An Apology and an Update • Hacker News Board

Re: An Apology and an Update

#141

Post by Gibbon1 » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 8:43 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #22

> We will soon begin blocking access to our service from IP addresses associated with an embargoed country. Users who travel to a sanctioned country may not be able to access Slack while they remain in that country. Is Slack legally required to do this? As long as they aren't knowingly accepting payment from these countries, shouldn't they be in the clear? How are other tech companies dealing with this? Does Google b…

> Is Slack legally required to do this?

No, the reason is Saudi Arabia told them to.

> The Crown Prince also invested $45 billion into a SoftBank subsidiary, the Vision Fund, which made subsequent investments in a number of US tech companies. The Vision Fund made significant investments into Slack, DoorDash, and Nvidia. Slack declined to comment and DoorDash did respond to a request for comment as of publication.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#142

Post by dang » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 8:45 AM UTC

fogetti wrote: post #117

briandear wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Much of Silicon Valley consists of foreigners, yet they didn’t block those users — a significant part of their user base ; thus the theory of ethnic or nationality blocking makes zero logical sense.

No. It's the exact opposite. The fact that Californian IP-s were not targeted makes it pretty clear that US nationals were not targeted. While other nationals were. And it also proves that Slack engineers are dumb as f@ck.

This comment breaks the site guidelines. We ban accounts that keep doing that, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing that, we'd all appreciate it.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#143

Post by welly » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 8:49 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #72

azhenley wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my point. Unless the apology is of the type "it accidentally got deployed before we had the opportunity to test the change and communicate to users..." then they shouldn't have done it to begin with.

So you are saying we are never allowed to make mistakes?

I'm not sure you'll get a response as the OP probably can't hear you right up there on that high horse of theirs.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#144

Post by lmm » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 8:55 AM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #84

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?

IPv6 address space is less fragmented than IPv4 (that's part of the point), so inferring location from IPv6 address is if anything easier.

Addresses should correspond to network topology in order to be useful for, you know, routing. And network topology tends to correspond to physical location for practical engineering reasons. Of course there's no reason someone couldn't run a cable halfway around the world to use IP space in one country from a different one (or use a VPN, is what people do in practice), but realistically what would they gain from that?

Re: An Apology and an Update

#145

Post by qwertay » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 9:02 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #111

pyrophane wrote: post #11

This is yet another good reason to prefer decentralized networks. When Slack or Facebook or whomever agrees to block someone there is no resolution other than appealing to a company with a closed decision making process, something I don't think any of us really want.

This is especially scary with SSO systems. Google/Facebook blocks your account? Guess what else you can't log into.

Its interesting to imagine what would happen if google blocked you from captcha.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#146

Post by drawkbox » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 9:25 AM UTC

Sanctions and embargos are getting out of hand. Blanket, rather than targeted individual sanctions/actions, truly only harm the people of a country that have little to no say in what their government or country does.

As seen here, sanctions turn companies that provide services into poor customer service scenarios through forced compliance for what reason ultimately? All that does is make it harder to track since we now live in a surveillance society. What a waste of time and energy. We are living in an age of the abuse of economic sanctions, that ultimately harm the wrong people and make companies/products look bad.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#147

Post by kortilla » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 9:28 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #40

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…

>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.

This doesn’t really mean much by itself. These are elements of the BP apology for the gulf spill as well. The only thing that matters is actions taken. Anything else is fluff part of standard PR.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#148

Post by sandGorgon » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

qwertay wrote: post #118

sandGorgon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modular.im is their hosted product. Much cheaper than slack as well.

I thought it was kind of expensive at first but then I saw the price of slack. ~$1.50/user/month seems very fair when you see what slack and email cost per user

the new redesigned UI is at https://riot.im/experimental/

you can participate in the discussion at https://riot.im/experimental/#/room/#modular:matrix.org to understand more if you want.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#149

Post by kortilla » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #146

Sanctions and embargos are getting out of hand. Blanket, rather than targeted individual sanctions/actions, truly only harm the people of a country that have little to no say in what their government or country does. As seen here, sanctions turn companies that provide services into poor customer service scenarios through forced compliance for what reason ultimately? All that does is make it harder to track since we n…

>Truly they only harm the people of a country that have little to no say in what their government or country does.

That’s the whole point. It’s not an unintended side effect. You’re targeting an entire country’s economy to pressure the government regardless of whether or not it’s elected.

Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of embargoes.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#150

Post by function_seven » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #144

function_seven wrote: post #84

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?

IPv6 address space is less fragmented than IPv4 (that's part of the point), so inferring location from IPv6 address is if anything easier. Addresses should correspond to network topology in order to be useful for, you know, routing. And network topology tends to correspond to physical location for practical engineering reasons. Of course there's no reason someone couldn't run a cable halfway around the world to use I…

Thanks. I had some fuzzy idea backwards in my mind: that part of the reason IP blocks are correlated to location had to do with address space constraints.

But that’s wrong. Having a massive address space makes it trivial to keep routable blocks contiguous no matter how many IPs they contain.