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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

#581

Post by SamWhited »

winrid wrote: post #479
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…

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 had the opposite experience; at my last job (a medium sized tech company that you've heard of and probably use tangentially on a daily basis) they wouldn't hear of using anything cloud based because then someone else could potentially leak their data.

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

#582

Post by SamWhited »

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.

What protocol does Mattermost use? I was under the impression that it was XMPP, but I can't find anything that says that now that I'm glancing at it. Did they invent their own as well?

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

#584

Post by TimWolla »

cmurf wrote: post #459
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…

What about mtproto (which is what Telegram is using)?

Google for "Telegram Security" or "Telegram Moxie" to see why Telegram / mtproto might not be the best choice. This is repeatedly the topic on Hacker News as well.

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

#585

Post by Zopieux »

mfer wrote: post #401
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.

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.

And yet some people are wondering why GDPR has a data retention policy that aims at keeping personal data around for the least amount of time necessary.

Companies should be made accountable for such blatant abuse of user data.

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

#586

Post by gsich »

wpietri wrote: post #336
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…

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…

>They started out with IRC and XMPP bridges. But they eventually shut those down because they were a drag on improving the product.

No. They shut it down because they want people to use their (crappy) UI.

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

#587

Post by gsich »

sotojuan wrote: post #564
u801e wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have to be a developer but you do need a level of technical background higher than that of the average computer user. Unless the technical skill of the average computer user has decreased substantially in the last 10 to 15 years, that shouldn't really be the case.

It has. Everyone uses computers now for less technical tasks, and some pretty much only use their phone or tablet.

Time to learn something then.

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

#588

Post by kaveh_h »

nradov wrote: post #560
TeMPOraL wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How exactly would that work?

Tor, bittorrent, bitcoin and other decentrialized open source software are great examples. No government can control what no one controls.

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

#589

Post by rhizome »

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'd agree that it's possible there are some discoverability issues, but i don't see where '/server irc.(efnet|freenode|etc.)' is bordering on impossible.

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

#590

Post by ummonk »

theamk wrote: post #569
ptman wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix.org foundation is being founded. It has taken some time, but is quite close already: https://matrix.org/blog/2018/10/29/introducing-the-matrix-or... The Matrix developers are familiar with XMPP, and have it covered in their FAQ: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq#what-is-the-difference-be...

> Matrix can be thought of as an eventually consistent global JSON db with an HTTP API and pubsub semantics - whilst XMPP can be thought of as a message passing protocol. Finally someone gets it! A chat service should value each message and it should never lose messages due to connectivity problems. Thank you for sharing that link, I learned something new today.

Yeah, I’m normally not a fan of creating a new protocol and further contributing to fragmentation of open source effort, but in this case matrix.org fills a technical need that old protocols like irc and xmpp simply weren’t up to the task for.
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