Live data from Hacker News

Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

twitter.com

31–40 of 638 posts

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#31
As bad as it may sound, but from what I can read in the tweets, he did violate the sanctions by using slack while being in iran.

Well, that is called breaking the law and I fully understand why slack terminated his account when he broke the law and violated their terms of service.

For example, other services or tools (like cisco anyconnect) clearly state, that you are not allowed to use them when in embargoed contries.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#35
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Face recognition will solve that for you.

Good luck guessing ethnicity for Iran. There will be many who look less middle-eastern than your average "Californian with a tan". You'd have the same problem with most near-east or Mediterranean countries. Being at the crossroads for a few millennia will do that to a place.

This holds up if you imagine the profiling as done by humans. However, neural networks already surpass human ability in some computer vision tasks. The features the trained models come up with can go way past what we might consider visual likeness. The algorithmic method might eventually become 99.999% efficient at racial profiling with the help of something as ridiculous as fingerprinting eyebrow strand distribution & orientations. The right way forward is to fully consider the ethical implications when shaping these policies, regardless of technological ability.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#36

Wow. This seems rather unprecedented and unnecessary, based upon the lack of action in this regard by other companies I don't know why Slack would do this. If for instance this kind of arbitrary action took place on GitHub I could see it having a detrimental impact to free software projects. This is another good reason to choose Zulipchat and other self-hostable platforms instead of proprietary SaaS solutions.

> This seems rather unprecedented

EULAs already sometime shad rules to excluded people based on the country they were a national of. Those one could simply ignore. With SaaS this is a different story.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, I can imagine it's hard for Slack to ignore those sanctions, but it does appear overzealous to ban individual accounts after having logged-in from Syria/Iran, instead of implementing a country ban from accessing slack. The latter would be far simpler from a technical standpoint, and I would imagine just as compliant with the sanctions.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#38
post #23

Smart 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...

Banning people because of the country they were born in is not "smart", it's abhorrent.

That the US, supposedly the leader of the free world, is threatening prosecution and jail to those who want to treat everyone in the world equally, is a ludicrous state of affairs.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#39

From 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…

[deleted]

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#40

I believe that the only party that suffers from those sanctions are actually the populations living in those dictatorships who don't have a say about who is their leader. Who does actually benefit from them and who do they really harm?

There are other parties that suffer from the sanctions.

For example, the guy in the Tweet, who doesn't even live in Iran and is merely ethnically Iranian.

Not to mention anyone in the US (or, just ethnically North American?) who takes the ethical stance of ignoring the sanction and gets punished for it.

Post reply on HN