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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

#501

Post by soheil »

eloff wrote: post #495
soheil wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s pretty much the point of sanctions, what did you think was going to happen, people of sanctioned countries getting a medal? The point is to put as much pressure on those countries as possible and there is no better way to pressure a country than to pressure its people to force a change. The question should be whether or not Iran should be sanctioned. But if you agree that it should then this is an example of a…

He's a Canadian student. How is this acceptable in any way?

The status of being a student does not expunge your status of being a citizen of your country of origin nor does it cut all your ties with said country. Part of sanctions is to pressure citizens of sanctioned countries in order for them to seek change in their governments.

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

#502

Post by def_true_false »

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.

I'm not sure why people keep saying this. If all you want is a web client, it doesn't get much easier than qwebirc: https://webchat.freenode.net/

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

#503

Post by vertexFarm »

soheil wrote: post #494
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…

That’s pretty much the point of sanctions, what did you think was going to happen, people of sanctioned countries getting a medal? The point is to put as much pressure on those countries as possible and there is no better way to pressure a country than to pressure its people to force a change. The question should be whether or not Iran should be sanctioned. But if you agree that it should then this is an example of a…

Wait, so sanctions against a country should affect all people who share the common ethnicity in that country regardless of citizenship status or location in the world? So essentially it's a sanction against an ethnic group, not a state. Are you sure that's a reasonable idea?

How did Slack figure out this guy's ethnicity / citizenship / status? Why are they allowed to access that information and unilaterally act on it? Sounds like there's a valid question being asked here to me.

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

#504

Post by 794CD01 »

AJ007 wrote: post #203
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know they're private companies and they _can_ do it, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. Actually, if you look at the image, Slack is beholden to US law, export regulations and economic sanctions - companies doing business with countries they shouldn't are in big trouble. See also: Huawei, who despite sanctions continued to do business with Iran, which caused the US to give them a huge fine. I don't…

This is another strong case for open source software development along with open, publicly available, standards and protocols. This isn't about Slack, it isn't about US sanctions law. It is about any private entity creating closed sourced, remotely hosted software. Everyone knows that APIs can be pulled at any time (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) Spying can be mandated whether it is the US government, China, or anyone else…

Buying and installing your own permanent elevators is too difficult and expensive. Think of what happens in 25 years when they need to be replaced. You'd be a fool not to pay a monthly fee for elevators-as-a-service.

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

#505

Post by joncrane »

eigenspace wrote: post #450
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/

Has anyone here used any of these? I'd love to hear your thoughts vs Slack.

Mattermost is the only one I've used and it's both easy to administer and works great.

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

#506

Post by dragonwriter »

mirimir wrote: post #355
kitd wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if what you say is technically true, Slack appear to have interpreted that as saying that they can't do business with anyone who as ever in the past opened up the Slack app in a designated country, whatever their nationality and/or reason for being there. At the very least, that is a shoddy algorithm.

> ... who as ever in the past opened up the Slack app in a designated country ... But they don't know that. They have IP addresses. And they do geolocation. But IP-based geolocation isn't reliable enough for that.

> But they don't know that.

They have information from which they conclude that; this information is fallible and conclusions are not certain, but that's true of virtually all “knowledge” about the material world.

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

#507

Post by nemothekid »

adriand wrote: post #378
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…

I think as ethical, intelligent and conscious individuals, we folks in the developer and hacker community want people to make decisions on the basis of principles, when the reality is that people generally make decisions on the basis of convenience. In fact, people are often willing to sacrifice their principles (to a certain extent) in the name of convenience. If we want people to use principled technology, then we…

If we want people to use principled technology, it has to be usable, full stop. As a developer, being able to say "I'm willing to sacrifice convenience, in the name of principle", is a privileged position - you know how to navigate software when it gets difficult - other people don't.

What I find a lot of people miss when comparing Slack to IRC, is that not everyone using Slack is a developer. The world doesn't consist solely of developers - and if your company is 30% of engineers, and the other 70% doesn't have the reserve to wrestle with XML, then your company is using Slack. Otherwise, you are simply choosing to sell out your friends and family in the name of "principle" as well.

Personally, I'm tired of the comparisons to IRC and XMPP. Both are garbage - time and time again its been show how difficult it is to create greate software on these protocols. Contrary to your final statement, there have been better open source applications - gitter and riot come to mind.

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

#508

Post by soheil »

vertexFarm wrote: post #503
soheil wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s pretty much the point of sanctions, what did you think was going to happen, people of sanctioned countries getting a medal? The point is to put as much pressure on those countries as possible and there is no better way to pressure a country than to pressure its people to force a change. The question should be whether or not Iran should be sanctioned. But if you agree that it should then this is an example of a…

Wait, so sanctions against a country should affect all people who share the common ethnicity in that country regardless of citizenship status or location in the world? So essentially it's a sanction against an ethnic group, not a state. Are you sure that's a reasonable idea? How did Slack figure out this guy's ethnicity / citizenship / status? Why are they allowed to access that information and unilaterally act on it…

That's a question for Slack how they found out and that is a great question, but there seems to be much conflation of that question with justification of sanctions in the first place, which I wanted to address. It's a question of nationality and citizenship if Slack determined one of those to be the case then they simply followed the regulations set forth by the sanctions.

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

#509

Post by bborud »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #310
bborud wrote: post #224

I think this highlights the precarious situation most people find themselves in today when it comes to communication channels and data that is being stored in the cloud. We tend to assume that we have rights and that wrongs will eventually be righted. But in practical reality this isn't necessarily true. Speaking of which, are there any open source alternatives to Slack which anyone could recommend?

Zulip chat is open source, free, can be self hosted and there is no limit on the number of chat messages. Zulip even has a usable mobile client and a healthy user community. Their support is excellent. Also Zulip has proper threading of messages to avoid notification fatigue. Much better workflow even it's otherwise almost identical in terms of features. There is also matrix (riot.im) which is fully decentralized tho…

After some searching I discovered https://mattermost.com/. Anyone have experience with this?

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

#510

Post by wpietri »

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.

Yes, this attitude is a clear part of why Slack crushed IRC. "It was easy for me, therefore anybody who finds it hard is dumb and we can ignore them."

I too figured out all sorts of computer things at 12. By standardized tests, I'm also in the top 1% of ability for things like that. And my dad was a programmer then, so I had a leg up.

At some point, I realized I had a choice. I could feel smug about my (narrow) genius and focus on tools for my (narrow) cohort. While grumping, of course, about how stupid everybody else was. Or I could recognize my luck and use it to make things that were good for everybody.

You know what helped me make this choice? Realizing how bad I was at so many other things. And how generous other people were in not only putting up with that, but helping me along.

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