91–100 of 236 posts
> Users who travel to a sanctioned country may not be able to access Slack while they remain in that country. However, we will not deactivate their account and they will be able to access Slack when they return to countries or regions for which no blocking is required. So why ban any account? Why not just drop connections from IP addresses in embargoed countries?
How did they not block based on nationality when they literally blocked a nation?
For context, one of the original reports of this was from (I believe) an Iranian-American with US Citizenship living in the US: https://twitter.com/aaomidi/status/1075621119028314112 You might read that and infer that Slack is somehow tracking the national origin, ethnicity, or race of all of its users, which would be much fishier behavior than IP-based blocking. They're explicitly saying that they don't do that and…
But they did do it, so what does that mean...
I'm a big fan and critic of apologies. This one is pretty good. They admit the mistake was theirs and they take responsibility for it. They say sorry. They explain what they're going to do to fix the situation. They say they're going to learn from this and not have similar mistakes in the future. Pretty solid. The only thing that is missing, in my view, is personalization. Tell me who you are, speaking for the organi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Going to go ahead and throw Matrix/Riot out there as a great alternative.
I pretty much gave up on Matrix after the following exchange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8697151 Perhaps I am overreacting, but that sort of attitude on matters core to basic privacy in the post-Snowden era seems both problematic and incurable.
I'm a big fan and critic of apologies. This one is pretty good. They admit the mistake was theirs and they take responsibility for it. They say sorry. They explain what they're going to do to fix the situation. They say they're going to learn from this and not have similar mistakes in the future. Pretty solid. The only thing that is missing, in my view, is personalization. Tell me who you are, speaking for the organi…
>We did not block any user based on their nationality or ethnicity. Okay, so how did you block them? >As is standard in the enterprise software industry, Slack uses location information principally derived from IP addresses to implement these required blocks. So, you blocked users based on their nationality. >We do not collect, use, or possess any information about the nationality or ethnicity of our users. you clear…
> Users who travel to a sanctioned country may not be able to access Slack while they remain in that country. However, we will not deactivate their account and they will be able to access Slack when they return to countries or regions for which no blocking is required. So why ban any account? Why not just drop connections from IP addresses in embargoed countries?
That’s what they said they’re going to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they blocked users based on location. I'm currently located in California, and this has nothing to do with my nationality.
Expats comprise less than 1% of the global population, and I doubt the number of international tourists at any given time pushes that percentage much higher. Use a VPN I guess, or better yet ditch Slack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s what they said they’re going to do.
It remains unclear. From the blog post, it sounds like they banned a number of accounts, and now are manually unbanning some of them.
Does an IPv6 world prevent IP-based location sniffing? It seems odd to me that IPs can still be used to (semi-)reliably determine a client's geographical location. With the immensely larger address space that comes with IPv6, does that give the Internet a chance to completely sever the link between geography and IP address? Or do we still have issues with aggregating routes in a space-efficient way?
I don't think limited addresses was ever the reason for assigning in blocks but the real reason is it makes routing easier. Instead of having every router know the path to 128² addresses it only needs to know that everything starting with these few bytes goes to this port which saves memory on routers.
I'm a big fan and critic of apologies. This one is pretty good. They admit the mistake was theirs and they take responsibility for it. They say sorry. They explain what they're going to do to fix the situation. They say they're going to learn from this and not have similar mistakes in the future. Pretty solid. The only thing that is missing, in my view, is personalization. Tell me who you are, speaking for the organi…
It seemed insincere to me with the emoji-like slack logo at the end of their post. I know it's a standard practice for them but if they wanted to appear sincere they should have discontinued that practice.