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Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

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

#401

Post by mfer »

jordank wrote: post #80

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.

If Slack did this because of her trip to Cuba years ago it means they have kept records of her IP going back years.

This causes me to think about the metadata records they have held onto in addition to all the data.

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

#402

Post by user5994461 »

Juliate wrote: post #149
SentientNo4 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple: it costs them money and resources to go through the process you described, whereas it costs them almost nothing to directly close the account and send an automated message.

I wouldn't call "reputation" nothing or less valuable than money.

I've only ever seen one company actually have a "reputation" metrics mentioned in the employee onboarding or customer support and outages.

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

#403

Post by brianpgordon »

gregmac wrote: post #391
ashelmire wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features does IRC lack? The messaging, chat rooms or PMs, private servers, file sharing, etc has existed forever. You can also build any sort of tool for integration with it. I guess it lacks persistence and access to history? But there are surely ways to solve that.

Off the top of my head... persistence, history, search, rich formatting, image previews, synchronization between devices, usable mobile clients, group/here/channel mentions, channel directory/search, channel descriptions, file upload/sharing (XDCC is not this), multi-line/expandable messages (eg, paste code or logs without flooding the channel), user status (away/DND). Some of this can be approximated with bots, of c…

irccloud is great and solves many of these issues. I'm not suggesting it's an alternative to Slack because of course then you're paying them $5/user/mo instead of paying Slack $6.67/user/mo and you're right back where you started, but if you're an IRC user looking for history/synchronization across devices, image previews, a mobile client, and drag-and-drop image sharing, irccloud is IMO totally worth it.

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

#404

Post by kuschku »

lorenzhs wrote: post #351
simias wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except looking at the past 20 years or so it seems clear that the trend is going the other way around. Slack itself is an example of that, not long ago it would've been a set of self-hosted tools. People have ditched IRC in favor of Discord and friends, they've ditched decentralized forums, BBSs and mailing lists for social networks, everybody hosts everything using the same four or five cloud providers, streaming an…

This is a bit of a shameless plug, but I just made a Show HN post about Glowing Bear, which is a web front-end for the WeeChat IRC client: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725038 . It's entirely implemented as client-side javascript, and you can easily self-host it without any requests being made to other servers. For me, it solves the problem of accessing IRC wherever I am without having to fumble with ssh on…

Weechat (with weechat android and glowingbear), IRCCloud, and Quassel (with Quasseldroid and quassel-webserver) are indeed awesome solutions for IRC.

(Personally, I’m ofc biased, as I’m the dev of https://quasseldroid.info/).

But I think for these solutions to gain more mainstream appeal, we’d need to make the setup much simpler, and work on ideally making it a single-click solution for an organization to set this up for their members. And maybe even provide hosted services (similar to IRCCloud) for the many users that would rather pay than run their own servers.

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

#405

Post by VectorLock »

ashelmire wrote: post #358
aetherson wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word. I don't love Slack, but IRC is awful, and an open protocol replacement for Slack would have to make easier many of the features that Slack has and IRC lacks.

What features does IRC lack? The messaging, chat rooms or PMs, private servers, file sharing, etc has existed forever. You can also build any sort of tool for integration with it. I guess it lacks persistence and access to history? But there are surely ways to solve that.

Custom emoji.

You could say IRC could do anything any other chat program does, but it doesn't.

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

#406

Post by user5994461 »

mirimir wrote: post #231
jwildeboer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I meant no criticism. I'm just trying to understand what they're doing. And damn, just the realization that they have access logs going back years is mind-boggling. If they didn't have the logs, they'd arguably be better off.

It's possible that they don't store access logs, but just keep the login history with time and location.

It's a lot less data and it's very useful to help with some customer issues, or legal matters like this.

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

#407

Post by lorenzhs »

kuschku wrote: post #404
lorenzhs wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of a shameless plug, but I just made a Show HN post about Glowing Bear, which is a web front-end for the WeeChat IRC client: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725038 . It's entirely implemented as client-side javascript, and you can easily self-host it without any requests being made to other servers. For me, it solves the problem of accessing IRC wherever I am without having to fumble with ssh on…

Weechat (with weechat android and glowingbear), IRCCloud, and Quassel (with Quasseldroid and quassel-webserver) are indeed awesome solutions for IRC. (Personally, I’m ofc biased, as I’m the dev of https://quasseldroid.info/ ). But I think for these solutions to gain more mainstream appeal, we’d need to make the setup much simpler, and work on ideally making it a single-click solution for an organization to set this u…

Yes, you're absolutely correct. Setup is indeed more complicated than it should be for Glowing Bear. I would love to have an automated solution for it, I just don't want to be the one to build it :)

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

#408

Post by brianpgordon »

robotbikes wrote: post #330
sudhirj wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the way Slack handled this, but by now it’s clear (even the original poster seems to have realised) that Slack banned everyone who accessed the service from an Iranian IP, irrespective of who they were or where they were from. It’s pretty clear that’s it not motivated by race or any kind of profiling. Slack has no incentive to boot more people off their platform than necessary, so this overly broad ba…

Who asked them to do this ? I have serious doubts that this action was directly recommended in any official government communication otherwise we would have had someone leak it and debate about it. My hunch is this isn't directed by a national security letter or anything like that with mandated secrecy otherwise we would see similar actions from other tech service providers. As far as I know Facebook isn't deleting t…

It's not inconceivable that Slack's general counsel saw the headlines about Trump campaign officials being investigated for circumventing Iranian sanctions, evaluated their position, and recommended this action just to be safe.

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

#409

Post by darkerside »

darkerside wrote: post #320

https://twitter.com/a_h_a/status/1075691620081623041 This is almost certainly related to the user's travel to Iran, and not any form of racial profiling. Everybody please remain calm. It's emblematic of today's society that at the first mention of ethnicity, everybody grabs their anti-racism pitchforks. I agree racism is a problem, but let's treat it appropriately. We need to look at it more like drug addiction today…

Really? Unexplained downvotes? At least do me the courtesy of explaining why.
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