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An Apology and an Update

slackhq.com

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Re: An Apology and an Update

#101

Post by xelxebar »

hamandcheese wrote: post #71
tlb wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "they should have acted differently to begin with" isn't a valid criticism of an apology, or it would apply to all apologies.

“If you were sorry you wouldn’t have done it to begin with” has also come up on several occasions in my personal life. Haven’t figured out how best to respond to that one.

If you trust the person to not be acting on malice, then I'd not worry too much about the precise semantics of those words and guess that the person is mainly expressing their frustration, hurt, etc.

What about responding to that honest emotional expression directly? "Ouch. I hadn't realize how much I'd hurt you. Truly, I'm sorry."

Re: An Apology and an Update

#102

Post by derefr »

I'm curious whether IP blocking is actually enough to comply with the spirit of a trade embargo.

Surely, the point of "not trading with Iran" is to avoid, through one's economic activity, enriching the citizens or corporations of Iran; and has nothing to do with preventing access to people who just happen to currently be within the geographic boundaries of Iran. (So: email blocking by detection of Iranian-ISP mail host = sensible; Iranian IP blocking = not-so-much.)

Unless, I suppose, you expect that a tourist accessing your service through an Iranian ISP, will be enriching the Iranian ISP to exactly the degree that you are serving them, and therefore, you are legally required to not serve the tourist, lest they enrich the ISP thereby. (That would be a hard point to prove.)

But actually, even if it was just the letter of the sanctions that you had to obey, I would expect that "not trading with Iran" would be a lot harder than it sounds—it would require, for example, that you do not trade with an Iranian citizen who is currently geographically located in, say, Mexico. How would you know? Your random IM webapp would need a KYC process (submission of ID documents, etc.) to be "sanction-compliant", wouldn't it?

Re: An Apology and an Update

#103

Post by briandear »

aaomidi wrote: post #58
da_chicken wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Slack legally required to do this? Yes, absolutely. Breaking sanctions is not just illegal, it's a criminal offense . There have been sanctions against Iran since roughly when Trump withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [1] in May of this year. The CFO of Huawei was arrested in Canada per a request by the US because of their dealings with Iran [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_C…

The CFO was arrested in relation to Iran but not because of it. She was arrested because she lied to banks and sold American made technology to Iran. Slack is actually not required to do this as IM applications are exempt from sanctions.

Is Slack just an IM application?

Re: An Apology and an Update

#105

Post by briandear »

gaius wrote: post #92
alangpierce wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They're explicitly saying that they don't do that and that they don't have that information. But they did do it, so what does that mean...

Did they? Or did they ban people associated with specific IPs?

Re: An Apology and an Update

#106

Post by cyphar »

nimbius wrote: post #51
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…

>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…

> So, you blocked users based on their nationality.

Where you are currently located or resident is effectively unrelated to your nationality (unless you were born a citizen of your country and have never left it, not even for a vacation).

This comment by Slack was in response to several (fairly overblown) comments that they were racially targeting users ("Slack bans Iranian in Canada"), when in fact they were disabling accounts of people who have used Slack from an embargoed country at some point. To be clear, this is still bad, just not "blocking users based on their nationality". All of the outrage was over expats (or travellers) being blocked.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#107

Post by clwk »

komali2 wrote: post #61
azhenley wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This apology seems very generic and sterile to me. People are boycotting their product so they apologized. They should have communicated with their users to begin with before taking such harsh actions.

From what I'm reading here, it would be impossible by your logic to effectively apologize. The only solution is to never make a mistake in the first place, which isn't a feasible expectation when dealing with humans.

I agree entirely with your sentiment. Still, I'm not sure corporate personhood means we should judge corporate action as we would human action. It's still not possible to expect corporations to never mistakes, but I wouldn't excuse it on the basis of their humanity.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#109

Post by ssnistfajen »

dbg31415 wrote: post #89

This disturbs me. So Slack is a communications platform. If we have an embargo against a country, we have to shut off any services we offer to that country? Including communications platforms. Doesn't seem like that will help improve things in that country, or help the people in that country communicate. I'm all for not sending a dictatorship steel or guns, but why would we cut off communications platforms? That seem…

Maybe KJU, Khamenei, and Raul Castro has a secret slack group for plotting USA's downfall. You never know! /s

I'm betting that Slack only had to do this to comply with some dumb laws regarding sanctions because I am unable to see why anyone from these countries using civilian, commercial, non-sensitive services such as Slack would have any impact on sanction enforcement.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#110

Post by chatmasta »

akerl_ wrote: post #98
chatmasta wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It remains unclear. From the blog post, it sounds like they banned a number of accounts, and now are manually unbanning some of them.

The line you quoted is specifically clarifying what they will be doing moving forward, which is blocking connections from sanctioned countries. Their post as a whole is their apology for the prior method, which did deactivate accounts.

Right, and their blog post also says that after de-activating accounts, they have restored access to some of them. So what about all the accounts they banned but have not unbanned? What if one of those accounts has only ever connected from an embargoed country, but travels in the future to a non-embargoed country? Will it be able to use Slack?

(Put another way, it seems like they’re saying some accounts remain de-activated. So which is it? Accounts are de-activated or IP addresses are blocked?)

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