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An Apology and an Update

slackhq.com

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Re: An Apology and an Update

#151

Post by bad_user »

speedplane wrote: post #116
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…

The apology wasn't good just because it accepted responsibility, it was good because they acted responsibly. The incident lasted two days, and it was quickly corrected. Many other companies would ignore it for months, and a similar apology in that case would be feel far less sincere. It's okay to mess up if you quickly correct the issue or at least quickly recognize it and try to correct it. The problems arise when i…

2 days for people being locked out of their account, through no fault of their own, is a long time.

Slack is only apologizing due to the public uproar, as apparently many people were affected.

Our cofounder was also locked of his account. He's Irish and living in Romania, with nothing to do with the embargoed countries.

To make matters worse, he tried contacting support to prove his nationality and country of residence and 2 days later he's still locked out of Slack.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#152

Post by drawkbox »

kortilla wrote: post #149
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.

Sanctions today are like someone committing a crime in your city and then you invoke martial law until that person gives themselves up without going after that person specifically, making everyone in the city suffer who are simply trying to survive and are powerless to resolve the situation.

It is a bit medieval and tribal if you ask me and doesn't work today.

Targeting individuals that actually cause the problems is a better strategy.

Ultimately, we live in a surveillance society now, blocking people with reckless abandon only limits access to individuals causing issues for all. Technology is being used by authoritarians in frightening ways, somehow this has to get fixed, companies/people need to stop falling in line.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#153

Post by bad_user »

akerl_ wrote: post #91
chatmasta wrote: post #90

> 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.

Why didn't they do that in the first place then?

This wasn't a bug, but a management level decision.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#154

Post by dempseye »

AlfeG wrote: post #114
derefr wrote: post #102

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 ho…

Its actually pretty funny. US and others says that Russia forcibly occupy Crimea. But now all people of Crimea is under embargo, not Russia. It like if its not enough, lets beat them harder.

Well, the people of Crimea wanted it, so there's that.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#155

Post by bad_user »

Bad apologies make things worse, but good apologies don’t make things better.

Actions speak louder than words. Blocking people accounts was a management level decision that they are only regretting due to this coming to the public’s attention.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#156

Post by Arathorn »

derf_ wrote: post #33
orthecreedence wrote: post #15

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.

Yup, you’re overreacting, especially given I wrote that >4y ago when we hadn’t even started implementing E2E encryption. Nowadays it’s almost complete and as others have said we will be turning it on by default for private comms in the coming month(s). (There is little point in E2E for a conversation which is public and being indexed by Google etc). Some deployments already have E2E on by default in fact (eg the french government deployment).

Re: An Apology and an Update

#157

Post by Jare »

"Mistakes were made" is a good apology, but with no personalization, no reparations for the people impacted, and no reflection on the process and context that allowed those mistakes to happen, it still leaves Slack in a lower place in my mind compared to where it was before this incident.

It may sound like there's no way to win for them, but well, mistakes have consequences. Time will heal the wounds.

Re: An Apology and an Update

#158

Post by paulgrimes1 »

I understand the necessity of embargoes, but I’m a little torn on this one, given the ubiquity of Slack, IP crackdown mistakes aside.

Hypothetical: If you build a product meant for use in other countries than (also as well as) the one it’s been built in, should you be allowed embargo its use based on the (possibly arbitrary) politics of a single one of those countries?

I suppose the makers can do as they please/are required to in their home country.

However, it opens another costly-to-startups hypothetical: If the politics of our home country swing to the (insert x-axis direction) and we decide (insert country Y) are baddies, do we have the resources to comply with an enforced embargo?

Re: An Apology and an Update

#159

Post by felipelemos »

tlb wrote: post #60
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.

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

This statement would only work if one's could be perfect, if their actions would be not a mistake but a calculated misdeed and their apology would not be sincere.

If you are really sincere with your apology, and you are doing the best you can to fix what you did, so just ignore this kind of statement. You are doing your part.

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