301–310 of 638 posts
Saudi 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/...
Is Twitter, Google, Microsoft behaving the same here?
P.S. On a side note, if these sanctions are really about 'punishing the regime', blocking mediums for Iranians to speak on isn't a way to do it, but what do I know.
Unaffected orgs will just keep on using slack, as will many affected orgs, and Free alternatives and irc will be mocked and laughed at by next week for being inconvenient and old in comparison to yet another proprietary solution, or even slack itself.
If you rely on communication, and you don't control your communication, you can't rely on that communication.
There'll be a reminder in 2025.
1. https://xkcd.com/743/ (and it really should be a Free Software violin now. If you ever wondered about the difference outside of licenses: this is it.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For more than a decade, Section 230 [1] has protected internet platforms from censorship of user-generated content. Why is Section 230 not applicable here, or is a similar law needed with wider scope? [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 > It is the policy of the United States— (1) to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media; (…
Because this isn’t about content, it’s about OFAC designations. That’s the office in the US Treasury department that says who Americans can’t do business with. They’re the ones that enforce sanctions and Iran is on their list. Penalties for noncompliance are stiff and there are no safe harbour provisions. (IANAL but I have implemented systems to check OFAC lists at other companies and seen it result in similar situat…
(a) the objectives of laws prohibiting large commercial flows to sanctioned countries and
(b) the objectives of laws encouraging many tiny information exchanges on the internet, taking place outside of sanctioned countries
Is it worth burning down Internet commerce in the hope of catching a few individuals? Did Congress intend to create a Do-Not-Speak list, or one such list for every Internet company? Should Internet UGC platforms now relocate outside the USA, when Congress is also encouraging companies to repatriate assets to the USA?
1. The export control regulations apply to companies and individuals who do business with any of the sanctioned countries. 2. Discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or political views is forbidden by law. In the absence of proof that this user had business with Iran (or any of the other sanctioned countries) through Slack's platform, the export control regulations do not apply. If the user has business with Iran…
> Ergo, the only thing left here is that Slack broke the law that forbids discrimination based on ethnicity. That's not how it works. Even if Slack is mistaken in their belief that export regulations apply, their action is still taken in that belief, which is not legally-discriminatory.
Would you say that robbing a bank is okay, if the robber believes that it's okay?
Using a proprietary protocol that doesn't allow any form of federation is an unacceptable way to build a global community. Please consider using an IRC based service for group chat or an XMPP based service where 1:1, history, rapid reconnects, and other more complex chat features are required (yes, if you're a dev you have to use XML which is annoying, but overall it's a well designed protocol, so get over it). This lets you host your own, and (in the case of XMPP at least) if one person wants to use a U.S. based service and another is in Iran they can just sign up for a Belgian account (or wherever). We can't afford to let he internet splinter off into siloed tiers based on nationality.
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?
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 S…
Mossadegh was not democratically elected. He was appointed by a dictator. The only part of that process that was even slightly democratic, was indirectly via Majlis vote. The people of Iran never specifically elected Mossadegh.
> No wonders Iran government stance can be a bit tense at time and that they want the Bomb to be at peace.
How does being at peace square with constantly calling for the genocide of Israel across decades and very aggressively funding terrorism & militias? The Iranian people have been protesting their military adventures in Syria as one recent example. Iran is every bit as dirty as the US and Russia when it comes to such activities over the decades in the Middle East.
So 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.
OP here. I would partly agree. But at the time I posted the link, I only had examples from Iranian people that are living in other countries using Slack and getting banned. Now that I have heard more stories about people from Syria and even one US person, I wouldn't post it again with that description. I'll leave it to the mods to change the description accordingly, if they feel inclined to do so. UPDATE: The mods ha…
My wife’s Slack account was closed yesterday. She created the account while traveling in Cuba (legally) years ago and hasn’t been back to Cuba or any other sanctioned country since. She is a cofounder of an org that uses Slack heavily and has now lost access to all her messages and files from the past couple years of work. There appears to be no appeal process here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming that for some reason I should take your word over his, banning for "having logged on in Iran at some point" is, effectively, banning for ethnicity.
It only is if you think someone who has ever set foot on Iran is an ethnic Irani. You just have to look at this HN thread to see that is false, as this problem also applies to other embargoed countries.
We're both adults here and I assume we both can realize that splitting these hairs doesn't make my statement that banning everyone that's ever logged on Iran from slack is, in effect, a ban on Iranian ethnic users?
I think this highlights the precarious situation most people find themselves in today when it comes to communication channels and data that is being stored in the cloud. We tend to assume that we have rights and that wrongs will eventually be righted. But in practical reality this isn't necessarily true. Speaking of which, are there any open source alternatives to Slack which anyone could recommend?
There is also matrix (riot.im) which is fully decentralized though the UX still needs a lot of work last time I checked.