Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you have employees in Syria? It’s a violation of federal sanctions. Edit: In the US, UK, and EU.
There's more countries in the world other than the US, you know.
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Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
181–190 of 638 posts
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#182Self-hosted, decentralised solutions such as Matrix (https://matrix.org) are available, and allow you to keep control of your own access and data.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#183Earlier 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…
(Some) Pakistani-Americans I’ve met who’ve grown up here have told me that my parents should be executed for being Ahmadis once an Islamic State has been established (but graciously offered them a one time chance to repent). So much for the immigration filter.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#184If they are just deleting accounts where someone logged in from a treasury-barred country’s IP, I wonder what happens if you BGP hijack a small amount of that address space, somehow get admins or high profile users to connect via this (run WiFi? Some kind of proxy?), and then observe the chaos.
Or if a data breach allows for account data to be stolen, then one can spoof access attempts from such IPs and seek to DOS the account access.
If the removals are automated, then the most vulnerable accounts would be those of slack employees - or slack investors?
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#185[deleted]
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're not a US company (I hope there are no sanctions in our own country. I somehow doubt it, but I'm not entirely sure to be honest, so I won't mention the country to avoid getting us in potential trouble... Anyone knows which other countries enforce similar sanctions on Syria??).
The US, UK, and EU. I wound be careful of you or your company reside here. The company I used to work for was fined for continuing services in Syria. I think your are in Germany and the EU might have lifted restrictions based on certain industries. https://www.ajc.com/business/investigation-into-syria-accusa...
I'm not a lawyer, but I am not aware of any restrictions to employ people from Syria, unless they were involved in military or related to the government etc.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#187I 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?
I frankly never quite understood the extremely high stance against Iran.
Iran has not really stage any offensive wars since 1856 (and most of the XIXe century wars were in fact to recover/maintain control over the Persian Empire which was slowly eaten by the Russian and the UK).
Since 1940, Iran was constantly meddled with by foreign powers, first being invaded during the WW2 by the Allies and the Soviets, with the Soviet reluctantly leaving the country after 1945.
Then the democratically elected Mosaddegh was deposed by the MI6 and the CIA because of "precious Oil". A "Pro-Western" dictatorial government was was put in place. This regime was of course brutal but also at odds with the population and its traditions, leading to a revolution in 1979.
In the midst of this revolution, Irak, another "Western backed" dictatorship tried to profit from the chaos to invade the country which lead to costly a 8 years war leaving ~1 Million people dead. This war is probably the last high intensity conventional war between 2 roughly equals and relatively developed countries to date.
And then in the 2000, it has seen two countries at its borders being invaded by historically hostile powers. And then these countries collapsed into chaos (And I'm even forgetting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 80ies).
And lately, after lengthily and complex negotiations, an international accord was signed, just to be thrown out of the window 1 year later by the US, the US then bullying other signatories into not abiding by said accord.
No wonders Iran government stance can be a bit tense at time and that they want the Bomb to be at peace.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#188Wow the Twitter thread and the experiences which are mentioned here sound so extreme and crazy that I am seriously confused to what believe. - Is this all made up to prove some point? - Is this just how the US ticks right now? - Is Slack just completely gone mad? - Is this what companies believes is acceptable nowadays? - Is this the future of the web? The fact that I am not sure what to believe and that I wouldn't b…
I don't think this is the future of the web.
This sort of thing is a temporary blip before everybody figures out decentralised solutions for everything.
Decentralisation is clearly the end game as long as politics causes problems like this. A decentralised solution will continue to "just work", while centralised solutions continue to boot people off. It's pretty obvious which one is going to win.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#189Aside 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.
No it’s the companies fault. Export restrictions can’t be applied indiscriminately. Laws are open to interpretation and they have interpreted this law in letter not in spirit.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#190So is this really an accurate title?
It seems most likely that Slack has geolocated IP addresses from account access logs, and closed accounts with hits from sanctioned countries. Perhaps going back years.
That in itself seems over the top. But it doesn't constitute ethnic profiling.
But if someone has a counterexample, that would be OK too.