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

531–540 of 638 posts

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

#531

Post by walterbell »

scruffyherder wrote: post #379
walterbell wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All the usual suspects. It'll die like the google chat thing(s).

Always possible. As a counter-precedent of success, https://www.opus-codec.org for WebRTC came from the IETF, Skype and others.

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

#533

Post by CPLX »

yamazaki wrote: post #467
dahart wrote: post #439

Earlier 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.

It’s not quite that simple. A case could be made that other variables are a proxy for race or national origin, and travel to specific countries is one of them.

Of course that argument has an opposing side as well, but it seems prima facie plausible as a cause of action.

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

#534

Post by matt_the_bass »

jstanley wrote: post #223
matt_the_bass wrote: post #155

FYI US export controls generally apply to nationals of an embargoed country even when they are outside of that country. Is the person in question an Iranian national or does slack have reason to believe? Then they are required to not provide their export controlled product, service or knowledge. The us government does not offer a “graceful” stoppage of service allowance. Yes this is annoying but probably not slacks f…

This is still Slack's fault as well. It's unethical to enforce unethical rules, even if the government tells you to.

I think it is Slacks fault for not being in compliance with export laws originally.

Their non-compliance is fact.

Whether or not you consider that law to be ethical is opinion.

I was not stating an opinion, merely stating fact. I was not trying to start a discussion of politics. I appologize if I was misunderstood.

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

#535

Post by toufiqbarhamov »

beobab wrote: post #349
eponeponepon wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice".

My dad used to say: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained with stupidity", but I love yours too.

“But don’t dismiss stupidity.” Is the ending of the better variation of that quote I think.

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

#536

Post by TeMPOraL »

jordank wrote: post #414
mfer wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, which should also indicate that this trip to Cuba wasn’t part of a pattern but rather an anomaly. I understand the complex legal frames that this exists in, but they appear to have the data to be way more precise here.

They may have the data, but they have no incentive to care whether or not their inferences are correct. This is a common problem with ostensibly data-driven companies.

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

#537

Post by avip »

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.

I've just opened all my slack workspaces from an IP Geolocated in Tehran to test that hypothesis. Let's see how it unfolds.

[EDIT] to be on the safe side, I've also created a new workspace from said IP.

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

#538

Post by TeMPOraL »

yamazaki wrote: post #453
thumb wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the laziest possible way. They could've looked at most frequent login IPs instead.

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

#539

Post by CPLX »

C4stor wrote: post #191
jimijazz wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. are there any Swiss technological developments? are there any other neutral countries?

Switzerland hosts, among other things, the EFPL, which does a great deal of technlogical achievement. The EFPL itself leads the Scala language development, among a lof of other stuff ! I'm not familiar with other countries as neutral as Switzerland which has a successful track record of staying neutral during two world wars on their borders, but I suspect there should be actually quite some. I _think_ that for exampl…

Costa Rica is another relevant example.

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

#540

Post by TeMPOraL »

nradov wrote: post #299
geofft wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put a finer point on it: open communications protocols driven by free software and end-to-end encryption both are and should be above the law, at least where the law purports to create national boundaries on the internet. Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are n…

That's a nice fantasy but the reality is that humans and computers still have to physically exist inside national boundaries. Flesh and steel still count for a lot.

That's why free/libre software advocates talk so frequently about technologies that could abstract flesh and steel away.
Post reply on HN