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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

#411

Post by SUr3na »

SamWhited wrote: post #305

I've been mad at the Go community in particular for continuing to promote Slack for ages, and this is exactly the hypothetical situation I always use to explain why (although there are other reasons too; Slack is a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with this industry, but that needs a fuller writeup). At a previous job we had to start doing this exact same thing when we were considering going public; this is the…

It's ironic that Golang.org is not accessible from Iran because of app engine.also several non proprietary repos like sourceforge. The only way to get go lang's source code is through github. It is only a matter of time untill Microsoft decides to block github for Iranians as well.I don't know why github is not currently blocked but I would not be surprised if it gets blocked.

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

#412

Post by bad_user »

wpietri wrote: post #336
SamWhited wrote: post #305

I've been mad at the Go community in particular for continuing to promote Slack for ages, and this is exactly the hypothetical situation I always use to explain why (although there are other reasons too; Slack is a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with this industry, but that needs a fuller writeup). At a previous job we had to start doing this exact same thing when we were considering going public; this is the…

I would love to see more things built on open protocols. But for that to be the case, we have to find ways to make better apps built on top of open protocols. We should start by admitting that Slack beat IRC. Beat it like a cheap hallway rug. IRC was always a terrible experience for novices, and it wasn't a great experience for experts. That it had any users at all is a testament not to IRC, but to what it enabled. S…

Checkout IRCCloud.com ... it's an online service for connecting to IRC and can also connect to Slack too.

The obvious advantages versus classic IRC clients: it's always online and the connection happening through their servers you get good push notifications on mobile.

The obvious advantage versus Slack: they don't own the IRC networks you're connecting to, so if you have issues with IRCCloud you can just change to another client.

It has some missing features, most notably search in archives, but they are working on it.

>> "admitting that Slack beat IRC"

Sure but are we talking about a fundamental limitation of the IRC protocol, or are we simply talking about implementation details that can be fixed?

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

#413

Post by bad_user »

brianpgordon wrote: post #403
gregmac wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> you're paying them $5/user/mo instead of paying Slack $6.67/user/mo and you're right back where you started

Are we complaining about price or are we complaining about proprietary services?

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

#414

Post by jordank »

mfer wrote: post #401
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.

Right, which should also indicate that this trip to Cuba wasn’t part of a pattern but rather an anomaly.

I understand the complex legal frames that this exists in, but they appear to have the data to be way more precise here.

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

#415

Post by mgbmtl »

IshKebab wrote: post #341
SamWhited wrote: post #305

I've been mad at the Go community in particular for continuing to promote Slack for ages, and this is exactly the hypothetical situation I always use to explain why (although there are other reasons too; Slack is a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with this industry, but that needs a fuller writeup). At a previous job we had to start doing this exact same thing when we were considering going public; this is the…

I wonder if part of the reason we don't have any great open source Slack competitors (yes I know about Mattermost, Zulip, etc.) is that so many open source developers (or at least commenters here) seem to be under the illusion that IRC is a reasonable alternative to Slack.

What's wrong with Mattermost? We use it for our FOSS community (and I use another instance for our company), works well.

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

#416

Post by jordank »

natch wrote: post #288
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.

So is it related to her ethnicity as this guy is claiming it is in his case? If not maybe everyone can consider that maybe Slack’s actions for the Iranian guy have some basis other than “his ethnicity.”

It appears we are talking about place of origin of accounts, at least in my wife’s case.

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

#417

Post by patmcguire »

jeswin wrote: post #74

As 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.

It's mostly about 1979 and the humiliation of the hostage crisis.

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

#419

Post by starbeast »

wastedhours wrote: post #384
beobab wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad used to say: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained with stupidity", but I love yours too.

Otherwise known has "Hanlon's Razor" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Which is great for politeness, but largely rubbish for working out what people might be up to, given that people not only regularly disguise malice as stupidity, but in some cases find it highly entertaining. Hence the existence of - https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/

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

#420

Post by Zigurd »

mirimir wrote: post #190

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.

That's a plausible inference, but the effect to anyone not equipped to make such an inference is that it's ethnic profiling. A geeky inference isn't a good excuse. An ethical lapse is what it looks like. Nobody has a duty to make excuses on Slack's behalf when Slack could just explain themselves in public and to the people affected.
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