Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

gregmac wrote: post #422

kuschku wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you’re willing to run a bouncer (and an organisation could run one for all their users), there are usable mobile clients with synchronization between devices, persistence, user status and even profile images. For example my app https://quasseldroid.info/ which requires you to run the https://quassel-irc.org/ bouncer, but provides all that. As well as IRCCloud and Weechat-Android, which are also very awesom…

This is kind of my point though, especially for a company: this is kind of a pain to setup for technical users that want to get the functionality. It's basically a complete barrier for the types of users who still primarily use e-mail, phone calls and in-person meetings.

[deleted]

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

#432

Post by laumars » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

paraditedc wrote: post #143

laumars wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you don’t need a hosting provider to self host. You don’t even need a domain name either. But in all honesty, there are hundreds of registrars and thousands of hosting providers around the world. Not all of them fall under US jurisdiction. But if you’re really really paranoid of getting shut down, there’s also .onion sites or distributed systems like IPFS. You can not prevent people from communicating on the…

I am not sure where you live, but in many places you can't host your own servers from your room because of ISP restrictions. Also, there are not a lot of places where you can find data centers that rent servers out for personal uses.

> I am not sure where you live, but in many places you can't host your own servers from your room because of ISP restrictions.

We have those restrictions in the UK but I've never once known any ISP act upon them. But in any case, I did also list other options that wasn't reliant on your ISP as well.

> Also, there are not a lot of places where you can find data centers that rent servers out for personal uses.

Sure there are. Hosting providers don't care if you're a business or private individual - they just want your cash. There's even serval places in Europe where you can send them a Raspberry Pi and they'd host that for you (obviously for a monthly fee). There really isn't a shortage of places to host bare metal nor VMs.

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

#433

Post by jack_pp » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #234

jstanley wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

20 years is a small timeframe in my opinion. Every new technology you exemplified is better in almost every way to the predecessor except for the fact that they hand the keys to the castle to a small group of people which the ordinary users don't care about until it starts hurting them, which has already started.

Now I suspect we'll start seeing clones of facebook / slack etc but with a decentralized backend while offering all the features users care about seamlessly. This might take a while but it'll eventually come.

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

#434

Post by parhamn » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

dustinmoris wrote: post #147

Wow 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'm an Iranian-American and Coinbase did something very similar to me in 2017. Here is the notice they sent me: https://i.imgur.com/xnJe0kd.png

We were very convinced it was name/ethnically based as I hadn't been to Iran for a few years before. The general counsel at my last job sent a strongly worded email suggesting they may have been using names to do this (thanks AA!). The email quickly resulted in my account being reinstated without any commentary on their methodology.

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

#435

Post by ciupicri » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

jamiek88 wrote: post #372

ryandrake wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily disagreeing but could someone provide some solid examples of IRC being a terrible user experience? Whenever IRC comes up, people say it lost and it’s not the right technology. When pressed, they wave their hands around saying “...because, uh, user experience reasons!” As a longtime user of IRC, I’m probably blind to these issues. What’s so bad about it that causes people to put up with these inadequat…

setting up, just getting started with IRC for a non-tech person is basically way too hard bordering on impossible from their perspective. We can talk about all the other issues around persistence and UX but just getting started is something beyond the vast majority of computer users. It’s really hard for us to remember and empathize with this.

But developers are not non-tech persons, they're techies.

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

#436

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

gregmac wrote: post #422

kuschku wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you’re willing to run a bouncer (and an organisation could run one for all their users), there are usable mobile clients with synchronization between devices, persistence, user status and even profile images. For example my app https://quasseldroid.info/ which requires you to run the https://quassel-irc.org/ bouncer, but provides all that. As well as IRCCloud and Weechat-Android, which are also very awesom…

This is kind of my point though, especially for a company: this is kind of a pain to setup for technical users that want to get the functionality. It's basically a complete barrier for the types of users who still primarily use e-mail, phone calls and in-person meetings.

[deleted]

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

#437

Post by cyphar » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

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…

Matrix.org is really doing a good job of being a Slack replacement (it even has Slack and IRC bridges). It's also federated and has a bunch of other nice features (like e2e which is based on Signal's crypto with some improvements for group chats). I would suggest taking a look (and I would suggest that people start switching to it).

Honestly, at this point, I can't really tell the difference between Slack and most "Slack clones" -- the interface of Slack has basically been copied by most people and to be honest it really wasn't that hard. Mattermost and Rocket.chat both look exactly like Slack to me.

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

#438

Post by igolden » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #265

What a great reason to switch to an open-source, self-hosted solution. Fortunately there exist several: http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ https://rocket.chat/ https://mattermost.com/ https://zulipchat.com/

mattermost is awesome, and super easy to get up and running. +1 for them

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

#439

Post by dahart » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #423

dahart wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, you are not legally entitled to shut down accounts on the basis of race or national origin, if that’s what they’re doing. That’s not what the parent comment said, you’re twisting it with an assumption. Slack is not legally obligated to provide Slack accounts to anyone, that was the point. > they may have to at least return the data: if I let you use a desk at my place and you start doing business there, I am pr…

> Slack is not legally obligated to provide Slack accounts to anyone, that was the point. And this point is untrue. As long as Slack provides accounts to the general public, they are required by law not to discriminate when doing so on the basis of race or national origin. They can stop serving everyone . They can firewall access from Iran, or identify actual persons covered by the sanctions. But they are legally obl…

> terms of service don't override law.

Correct, agreed!

> As long as Slack provides accounts to the general public

Slack does not provide accounts to the general public, in any legal sense. Slack is a private business, not a public service. Please read the terms of service to understand the terminology.

> they are required by law to not discriminate

Well, they are required by law to discriminate against traffic to Iran.

But, again, you've twisted my meaning to make your own separate point. I wasn't talking about discrimination. Slack is not compelled by law to provide accounts to someone. They can legally refuse service to someone who lives in Iran, or connects to Slack from servers located in Iran.

> But they are legally obligated to serve Iranians as much as they serve anyone else.

That statement is true in the sense that Slack is under no legal obligation to provide their service to anyone, outside of the agreement they created. That is separate from and irrelevant to whether or not they're allowed to discriminate against the people Slack agrees to provide service to, under their terms of service contract.

> they are required by law not to discriminate

BTW, what law are you talking about specifically? I'm aware of civil rights for US citizens, and anti-discrimination employment law in the US, but not of a specific law that bars online discrimination. I personally believe discrimination online would be wrong and bad, but are you certain that it's illegal?

Keep in mind we're talking about someone in Canada connecting to a US service, with a plausible decent chance that he connected from Iran or through an Iran server and just forgot about it. I'm not aware of specific US anti-discrimination or civil rights laws that would protect Amir in this case.

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

#440

Post by onetimemanytime » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

Internal communication: "Hi John, We need to ban users from Iran, NK, Cuba, Syria or else we'll be ruined by Treasury Department.*

Not a conspiracy, IMO, just taking shortcuts to be "better safe than sorry." So what a few thousand users are incorrectly banned? We'll restore many of them one by one but at least we'll be fine with the US Gov. Plus, depends on what the government says "users" mean. If you used Slack in Iran...what's Slack to do?