skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it seems that Slack is going through their log files and closing down accounts that have used IP addresses that are considered to be in embargoed countries. I base that assumption on various comments here and on Twitter.

If true, it is definitely the worst way to do. It doesn't take into account any circumstantial evidence that could explain the use of such an IP address (vacation, VPN, BGP or a mistake in the geolocation data used) and Slack doesn't seem to offer any way to appeal or even inform other users about what happened to their contacts.

Slack should offer a configurable notification that could contain other contact methods to the banned user. Slack could also give those users at least sth like 48 hours to inform their contacts about what is going to happen. And it could offer banned users a downloadable archive of all content created to make sure no data is lost.

But the way Slack is doing it right now means that you can't trust them and one should really think about relying on their services in the future.

I am still on IRC and XMPP (Jabber) for good reasons ;)
Serious question: Would this have anything to do with selecting Goldman Sachs as the handler for their IPO?
Zoom Beta – UI Update
Steve Jobs' biological father was Syrian.
> with the weapons they’re willing to use against each other it may be hard to just sit on the sidelines.

Someone's got to keep selling them those weapons, right?
I haven't used Parallels in a few years due to the cost and that it stops working every time you upgrade MacOS, but it was always significantly faster for me than virtualbox.
Wow! so the asshole detector detected assholes in the seat of the decision makers at debian.

It's sad when debian is not a welcoming place anymore and makes stupid decisions like this that make it look bad.

Great a package that happens to be really useful and innovative is now removed. Thanks to this much needed move women are now massively using debian right away because they do not feel threatened anymore by this package name, specifically among all those non english speaking people like France where this software is from.

On the other hand this move may make debian looks bad and unwelcoming.
I also think that if Facebook started charging everybody any price (like $10/year, or even $1/year), many people (not all of them obviously) would definitely stop using it, and then the network would be immediately broken because of that, as its value would quickly spiral down since the current value proposition of Facebook as a user is that perceptually basically everyone and their dog is on Facebook.

This question (can Facebook charge people to use its service?) is fundamentally vastly different from the one in the article, which basically is: can someone kill Facebook by buying enough people out of using it?
> Beyond that I find it outrageously unethical.

What, complying with national and international sanctions and erring on the side of caution? Losing part of your customer base is preferable over getting fined to the tune of hundreds of millions of USD.
well, I did see the movie "bohemian rapsody" mainly to hear the music...
I cannot proceed to reading the article because I refuse to accept fb's cookie policy that doesn't seem to give a way to read the content without accepting a cookie from them.
Yep. This is nothing but propaganda.
Then crims won’t buy those drones. But they’ll appreciate the backdoors in other people’s drones. But yes I can see such a law passing. Aussies can help UK draft it.
I think Iran has demonstrated they ate quite capable in this regard.
Even then it's only a question of money, and you can keep local backups without having to fear it'll all be gone tomorrow.
There's a lot of clay pigeon shooting in England. I think the shot looses too much velocity to do much damage on the way back down. It could work ok if the drones were below say 300 ft.
This is what centralized silos are like, have always been like, and will always be like.

Unfortunately centralized silos also allow unprecedented convenience and ease of use. Nobody's figured out yet how to duplicate that in a decentralized or federated system.
It's the dystopia of the film Brazil: someone makes a typo in a database, someone else's life is dramatically inconvenienced, and it's impossible for them to access any means of redress.

> Is this just how the US ticks right now?

Yes.
What we really need is minimum authentication standards with incentives for compliance - password reuse isn’t limited to Fortnite.
How is pci-passthrough for hypervisor security? I’m speaking from a layman’s perspective, but there have been successful escapes through the GPU / GPU memory in the past right?
No, the Artix-7 is a bottomless pit of LUTs, DSPs, and BRAMs. You could probably fit a ton of 6502's in it.
"Neutral" countries also have to conform to sanctions; Switzerland is mentioned a few times but "the sanctions regime in place is based on the Federal Act on the Implementation of International Sanctions" and "Does Switzerland implement UN sanctions? - Yes."

https://sanctionsguide.eversheds-sutherland.com/countries/sw...

