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Slack 'bans users' who have visited US sanctioned countries
- Cypher 8y ago...
- mcguire 8y ago"In a statement to website Mashable, Slack said they "prohibit unauthorized Slack use in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and the Crimea region of Ukraine" to comply with US regulations." Wait. What?
- abtinf 8y agoWhat are you confused by?
- gammateam 8y agoThe company's interpretations of US regulations obviously.
- mcguire 8y agoUse is prohibited in those countries. The woman in the article reportedly created her account while in Cuba years ago (presumably before this policy?) and hasn't been back since. She wasn't using Slack in Cuba when her account was cancelled.
- dylz 8y agoYou can't service them or have a business relationship with them per US law? I can't get certificates for .ir domains signed, I can't add .ir domains to shared hosting providers, etc.
- mcguire 8y agoApparently, you cannot ever have had a relationship with those countries.
- anothergoogler 8y agoThe State Department is a Slack user so there's that. https://apps.gov/products/Slack/ https://apps.gov/products/Slack/
- abtinf 8y agoThis seems pretty straightforward. It is a violation of just about every competently written terms of service from a US company to transact business in these countries. For a complete list, see https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/SDN-List/Pages/default.aspx https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/SDN-List/... and https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...
- defen 8y agoSpecifically, section 560.540 of the ITR authorizes the exportation from the United States or by U.S. persons, wherever located, to persons in Iran of services incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Intemet, such as instant messaging, chat and email, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging, provided that such services are publicly available at no cost to the user. (ITR, section 560.540(a)(1).)
- Hupriene 8y agoTo be fair, it's often unclear what you need to do to comply w/ sanctions, and being found non-compliant can bring down some really heavy penalties.
- gsich 8y agoHint: Nothing unless you have proof. An IP is not enough because of VPNs or Proxies.
- ajross 8y agoTo be fair, no one ever went after Freenode over a desire to ban Iranians in Canada. What you're saying seems to be along the lines of "It's a dumb law, don't blame slack." But to be fair, (heh) it's not like this mess was completely unforseen. There are censored/censorable forums and there are open ones. A lot of people knew the difference and warned us about this kind of thing.
- robkop 8y agoYou really can't compare freenode to slack, their scales are so vastly different that you're practically making a strawman.
- ajross 8y agoThat's... a fine response to a feature flame war. Fine fine, slack is better. IRC just doesn't compare. All of us using it are dinosaurs who should be forgotten. I'll grant all that stuff. But real people are having their accounts banned simply because they've been to Iran (Or more worryingly, simply because they're Iranian; are european tourists getting banned? Seems like it's all expats in the article...) You can't compare serious issues of censorship to platform flame wars. The moral scales are so vastly different that you're practically doing political censorship.
- nradov 8y agoCompanies can ask the federal agencies responsible for enforcing sanctions in advance whether particular actions are compliant or not. If you make a good faith effort to work with them they won't come down hard on you. Bureaucrats prefer cooperation rather than dealing with the hassle of enforcement; it's just less work for them.
- steve19 8y agoCan't they just block those countries at a firewall level?
- bengotow 8y agoThis does seem like it'd be a much better solution... +1
- jstanley 8y agoDiscussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18724107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18724107
- yellowapple 8y agoThat's a slightly different situation, though. The "original" article is about an Iranian national who now lives in Canada, while this "dupe" article covers both that case and multiple others with the claim that Slack is banning anyone who has ever visited one of the sanctioned countries.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aaomidi 8y agoI'm one of the people who got banned: https://twitter.com/aaomidi/status/1075621119028314112 https://twitter.com/aaomidi/status/1075621119028314112 Just FYI for everyone here, the US government explicitly allows instant messaging applications to be exempt from sanctions: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/internet_freedom.pdf https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/... This is to foster more secure and wider internet access for Iranians.
- dylz 8y agoSlack is generally B2B paid service for collaboration, is it not? You would imagine instant messaging and social networking to be something where Skype.com falls under the umbrella, but Lync/Skype for Business does not. The PDF also constantly uses the word personal. > such as instant messaging, chat and email, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging. In order to qualify for that authorization, such services and software had to be publicly available (widely available to the public) at no cost to the user
- saghm 8y agoI'm fairly certain that Slack is available for free usage; I think there's just a limit on the number of users you can have in your "organization" (where "organization" doesn't necessarily mean anything formal like a company) without needing to pay
- dylz 8y agoYes, sure, you can make a free workspace just like you can run a trial of Lync, but presumably this categorization brings them out of personal messaging and into a B2B-relationship for business purposes, and the majority of their business is funded by paid B2B contracts. NB: I'm not saying this is fair to anyone and it's just my personal interpretation, but it reads to me that the OFAC PDF linked is overly intent on specifically personal messaging, for personal individuals, not for business collaboration, B2B contracts, anything related to work or commercialness
- hit8run 8y agoUse protocols that are public domain and not some proprietary shit. IRC, E-Mail and Websites: They will remain long after Slack, Facebook and others are gone.
- jkepler 8y agoMattermost, anyone? Its a libre Slack replacement, with additional functionalities.
- ZeroCool2u 8y agoWe have Mattermost at work, a very traditional Skype For Business kinda place, and it's awesome!
- baroffoos 8y agoMatrix is another great replacement. The devs also offer dedicated hosting for a much cheaper per user cost than slack.
- mikenew 8y agoI've been hosting a home Matrix server for around 6 months now and bridging my other services (hangouts, iMessage, SMS, and Slack) into it. As I slowly migrate away from those services I'll shut them down. It is not perfect, particularly if you're using encryption, but everything I've had complaints about seems to be slowly but surely getting dealt with, and at this point it's actually a pretty solid experience with only a few bumps. In fact the thought of going back to having different applications, UIs, and devices to access my various communication channels seems ridiculous.
- paulie_a 8y agoI really don't understand why slack is so popular. It's just irc, if you have a devops person they can stand that up over lunch, and send out the email to "hey download this app"
- 8y ago
- tdfx 8y agoI'm a US citizen that used Slack briefly during a visit to Cuba and my accounts are still fine. Not sure how they are targeting people.
- darkhorn 8y agoThere is alternative, use Hipchat.
- derimagia 8y agoHipchat is discontinued. Was announced a while ago. Their official migration path is to move to Slack.