Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 638 posts

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

#461

Post by SamWhited »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #333
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…

This is a software space that could really use more devs. IRC is fine but many people can't use it because it's too technical. We need more user friendly XMPP clients with features that non-technical people want. I hate Skype but damn if the non-techies I work with don't love it. I tried to download and run Jitsi a couple months ago for a project and it's voice quality was terrible. Skype just works. I sometimes have…

WRT XMPP clients: Dino.im is getting there (although it's still too early and buggy to say it's there yet, I think). I'm still not aware of any decent web clients though, unfortunately. The ones that do exist tend to be developed by individuals and full of security issues, even if they are nice looking and easy to use.

I tend to think that we don't need more small community projects, we need one or two entire services like Slack to build themselves on the base protocols and federate. Even if they only allowed their own clients so that they controlled the entire experience, if they just federated with other servers it would give users a choice and largely solve the Slack problem.

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

#462

Post by tzs »

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.

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

Or they did an IP to country lookup back then and kept the result of that rather than keeping the IP.

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

#463

Post by kuschku »

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.

I agree — the current usability is still very suboptimal, and we need to work on it a lot. But compared to where we’ve been a few years ago, it’s already gotten better.

I wish I could do more, but in the end, I’m just a single developer improving the usability of a single app in my free time.

For open source non-centralized solutions to compete with the proprietary options, you need lots of devs and even more funding. Matrix/Riot.im has that, and even they aren’t close to where Slack is. Most of us IRC devs are either getting nothing, or, as e.g. in my case, the donations don’t even cover the server costs.

In the end, if people want open solutions to grow, they need to put their money where their mouth is.

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

#464

Post by irq-1 »

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.

> It is not a goal of this group to enable interoperability/federation between messaging applications beyond the key establishment, authentication, and confidentiality services. Full interoperability would require alignment at many different layers beyond security, e.g., standard message transport and application semantics. The focus of this work is to develop a messaging security layer that different applications can adapt to their own needs.

From your link.

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

#466

Post by geff82 »

By the way, I am currently investigating an issue were auto-upload of my holiday pictures in Iran to OneDrive is somehow not possible. All those pictures are location-tagged by my iPhone. Maybe it is just an coincidence with a bug, but it is strange. I am now in Germany (I am "pure" German), so in general it should work.

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

#467

Post by yamazaki »

dahart wrote: post #439
geofft wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ir…

Slack doesn't even know someone's race or ethnicity, thus can't discriminate against that. They are just disabling accounts based on the IP they were created from, which was the best they had to go by to abide the sanctions. This is for sure inexact and bound to have false positives though.

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

#468

Post by cbracken »

yamazaki wrote: post #458
chisleu wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He states that he created the account in Canada [1], though may have used it from Iran.

[1] https://twitter.com/a_h_a/status/1075691620081623041

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

#469

Post by icebraining »

saryant wrote: post #286
gaius wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR holds that you own your data and are entitled to be provided a download of it. Not sure what the Canadian equivalent is, if any.

Even if the GDPR applied in this situation, Slack is trying to obey US sanctions. I’d wager a guess GDPR can’t force a company to violate those laws.

Do the US sanctions prevent them from giving the user a copy of their data?

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

#470

Post by asl19dev »

OFAC's General License D-1 provides Slack with exemptions to offer their services even to users based in Iran:

(a) Effective February 7, 2014, to the extent that such transactions are not exempt from the prohibitions of the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. Part 560 ("ITSR"), and subject to the restrictions set forth in paragraph (b), the following transactions are authorized: (1) Fee-based services. The exportation or reexportation, directly or indirectly, from the United States or by a U.S. person, wherever located, to Iran of fee-based services incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Intemet, such as instant messaging, chat and email, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

Post reply on HN