious reasons in other circumstances and places.