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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

#451

Post by wil421 »

gingerlime wrote: post #256
wil421 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just said you didn’t know and now all of the sudden you do? It seems the harder restrictions were lifted in 2014 in the EU due to member state disputes.

I said that I'm not sure, but that I doubt it. I then spent some time checking, and couldn't find anything to support your claim. If you have any sources that EU countries are forbidden from employing "normal" Syrian people (now or even before 2014), I'd love to see them. Otherwise, it really feels like you're just trolling to be honest.

Yes I am wrong and will admit it. Certainly not a troll!

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

#452

Post by starbeast »

user5994461 wrote: post #402
Juliate wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The value of that intangible asset is called 'goodwill' and the market gives it a value. Worldcom had to slash around $80 billion dollars in lost 'goodwill'.

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

#453

Post by yamazaki »

thumb wrote: post #318
xenophonf wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's perfectly legal for your wife, a Canadian, to go to Cuba, it's still embargoed by the U.S., and Slack as a U.S. company must comply with the embargo (even though your wife has done nothing wrong per Canadian law).

That's true, but why does that mean they need to shut down her account just because she visited Cuba? Would that mean a grocery store would then have to refuse to sell you their goods because you visited the country once?

They didn't shut down their account because she visited Cuba, but because her account was created _from_ Cuba. It's unfortunate but I guess it's the only way Slack has to "know" where an account is from.

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

#454

Post by SSLy »

SamWhited wrote: post #448
cyphar wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "S…

Matrix.org's problem was that they reinvented the wheel (again) WRT the protocol. Now you have a protocol that if the main company goes under, probably can't be developed further and doesn't already have wide adoption and lots of clients written for it (as is the case of IRC/XMPP). HipChat had a better model here where they used XMPP (admittedly, in the worst way possible and completely misunderstood and broke the pr…

What are your pain points with the matrix proto?

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

#455

Post by msla »

jstanley wrote: post #58
InGodsName wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Country is made up of its citizens. If a country does smth, citizens are punished. This has been case throughout the history. Alexander took the losing kingdom's citizen as slaves and American bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, again the citizens of Japan who were living there.

So when were the citizens of the US punished for their government bombing Japan? EDIT: Also, in a different comment in this thread, you claim to be Iranian. Why are you defending sanctions against the country that you are from?

> So when were the citizens of the US punished for their government bombing Japan?

About the same time as Japanese citizens were punished for the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, and the Korean Comfort Women.

Besides, since when is it appropriate to "punish" a country for winning a war in which it was aggressed against?

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

#456

Post by kalleboo »

black-tea wrote: post #430
wpietri wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> IRC was always a terrible experience for novices Who the hell cares? I figured out IRC when I was about 12 and I'm no genius. If that bar is too high for people in tech then we have serious problems.

In my middle school (late 90's, the age of ICQ) all the self-described "non-technical" girls spent their breaks on mIRC in the computer lab gossiping or whatever teenage girls do. If we're talking about a developer audience (the readers of Hacker News) it really isn't difficult at all.

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

#457

Post by SamWhited »

walterbell wrote: post #346
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…

An effort is underway to standardize E2E encrypted group messaging in the IETF with the MLS [1] protocol. Open-source participants include Wire and Matrix. Commercial participants include Facebook, Cisco, Google and Apple. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/ Wire is open-source today and usable by regular people, with E2E encryption and email-only accounts.

How is Wire developed and funded? This was my biggest problem with Matrix (unsustainable funding model for the protocol and no proper standards body).

Why not just use XMPP? Yes, everyone hates XML, but the protocol is well designed, has sustainable funding (via the IETF and XSF), and there's lots of experience out there, and it's flexible enough to develop services like Slack on top of.

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

#458

Post by yamazaki »

chisleu wrote: post #356
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…

Did he visit Iran and forget to uninstall Slack before he went?

It's not about visiting a country, it's about where your Slack account was created. If you created your Slack account from an embargoed country, regardless of your citizenship or ethnicity, they will probably disable it.

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

#459

Post by cmurf »

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…

What about mtproto (which is what Telegram is using)?

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

#460

Post by taude »

taude wrote: post #447

Without spending a lot of time on this, I don't believe that Slack just used ethnicity to ban this account. Could the OP have been using VPNs or something that led Slack to believe his IPs were coming from IRAN? I don't see Slack doing anything differently, and all this "outrage" seems to be unfounded at this point. Edit: one thought, hopefully they can open a new Slack account with IPs originating in Canada and Slac…

Not sure why the downvotes? It's pretty obvious there's a lot of jumping to conclusions in the first 10 comments (that's all I read) on that Twitter thread, basically implying that Slack is using ethnicity to close the account and not something more technical like an IP address that was tied to Iran at one point in time.

It seems from reading other comments that this Slack team was created when he was in Iran from an Iranian IP. And they used originating IP when the team was created and not access to determine. We can debate the proper technical solution to base the rule when you apply it across your SaaS-based application at world-scale, but implying that Slack did this on race is pretty absurd at this point.

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