Use a VPN? We Americans have to use them to get around dumb laws and help protect our privacy, too. There is almost always a digital solution to digital problems. Bypass them.
Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
471–480 of 638 posts
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#472Earlier 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…
Can you give precise examples of the problems? As someone who tried to use XMPP in the past, I found it to be far worse than IRC in terms of connectivity and how things worked. Matrix.org couldn't really have used IRC as a protocol because IRC isn't a very extensible protocol. I've been using Matrix.org for several years now, and it's much better than my experiences with IRC and XMPP (though IRC is still quite usable, and I do still use it regularly).
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Exactly. Assuming ethnic discrimination seems pretty unwarranted.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#474Earlier 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.
It's been a while since I've used IRC daily, but I think I remember the basics...
Doesn't IRC file sharing involve directly connecting to individual users to transfer the file, instead of those users choosing to download it at their leisure? And if you happened to be offline at the moment the user shared the file, can't you never download it unless you ask them to resend? For large, asynchronous groups, that is untenable. Slack's file sharing works because Slack hosts the file.
Also, basic messaging features are indeed missing from IRC. How do you do a private group chat? Like an SMS group thread? Doesn't it only support channels and then individual 1:1 DMs? Slack has ad-hoc group DMs. On IRC you'd have to make a new channel every time. It's like getting a conference room every time you want to talk to more than one person at once.
Slack also does voice and video calls, and screen sharing, and it's really quite good at it (feels light, not bloated). Sometimes talking with someone needs to turn into a face-to-face call.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#475This is really concerning. Slack is starting to worry us like FB has continued to do. The good news is there are alternative services that I see that can do most, if not all of what Slack does with better security, privacy, and performance.
I’m getting fed up with paying for a bloated Electron app with nice colors and now improved with tracking of it’s users.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#476Earlier 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 $6.67/user/mo and you're right back where you started, but if you're an IRC user looking for history/synchronization across devices, image previews, a mobile client, and drag-and-drop image sharing, irccloud is IMO totally worth it.
Slack is free for users in FOSS communities. So they beat IRCCloud by 5$. Why would people with a question pay those to get into your community?
I hate Slack for open communities as much as the next person, but IRC or fixes on top of it aren't really the solution.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#477Earlier 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?
Not a great analogy since you normally can't shop at an American grocery store from Cuba, but you can use an American web site from there.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've heard Matrix might be a good IRC replacement. But it also still looks rough to me. I only tried it once, but didn't continue as I didn't need it for anything.
Matrix is terrible in as it is purely focused on building a protocol. Everything else is underserved. People are into Chats because of the clients.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#479I'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…
Try to propose running your own chat server at any medium to large company. No VP of engineering or CTO wants to worry about that and the possible security risks. If Slack messes up they can blame Slack but if you mess up and expose some Healthcare data to the outside world because of your chat server they are screwed.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#480Earlier 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…
I could count the number of good, modern, high featured XMPP and IRC clients on one hand. At least compared to their proprietary counterparts. Matrix has at least as many either mature (Fractal, Riot) or up and coming clients as I'd consider usable with anything else, and it has bridges into all that legacy, something I have never seen IRC or XMPP manage well.
If you have legitimate grievances with the protocol and feel you can see flaws in it, make an issue on the tracker now while its still a 0.x release, doesn't have the broad adoption you describe, and while the team (knowingly) can make breaking changes simultaneously released to matrix.org and riot.im and cover 95% of the users still.