I get the impression that neutral in this case is being confused with some libertarian / anarchist / lawless utopia.
> I knew my parents would have gone mental if I was caught

You hooked it up to the phone, didn't you? You screw up again and you won't get into college!
yes. are there any Swiss technological developments? are there any other neutral countries?
This is almost certainly the result of adding a new compliance product feed (which may have false positives). I remember having to implement one for an acquired ecommerce site. The feed by it's nature was prone to false positives (it matched on name). However, there was an internal appeals process with the ability to override whereas if this is new to slack they are probably overwhelmed
In the case of suspending these accounts, this isn't something just Slack has done. A crypto exchange was wholesale closing accounts in the past 3 years if people even opened the app while on holiday in Cuba and rightly so. You do NOT want to have to deal with the government if they suspect you, or a customer, of dealing with a sanctioned or embargoed country. You just don't. It's going to be messy and long and expensive especially as a finance or communication company.

It isn't a "oh you're a Muslim/Iranian/Cuban/resident of Kiev, banned!" thing it's a "Oh, you could cost us millions and millions of dollars in legal trouble, exposure of our other customer's data, etc, sorry but we have to sever ties with you immediately to reduce our risk to very serious government investigation and litigation".

Given Slack also uses encryption at rest and in transit, there may be a LEGAL REQUIREMENT not to allow users with ties to Iran to use the product under CFR title 15 chapter VII, subchapter C.

> Shi'ite Iran certainly has human rights issues, but as far as terrorism is concerned the majority of them are orchestrated by Sunni groups

It doesn't matter what religious sect has perpetrated acts, the current government is reliably documented to a laundry list of terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, imprisoning/lashing/executing members of the gay community, at least 15 assassinations on foreign soil (US, FR, DE, CH, SE etc), a recent president was a staunch holocaust denier and the government even sponsored an anti-holocaust conference.

We impose sanctions, embargoes etc on COUNTRIES not religious sects. We hold COUNTRIES responsible for war crimes and genocides, not specific religious sects. The current government of Iran in this instance has a history of doing bad things for its entire existence, as such the U.S. government has decided they are both a threat to nation and worthy of sanctions for various reasons. I suspect the powers that be at Slack simply are trying to minimize risk to the company and other customers by eliminating users that have shown a connection to IPs geographically connected to the nation of Iran.

See:

- 15 CFR chapter VII, subchapter C.

- 31 CFR Part 560 and Appendix A to Chapter V

- Public Law 115–44 (the CAATSA)
Granted. I was going to include a note, but didn't want to get too long winded.

Non-representative sample, self-selected according to dominant migration obstacle (e.g. financial or educational).
Interesting, I didn't know that. I guess that makes the self hosted path the only safe and sustainable path for managing one's information.
We already have a system to turn road usage into government revenue. Collection is easy efficient, and wastes zero time for the people paying. It does a good job correlating not only to road use but also pollution produced. In fact it's so easy to pay that many consumers rarely even think about it when they're paying it, yet even anonymous cash payers can't find a way to skirt around it.

It's called the gas tax, and it does a good enough job charging people for their negative externalities that everyone seems to hate it.
The Cost of Living in Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet Empire
> They are not a local filesystem, they are network drives mounted as NFS, with the abysmal support and quirk that comes with that.

They’re actually not, which is exactly the problem. vboxsf is its own “real” filesystem. The code is super simple (too simple, perhaps): https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Addit...

It contains many shortcuts with reporting free inodes and whatnot.
Its not a companies fault. Its governement.
Is the sanctions mentioned on Syria the country, or Syrian nationals? Both?
Interesting to see the long-term decline, but to be fair, I don't think many people who are looking for a particular paper would start by Googling the word "elsevier." They would, however, Google "scihub" to find out their latest hosting domain.
So just rich people being rich?
Myspace was very poorly implemented. Slow, often even displaying errors on some pages.

