Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by floatingatoll » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 1:27 AM UTC

sonnyblarney wrote: post #324

xenophonf wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's perfectly legal for your wife, a Canadian, to go to Cuba, it's still embargoed by the U.S., and Slack as a U.S. company must comply with the embargo (even though your wife has done nothing wrong per Canadian law).

That's a good point except that Slack shouldn't be banning people that are not violating sanctions. In this case, if the account was actually opened from Cuba ... that could be a problem. What they should do is offer recourse and a way to have this resolved.

They did offer an appeals process, but that can be safely assumed not to be a process for appealing the US law and their interpretation of it — it’s much more likely a process for appealing technical errors committed by accident during bulk work, such as “you identified my IP as Cuba when it’s Florida” or “I was hacked and we discussed that back then, please recheck your logs excluding the hacker’s activity”.

So they are absolutely offering recourse and resolution, but only where it is in their power to do so.

TLDR: Don’t expect Slack to be responsive to arguments that contain “please ignore US law for my individual circumstances”.

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

#592

Post by swozey » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 1:46 AM UTC

bjoli wrote: post #424

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 am starting to become scared that my accounts with different companies will be closed retroactively. I have, through work, toured most of the free and some parts of the non-free world (including Iran, Cuba and sudan). That apparently makes me fair game to have my US accounts closed. Had I been a slack user I, by the look of it, probably would have had my account closed today, even though I have lived within the EU…

I worked in webhosting forever and I've never heard of a company until this post actively digging through a users access to services to block them. What we'd do is use products like Maxmind where if you tried to sign up and pay from Iran, etc, you'd be automatically denied. I've never, ever heard of audits to SSH logs to track this stuff down. We'd audit ssh logs if there was a server that was hacked, etc, usually to see if they hacked other servers so we could take them all down at once or find out (they'd often have irc running) what groups they were in to get more info on how they did it, etc.

This is absolutely ridiculous. I've opened up Slack while in Cuba to check on work things at my American company who does no business there. I don't have anything to do with our Slack bill and I'm a US citizen. So if someone goes to see their family in Iran/etc and just happens to open Slack they'll get banned? That's hamfisted as all hell.

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

#593

Post by zachguo » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 2:56 AM UTC

jeswin wrote: post #74

As an outsider, I am really surprised by how deep-rooted America's hostility is towards Iran. Shi'ite Iran certainly has human rights issues, but as far as terrorism is concerned the majority of them are orchestrated by Sunni groups. 9/11 hijackers, Al Queda, Islamic State, Paris attackers - are all Sunni.

You know, Iran is selling oil to countries without using US dollars.

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

#594

Post by alexlavrww » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

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.

Slack could just block access to IPs from banned countries. Why are they retroactively blocking accounts? Sounds like Slack is punishing regular people who visited those countries.

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

#595

Post by kalleboo » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 3:57 AM UTC

sneakernets wrote: post #490

kalleboo wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my middle school (late 90's, the age of ICQ) all the self-described "non-technical" girls spent their breaks on mIRC in the computer lab gossiping or whatever teenage girls do. If we're talking about a developer audience (the readers of Hacker News) it really isn't difficult at all.

Are you sure that wasn't just AIM? AIM couldn't be port blocked like IRC. Most all schools had already blocked those ports.

It was definitely IRC. As boys who had a prerogative to tease girls, we installed NetNanny to block launching mIRC (and then the trial period expired and the school computers got infested with registration reminders...). AIM had zero mindshare in Europe at the time, it was all ICQ and later MSN.

Our school had nothing blocked, and the computers weren't locked down at all.

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

#596

Post by pseudalopex » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 5:14 AM UTC

zanny wrote: post #480

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…

I could count the number of good, modern, high featured XMPP and IRC clients on one hand. At least compared to their proprietary counterparts. Matrix has at least as many either mature (Fractal, Riot) or up and coming clients as I'd consider usable with anything else, and it has bridges into all that legacy, something I have never seen IRC or XMPP manage well. If you have legitimate grievances with the protocol and f…

Riot is the only client Matrix.org calls stable.[1] I would not call the desktop version good. The only third-party clients that are close to complete are Nheko (which has been abandoned) and FluffyChat (which is for Ubuntu Touch).[2][3]

There are no stable servers.[1] The reference server is being completely rewritten.

Matrix bridges work about as well as XMPP bridges in my experience.

[1] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now

[2] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix

[3] https://github.com/mujx/nheko

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

#597

Post by jackvalentine » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 5:20 AM UTC

gsich wrote: post #587

sotojuan wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure... they learned Slack.

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

#598

Post by mirimir » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 5:56 AM UTC

vertexFarm wrote: post #518

mirimir wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Some of us don't particularly want the "herd". The Internet was a better place before Eternal September. And it arguably would have become a far better place, without commercialization.

Maybe those "powerful actors" could prevent decentralization from becoming mainstream, but they can't kill it. Consider marijuana, for example. Use has been demonized for decades by the US and its allies. But that didn't stop an appreciable fraction of the US population from using (or at least, trying). And now it's becoming legal in more and more states.

For Internet decentralization, the driving factors will almost certainly be porn, gambling and prostitution. To the extent that they're driven off the clearnet, demand for them will fuel growth of alternatives. Freedom of expression is essential, of course, but it will be just a side benefit.

The more decentralization is suppressed by "powerful actors", the more it will be dominated by other "powerful actors". That is, by organized crime.

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

#599

Post by mirimir » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 6:06 AM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #420

mirimir wrote: post #190

So is this really an accurate title? It seems most likely that Slack has geolocated IP addresses from account access logs, and closed accounts with hits from sanctioned countries. Perhaps going back years. That in itself seems over the top. But it doesn't constitute ethnic profiling. But if someone has a counterexample, that would be OK too.

That's a plausible inference, but the effect to anyone not equipped to make such an inference is that it's ethnic profiling. A geeky inference isn't a good excuse. An ethical lapse is what it looks like. Nobody has a duty to make excuses on Slack's behalf when Slack could just explain themselves in public and to the people affected.

The title made sense in the context of Iranians being banned. But once we know that it's a far broader issue, it's misleading and inflammatory.

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

#600

Post by pseudalopex » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 6:21 AM UTC

blancNoir wrote: post #559

SamWhited wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Wire developed and funded? This was my biggest problem with Matrix (unsustainable funding model for the protocol and no proper standards body). Why not just use XMPP? Yes, everyone hates XML, but the protocol is well designed, has sustainable funding (via the IETF and XSF), and there's lots of experience out there, and it's flexible enough to develop services like Slack on top of.

Here's what Moxie Marlinspike has to say about the drawbacks of XMPP. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ "XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a “living standard.” Despite its capacity for protocol “extensions,” however, it’s undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can’t realistically be deployed on mo…

He wrote that after most messaging had already moved to proprietary networks. That happened primarily because Facebook and Google wanted to lock in users. The most popular desktop clients were multi-protocol clients that were slowly neglected. The most popular mobile clients were hobby projects.

Now we have uncertainty around which networks people use, which devices they use them on, and which features each network supports.