Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Apology and an Update

slackhq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 236 posts

Re: An Apology and an Update

#221

Post by mikenew »

xf86alsa wrote: post #220
mikenew wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one. I'm using it, it works, but it's a little buggy: https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix . I haven't been able to ignore my message app and trust the bridge 100% yet. I'm hoping to spend some of my christmas break contributing some work to the project. I agree, bridging SMS into a chat service that you can use from anywhere is a killer feature.

If you do make any updates, feel free to throw them into the This Week in Matrix room which may catch some more dev's attention! https://matrix.to/#/#twim:matrix.org

Awesome, will do!

Re: An Apology and an Update

#222

Post by dkersten »

mac01021 wrote: post #205
dkersten wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three of your possibilities imply that it was on purpose and understood to be wrong to begin with. What about if you made a mistake: you thought you were doing the right thing, but turns out it was the wrong thing. Or you thought what you are doing wouldn’t impact anybody negatively. Or you did the right thing but it didn’t work out the way you anticipated. Or it was an innocent and honest thing you did, but some…

Don't those all fall squarely under #2 (supposing the act won't bother anyone)?

I guess you’re right.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#223

Post by tedivm »

lazerwalker wrote: post #207
n_e wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2 days for people being locked out of their account, through no fault of their own, is a long time. In absolute terms yes. Compared to how for example google handles this it’s outstanding.

Most times Google has issues like that, it's for a free service, rather than something affecting paid customers, yeah?

When I was consulting I had a client whose google ads stopped working for six weeks. She was spending $500 a week in ads, but Google wouldn't do anything to fix or even acknowledge the issue.

I also had Google accuse me of "click fraud" on a website I ran in college- they stole about $300 from me, with no ability to appeal.

Google's support- even for paying customers- is abysmal.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#224

Post by meshr »

googamooga wrote: post #180

I wonder why Slack so cares about blocking poor Crimeans from its service and at the same time Visa and MasterCard are accepted freely in any town of Crimea. Why these payment schemes are allowed to work there despite the embargo?

Why do you think so? Visa and MasterCard are banned in Crimea. Visa and MasterCard can't track its holder location.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#226

Post by kortilla »

filleduchaos wrote: post #178
kortilla wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It takes a special kind of naivete to think that a country worth placing this sort of embargo on is a country where "pressuring the government" would lead to any tangible results. That or a special kind of callousness, because most often the only way the citizenry can effect change is through violent revolt after reaching the boiling point of poverty and/or oppression.

Damaging an economy pressures a government whether or not there is any kind of pressure from the citizenry. Governments need economies to run, especially ones depending on the military to “keep peace”.

It takes a special kind of naïveté to think governments run in a vacuum independent of the economy.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#227

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

mirimir wrote: post #203
daveFNbuck wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sanctions aren't about stopping people who are up to no good. They're supposed to hurt the country as a whole, which mostly means hurting the innocent. The idea is that this will incentivize the country to stop doing the thing it's being sanctioned for.

OK, so I know nothing about the legal context for sanction enforcement. But in the US, the standard of proof in criminal cases is something like "beyond a reasonable doubt". And even in civil cases, it's something like "preponderance of the evidence". In my experience with pollution torts, that typically meant >50% probability of causation. But it usually devolved into battles of experts, and Daubert challenges. I do…

Sanctions work like this:

One country decides "fuck that other country in particular", either alone by their power of sovereignty or together with some international body. The sanctioning country (say, the US) now declares economic sanctions against another country (say, Iran). Since the US can only directly make rules for citizens/entities within the US, they say "it is illegal for anyone to export goods or services to anyone in Iran - if your company does it, the company gets fined and the CEO goes to prison". They might also say "and if anyone else that I can't punish directly sells to Iran, I will prohibit my people from selling things to you!" to force others to also participate in their sanctions.

Now, the US gets a suspicion that Slack provided services to Iran. They arrange for the FBI (or whoever is responsible) to raid their offices, build a case beyond reasonable doubt that shows Slack provided services to a company in Iran, e.g. because said companies egress NAT IP was connecting and the user names match people working for that company in Iran. On top of that, they also show that Slack didn't do enough to prevent that from happening. Now, Slack gets fined and their CEO goes to jail (not sure if that's the penalty for sanction violations but I'd assume so).

Since the CEO doesn't want to go to jail, and the company doesn't want to be fined, they'll do whatever they can to avoid selling services to Iran. They can generally choose who they do business with, and its in their best interest to err on the side of caution. You have little recourse if Slack doesn't do business with you because they don't like your IP, and they're almost certainly well covered by their ToS.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#228

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Santosh83 wrote: post #13

What does Slack propose to do about access through a VPN so your real IP is hidden? Of course in the long term this is just incentive for countries to support balkanisation of the Internet.

Closing their eyes and pretending it doesn't happen, because with VPN they have plausible deniability/can claim they had no way to detect that they were actually providing the service to someone in a sanctioned country.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#229

Post by jkaplowitz »

nulbyte wrote: post #214
jkaplowitz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That says "personal communications". Slack is aimed at businesses, not personal use. It also requires "no cost to the user." Very well may not exempt their business model, though some room for argument exists. Of course, any sanctions regime that does still apply wouldn't require the collateral damage of Slack's excessive initial ban.

Corporations and other business entities are persons. Also, the license applies to services for a fee. Also, exchanging information isn't embargoed.

The "corporations are people" thing is exaggerated in a lot of understandings, and I doubt corporations are deemed capable of "personal communications". Still, personal communications might be found to cover the communication among persons at the companies.

But Slack does support a lot more than just people chatting with people, like bot and app/SaaS integrations. Those clearly aren't personal communications and frequently accomplish more than just exchanging information.

Good catch that the license does have provisions for fee-based services as well. However, the person I was replying to quoted the one for no-cost services, so that's what I focused on in my reply.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#230

Post by pygy_ »

justtopost wrote: post #198
pygy_ wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but you set the bar very low. Regarding user support, Google ranks on par with an anvil.

My anvil has 100% uptime since 1912. Just sayin.

The metaphor stays apt if you take uptime into account :-)

Anvils do break, sometimes, and the failure mode is catastrophic: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=broken+anvil&t=h_&iax=images&ia=im...

Post reply on HN