The social network I miss is Mixi, which was a sort of proto-Facebook around in the early 2000s (in Japan and Japanese only). Mixi had some really interesting features like being able to see who had browsed your account. (To be fair Mixi still exists, but they kind of died when FB became popular, as well as putting itself out of business with some onerous changes to their terms of service and business practices.)
I don't mean this to be snarky but reading it actually reminded me of papers I wrote in high school as they were very similar in style. Overall the analysis seemed to be mostly speculation with a dissapointing amount of data.
The organizers had made public and explicit statement that "cis-men was not allowed", but then did not enforce it at entry.

Also, a "man-pen"? Just imagine if the targeted demographic was something else, like Muslims.
> 99.999% efficient at racial profiling

Next on HN: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Race
The EU and U.K. are not in the US last I checked.
How about no social networks? What are you looking for that Facebook gives/gave you?
> z = a > b ? c < d ? e : f : g ? h : i

That's stylistically ugly but not hard to predict; at some point I had it beaten into my head that ternaries are always at the bottom of the single-character operator precedence stack (I really hope all languages stick to that). I'd expect most people to know this.

> z = a & b > c | d

That is harder to predict. I wouldn't expect most people to know this one without looking up a precedence list.
This is super cool, especially how it is done as a side project. It's resourceful using a game as the physics simulator. I wonder how it compares to Microsoft's [1] and Udacity's [2] implementation.

[1]https://github.com/Microsoft/AirSim
[2] https://github.com/udacity/self-driving-car-sim
Self-hosted, decentralised solutions such as Matrix (https://matrix.org) are available, and allow you to keep control of your own access and data.
Good points but it seems hacking is slightly different these days with high profile hackers (i.e. jailbreak dude) being invited on tv shows and getting lucrative work. There is still a fine line between criminal behavior and just pushing the boundaries, and whole companies are build on boundary pushing. So the question is probably as relatable to morality of your kids actions as much as legality. Just thinking outloud here that the whole meaning / stigma of hackers seems to trend towards positive / resume building these days.
Also: https://www.generationamiga.com/2018/11/18/mister-the-ideal-...
(Some) Pakistani-Americans I’ve met who’ve grown up here have told me that my parents should be executed for being Ahmadis once an Islamic State has been established (but graciously offered them a one time chance to repent). So much for the immigration filter.
Titan RTX liquid-cooled overclocking: 3DMark runs beyond Titan V 34%
That link only shows:

"Access Denied

You don't have permission to access "http://m.cdw.com/product/oracle-vm-virtualbox-enterprise-lic... on this server."
Not everywhere.
“Journalist of the Year” and how Fake News is real
Or if a data breach allows for account data to be stolen, then one can spoof access attempts from such IPs and seek to DOS the account access.

If the removals are automated, then the most vulnerable accounts would be those of slack employees - or slack investors?
Well, hopefully one difference will be that people remember Tom as your first friend and Mark as the the lying asshole he is.
I guarantee "Python Mu" will continue to bring up codewith.mu and "Mu" will continue to bring a million random sites as it is an extremely common letter and abbreviation. If Googling "Mu" was bringing up codewith.mu for you it was because Google already knew your context already from history with the project or Python searches.

Sidenote: If you want a unique name don't pick one that is 2 letters (or 1 technically).
I'm pretty sure you can have one interface for YeSQL an NoSQL.

* getUsers()
* saveUser()
* listUsers()
* deleteUser()

and implementation can implement it in specific way to take advantage of chosen technology. If you have some esoteric use cases they could be handled in special way separate from business code.
Show HN: Ask for help today
Somewhat better than OpenGL passthrough, whose security can be summarized as between "basically none" and "absolutely none".
I'm not a lawyer, but I am not aware of any restrictions to employ people from Syria, unless they were involved in military or related to the government etc.
How to Build a Dyson Sphere [video]
You'd think the incentive to not loose your account would be enough!
Regularly happens in India. Google "naxal railway tracks".
I frankly never quite understood the extremely high stance against Iran.

Iran has not really stage any offensive wars since 1856 (and most of the XIXe century wars were in fact to recover/maintain control over the Persian Empire which was slowly eaten by the Russian and the UK).

