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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

#511

Post by kakwa_ »

adventured wrote: post #306
kakwa_ wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frankly never quite understood the extremely high stance against Iran. Iran has not really stage any offensive wars since 1856 (and most of the XIXe century wars were in fact to recover/maintain control over the Persian Empire which was slowly eaten by the Russian and the UK). Since 1940, Iran was constantly meddled with by foreign powers, first being invaded during the WW2 by the Allies and the Soviets, with the S…

> Then the democratically elected Mosaddegh was deposed Mossadegh was not democratically elected. He was appointed by a dictator. The only part of that process that was even slightly democratic, was indirectly via Majlis vote. The people of Iran never specifically elected Mossadegh. > No wonders Iran government stance can be a bit tense at time and that they want the Bomb to be at peace. How does being at peace squar…

Sorry for the inaccuracy about Mossadegh.

I do agree that the successive Iranian governments and the Iranian regime is far from a saint in this story, specially since the Islamic revolution.

Calling Israel a "cancer" or a "little satan" (with the US as the "great satan") is an atrocious way to do diplomacy...

The Iran hostage crisis was a really bad starting move. with long lasting consequences.

Iran is also quite active militarily, but the goal is more to maintain security at its border (Iraq), or maintain the few allies it has in the region (Syria, Lebanon). There are reasons behind these adventures, even if that doesn't excuse them.

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

#512

Post by doublepg23 »

ryandrake wrote: post #363
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…

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…

As a tech guy, history is the biggest complaint. riot.im is great in this respect because I get IRC (with history!) and a great UI.

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

#513

Post by MeltySmelty »

castis wrote: post #46
jstanley wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning people because of the country they were born in is not "smart", it's abhorrent. That the US, supposedly the leader of the free world, is threatening prosecution and jail to those who want to treat everyone in the world equally, is a ludicrous state of affairs.

The US hasn't been the leader for a while now. I dont see it getting that title back for a long time.

We don't want to be the leader of anything. We're doing just fine, keep the trash out of this country. Europe will be re-entering the crusades while we're living the dream.

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

#514

Post by munk-a »

paulddraper wrote: post #368
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…

Access to history and search Google SSO/SAML Threads But mostly access to history and search. (Note that it's not coincidence that this is what differentiates the free from paid Slack.)

Threads have been super useful for us, we have a few channels that are forums by social agreement where long running discussions are recorded to make it easy to reference. We found this style to be easier to review then breaking off separate channels per topic and we generally use it for initial feature exploration. Once something moves into the category of "We're doing this" we split off a channel and isolate the discussion.

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

#515

Post by vertexFarm »

jstanley wrote: post #188
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 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.

Controversial opinion incoming: decentralization isn't going to be a silver bullet that fundamentally solves anything. These services are still going to depend on large amounts of expensive hardware and infrastructure that must exist in the real world, much like cryptocurrency. That hardware is still vulnerable to control and influence from strong corporate or state actors, so the decentralized stuff running on them is always going to be under influence as well. Even with strong crypto, methods to manipulate it either directly or through side channels will be developed. It's absolutely inevitable. Somebody controls the power plants generating and pricing all that electricity, somebody owns the internet backbone hardware, somebody can afford a much higher hashrate, somebody controls tech legistlation, and somebody is on the bleeding edge of cyber-warfare with a DOD budget. Sure, some of the hardware will be in private ownership, but not the majority. If it ever becomes widespread enough to be of great significance, traditional power structures will absolutely contrive a way to seize it.

What this all really does in the end is create a technical caste system and obfuscation of ownership. People fortunate enough to have access and be up to speed on the latest technology (or hire people who are) will reap the rewards of decentralized systems which still belong to authoritarian actors, yet it will be extremely difficult to prove that ownership--especially to laymen. It will always have a nice hazy deniability, and it will be almost impossible to hold anyone accountable for their actions, or prevent or even identify exploitation.

This is absolutely the future of the web. Perpetual and stealthy non-neutral manipulation by the technically advanced and financially powerful is here to stay. I think that as engineers our tunnel vision and intellectual hubris have given us a false sense of security as we developed this hideous system, because we thought it was some kind of purely digital realm where we have real control and real comprehension of what we are doing. But nothing is purely digital. Everything is built on top of the real, analogue world where strong actors have already divvied up and taken ownership of everything.

