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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

#541

Post by PascLeRasc »

simonsaidit wrote: post #525
winrid wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve seen exactly those reasons by those people in those size companies to explain why slack could not be allowed.

I've seen that too, but it's usually the same people who just reject anything hosted somewhere else with statements like "we're not doing airquotes The Cloud" and think all tech companies are conspiring against us.

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

#542

Post by mst »

SamWhited wrote: post #448
cyphar wrote: post #437

Earlier 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…

XMPP on mobile was always a disaster for data use and battery life - back when gtalk was still XMPP the mobile clients used a proprietary protocol to talk to a google server that unwrapped it into XMPP.

Pure-XMPP simply would not have worked.

(I have my issues with the matrix protocol, mind, but they had good reasons to create a protocol even so)

Edit: I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why facebook messenger switched from XMPP to a custom MQTT-based system.

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

#543

Post by clarry »

mgbmtl wrote: post #415
IshKebab wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if part of the reason we don't have any great open source Slack competitors (yes I know about Mattermost, Zulip, etc.) is that so many open source developers (or at least commenters here) seem to be under the illusion that IRC is a reasonable alternative to Slack.

What's wrong with Mattermost? We use it for our FOSS community (and I use another instance for our company), works well.

Just terrible UX in general, and a very bloated & power hungry client. Search is borderline useless, and it's difficult for me to find anything that was talked about a couple weeks ago (meanwhile I can easily grep IRC logs for things that were said years ago). People at work turned off mobile notifications because they sometimes work, but usually not when you want them to work. I wish we'd just switch to IRC.

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

#544

Post by davismwfl »

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…

They didn't figure out anyone's ethnicity, according to their press statement they banned all accounts which were accessed via Iranian IP's. While seemingly a little heavy handed IMO, they are trying to comply with US laws. They also provided a way for people to send an email to address their specific accounts if they feel they were terminated improperly.

Slack is protecting their multi-billion dollar business and their investors which are both based in the U.S. If they do not, they could run into trouble and put far more at risk. This does not only affect Iran, it affects other countries too which the U.S. has active sanctions against.

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

#545

Post by gdy »

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…

"there is no better way to pressure a country than to pressure its people to force a change"

So you would make people suffer and think that they would blame their own government for that and not the US?

Don't you think that makes you and your country evil?

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

#546

Post by clarry »

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.

I use mattermost at work. It's terrible. Coworkers don't seem particularly impressed with it either.

Can't compare it to Slack though, since I never used it.

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

#547

Post by bobbybroadcast »

This appears to be the state of play. User is accused of doing violating TOS and gets auto banned. No appeal, no recourse, no way of getting their info. Imagine kicked out of somewhere, like a hotel, based on an accusation and then not even being able to get your stuff. While property law allows us opportunity to have our possessions returned, requiring the other party to return it to us, in cases like these however, who owns the text messages, emails, photos? How can we retrieve them?

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

#548

Post by gdy »

davismwfl wrote: post #544
vertexFarm wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They didn't figure out anyone's ethnicity, according to their press statement they banned all accounts which were accessed via Iranian IP's. While seemingly a little heavy handed IMO, they are trying to comply with US laws. They also provided a way for people to send an email to address their specific accounts if they feel they were terminated improperly. Slack is protecting their multi-billion dollar business and th…

Which is a good argument for cutting down reliance on American companies.

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

#549

Post by SamWhited »

mst wrote: post #542
SamWhited wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

XMPP on mobile was always a disaster for data use and battery life - back when gtalk was still XMPP the mobile clients used a proprietary protocol to talk to a google server that unwrapped it into XMPP. Pure-XMPP simply would not have worked. (I have my issues with the matrix protocol, mind, but they had good reasons to create a protocol even so) Edit: I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why facebook messenger sw…

This is a myth (or one of those things that may have been true at one point but is now repeated as lore even though it was solved 15+ years ago); XMPP is actually pretty good on mobile. Between the persistent TLS connection which can let the radio go to sleep when no data is being sent (without the tail time of creating a new TCP connection constantly) and TLS style stream management it's very battery efficient when you're using a server that's optimized for mobile.

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

#550

Post by SamWhited »

cyphar wrote: post #472
SamWhited wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since multiple people asked this, I started a write up. I'll try to post it soon.
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