Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neutral countries? What’s a neutral country?
It's Switzerland.
yes. are there any Swiss technological developments? are there any other neutral countries?
Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
171–180 of 638 posts
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#172This is almost certainly the result of adding a new compliance product feed (which may have false positives). I remember having to implement one for an acquired ecommerce site. The feed by it's nature was prone to false positives (it matched on name). However, there was an internal appeals process with the ability to override whereas if this is new to slack they are probably overwhelmed
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#173As an outsider, I am really surprised by how deep-rooted America's hostility is towards Iran. Shi'ite Iran certainly has human rights issues, but as far as terrorism is concerned the majority of them are orchestrated by Sunni groups. 9/11 hijackers, Al Queda, Islamic State, Paris attackers - are all Sunni.
In the case of suspending these accounts, this isn't something just Slack has done. A crypto exchange was wholesale closing accounts in the past 3 years if people even opened the app while on holiday in Cuba and rightly so. You do NOT want to have to deal with the government if they suspect you, or a customer, of dealing with a sanctioned or embargoed country. You just don't. It's going to be messy and long and expensive especially as a finance or communication company.
It isn't a "oh you're a Muslim/Iranian/Cuban/resident of Kiev, banned!" thing it's a "Oh, you could cost us millions and millions of dollars in legal trouble, exposure of our other customer's data, etc, sorry but we have to sever ties with you immediately to reduce our risk to very serious government investigation and litigation".
Given Slack also uses encryption at rest and in transit, there may be a LEGAL REQUIREMENT not to allow users with ties to Iran to use the product under CFR title 15 chapter VII, subchapter C.
> Shi'ite Iran certainly has human rights issues, but as far as terrorism is concerned the majority of them are orchestrated by Sunni groups
It doesn't matter what religious sect has perpetrated acts, the current government is reliably documented to a laundry list of terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, imprisoning/lashing/executing members of the gay community, at least 15 assassinations on foreign soil (US, FR, DE, CH, SE etc), a recent president was a staunch holocaust denier and the government even sponsored an anti-holocaust conference.
We impose sanctions, embargoes etc on COUNTRIES not religious sects. We hold COUNTRIES responsible for war crimes and genocides, not specific religious sects. The current government of Iran in this instance has a history of doing bad things for its entire existence, as such the U.S. government has decided they are both a threat to nation and worthy of sanctions for various reasons. I suspect the powers that be at Slack simply are trying to minimize risk to the company and other customers by eliminating users that have shown a connection to IPs geographically connected to the nation of Iran.
See:
- 15 CFR chapter VII, subchapter C.
- 31 CFR Part 560 and Appendix A to Chapter V
- Public Law 115–44 (the CAATSA)
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iran is an easy enemy for the US government to offer to its citizens. Because of the fairly harsh anti-US rhetoric circulated by the Iranian government to its citizens since the revolution (itself because of our previous support of the Shah and current support of Israel) for purposes of maintaining power, it's easy to say "Look, Iran hates America." The Shia / Sunni distinction is largely lost on the average American…
To be completely fair about the last point, immigrants you meet in the US are not a representative sample. I say this as an immigrant myself. The Bangladeshis and Pakistanis I’ve met in the US are educated and relatively liberal, having gotten through our immigration filters. But the beliefs and attitudes of people back in the country are totally different. For example, American muslims are slightly more liberal than…
Granted. I was going to include a note, but didn't want to get too long winded.
Non-representative sample, self-selected according to dominant migration obstacle (e.g. financial or educational).
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree about going to the self-hostable path. I would add as an alternative, looking for non-US products, maybe from neutral countries. As someone mentioned in the twitter thread, this could happen to any product: Google, Facebook, even taking the bus!
"Neutral" countries also have to conform to sanctions; Switzerland is mentioned a few times but "the sanctions regime in place is based on the Federal Act on the Implementation of International Sanctions" and "Does Switzerland implement UN sanctions? - Yes." https://sanctionsguide.eversheds-sutherland.com/countries/sw... I get the impression that neutral in this case is being confused with some libertarian / anarchis…
Interesting, I didn't know that. I guess that makes the self hosted path the only safe and sustainable path for managing one's information.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#176Aside from the obvious wrong of blocking people based on their origin, what's up with these companies closing accounts with no warning and no recourse? I know they're private companies and they _can_ do it, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. Why not give the user even a few days notice so they can communicate with support to try and clear things up? Taking the OP's story at face value, Slack should eas…
Its not a companies fault. Its governement.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#177A 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.
Is the sanctions mentioned on Syria the country, or Syrian nationals? Both?
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#178Earlier 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?
> Why are we letting politics fuck it up? Yes why? Fight back: use Tor, have proxies, Tor nodes, bridges, gateways. Use ZeroNet, help crypto projects. Make it hard to discriminate on IP.
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Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 99.999% efficient at racial profiling
Next on HN: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Race
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you have employees in Syria? It’s a violation of federal sanctions. Edit: In the US, UK, and EU.
Which might mean American companies can't employ people in Syria, but what does that have to do with the rest of the world?
The EU and U.K. are not in the US last I checked.