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

#516

Post by wpietri »

ekianjo wrote: post #394
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…

> admitting that Slack beat IRC. In which world does it beat IRC? Number of users? That's not even sure, since there are dozens of thousands of IRC servers worldwide. And that's not even counting the private, self-hosted IRC servers. IRC runs everywhere and does not need a fat browser or a RAM-and-CPU hungry application to enable "chat". As for the user experience, this would merit a whole post in itself, but Slack s…

> Number of users? That's not even sure

As far as I can tell, Slack has an order of magnitude more users. They were at 8m DAU back in May: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/slack-hits-8-million-daily...

IRC was in long-term decline even before Slack: https://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-i...

So my best guess is that Slack has at least an order of magnitude more users.

But users is not exactly the metric I'm thinking of. It's when people say, "We need some way for us to communicate," Slack is the popular option. Even though I'd rather not use it, I'm in 8 right now. If you look through this thread, you'll find plenty of people concerned about how prominent it is in the open-source world, IRC's home ground.

> IRC runs everywhere and does not need a fat browser or a RAM-and-CPU hungry application to enable "chat".

I get this in theory. But RAM and CPU power are fantastically cheap. Conserving them to get a worse user experience is optimizing for the wrong thing.

> but Slack sucks in many ways

Sure. There are no perfect things. But Slack doesn't have to be perfect. It just had to be better than the competition. And for most people it manifestly is.

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

#517

Post by rostasteve »

When a company gets large or important enough it realizes that it has to follow some inconvenient laws.

In the US there's OFAC (https://www.treasury.gov/about/organizational-structure/offi...) which lists individuals and entities that companies cannot do business with. Implementing these rules is a nightmare for companies so they use a 3rd party services which produce a huge number of false positives. Middle eastern names tend result in many false positives.

My guess is that Slack is scrambling to clean house ahead of the IPO and they don't have a user friendly way of dealing with this. In fact most companies don't. This is the same crap that bites people who inadvertently end up on no-fly lists with no way to get off.

Don't like this? Call your representative. Build a better way to implement OFAC and similar laws.

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

#518

Post by vertexFarm »

mirimir wrote: post #271
adminu wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until taking part in a decentralized system is a crime by itself due to potentially illegal content and your possession and distribution of that content. The distributed system does not stop to work then, but the user might risk punishment for using it, which might be even worse than not being able to use it.

When decentralized systems are illegal, only criminals will use them. Anonymously. And very likely, using your devices as botnet slaves. But pretty much, you get what you select for.

It will also drop the userbase below a useful threshold. Sure, there will be the technical possibility of still managing to use it illegally and undetected--but there will be no herd immunity, there will be no effects of scale that make the system particularly useful or affordable compared to proprietary, centralized, and more performant alternatives. People can and do still use bittorrent illegally, but it doesn't have even close to enough market share to make centralized streaming services nonexistent or non-competitive. Basically the same idea.

The fact that you can't decentralize legislation and physical governance is not insignificant. You can't block the influence of preexisting powerful actors. Those factors do have the power to destroy the decentralization movement, and most likely will.

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

#519

Post by munchbunny »

pjc50 wrote: post #169
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…

It's the dystopia of the film Brazil : someone makes a typo in a database, someone else's life is dramatically inconvenienced, and it's impossible for them to access any means of redress. > Is this just how the US ticks right now? Yes.

This is also the future of blind faith in a few companies that control substantial things you depend on personally/professionally. You don't really think about how much damage something like Slack (or god forbid, Google) could do to you by shutting down your account until something like this actually happens.

Add to that the dark side of being "data driven," which is that stories like this one are just part of the 1% of edge cases. These companies also try to move away from actual customer service as much as possible because human labor doesn't scale as well as automation, so you'll fall through the cracks as long as the news that it happened to you doesn't get enough press to make it worth an engineer's or VP's time.

I know that sounds extremely cynical, but having been on the inside in situations like this, I saw how these dynamics converged despite good intentions. Stuff like this is why sending engineers through front-line customer support rotations tends to dramatically motivate engineering teams to make quality of life improvements. Once you lose the detachment that indirection from the user gets you, suddenly those 1% cases feel more important.

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

#520

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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