Since 1940, Iran was constantly meddled with by foreign powers, first being invaded during the WW2 by the Allies and the Soviets, with the Soviet reluctantly leaving the country after 1945.

Then the democratically elected Mosaddegh was deposed by the MI6 and the CIA because of "precious Oil". A "Pro-Western" dictatorial government was was put in place. This regime was of course brutal but also at odds with the population and its traditions, leading to a revolution in 1979.

In the midst of this revolution, Irak, another "Western backed" dictatorship tried to profit from the chaos to invade the country which lead to costly a 8 years war leaving ~1 Million people dead. This war is probably the last high intensity conventional war between 2 roughly equals and relatively developed countries to date.

And then in the 2000, it has seen two countries at its borders being invaded by historically hostile powers. And then these countries collapsed into chaos (And I'm even forgetting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 80ies).

And lately, after lengthily and complex negotiations, an international accord was signed, just to be thrown out of the window 1 year later by the US, the US then bullying other signatories into not abiding by said accord.

No wonders Iran government stance can be a bit tense at time and that they want the Bomb to be at peace.
The concept of free market healthcare basically expects consumers to bargain with their own lives. No rational person would do that.

We agree to service and pay even if it would bankrupt us because at least we'd still be alive.
I don't think this is the future of the web.

This sort of thing is a temporary blip before everybody figures out decentralised solutions for everything.

Decentralisation is clearly the end game as long as politics causes problems like this. A decentralised solution will continue to "just work", while centralised solutions continue to boot people off. It's pretty obvious which one is going to win.
No it’s the companies fault. Export restrictions can’t be applied indiscriminately. Laws are open to interpretation and they have interpreted this law in letter not in spirit.
So is this really an accurate title?

It seems most likely that Slack has geolocated IP addresses from account access logs, and closed accounts with hits from sanctioned countries. Perhaps going back years.

That in itself seems over the top. But it doesn't constitute ethnic profiling.

But if someone has a counterexample, that would be OK too.
As a rural American, I can assure you that many people feel mis-characterized as the authors of this piece feel.

Intellectual dishonesty of this type is one of the root causes of the current American political climate.
Switzerland hosts, among other things, the EFPL, which does a great deal of technlogical achievement. The EFPL itself leads the Scala language development, among a lof of other stuff !

I'm not familiar with other countries as neutral as Switzerland which has a successful track record of staying neutral during two world wars on their borders, but I suspect there should be actually quite some. I _think_ that for example Kazakhstan is currently trying to follow a similar neutral political path.
It may be asinine, but in no way, shape, or form is this racism. Just stop.
Disclosure: ChatGrape.com CEO

We are based in the EU and can offer an embargo-free and on-prem capable environment.
Meanwhile in Russia: free ER services, free nationwide health care and no-franchise cheap voluntary insurance for everyone who doesn't want state medicine.
Cheap because you have to compete with rather-good and completely free for everyone.
If you look at where their revenue is, it it probably not broad at all (just search advertisement and AdSense).

And if you look solely at the US and Canada their adaption is probably petering out as well.

And heart what is their core business other than a massive invasion of privacy and data mining of personal information?

What about all these stories that has push management on the defence? (Google China, that right-wing guy and so on.)

The point is. What this article is saying about Facebook could just as easily had been said about Google with just about the same validity.

Why does Facebook get bad press whereas Google does not?
No they aren't above the law.

But to clarify, they gave a service to people/teams who maybe they shouldn't have. Did the people signing up/using Slack know that? Maybe. Who's responsible to ensure it's enforced?

Slack.
I hate how they redesign their mice every year. Loved my g500 and it's brethren. Some of the best mine that I ever owned. However the new versions have super sharp edges and aren't as comfortable to hold. They look extreme and have more better lazers. I guess that's what the fortnite kids want or so says the marketing department.
German court rules Apple infringed Qualcomm patent
Wire is a Swiss Slack alternative that’s open source. Do note the comment close to this one mentioning that Switzerland would also have to comply with the sanctions.
Guess I was thinking of the cost. At a quick glance a C150 is about £99/hr and a twin £350 which is quite a lot to take out a stupid drone. Though I see the police seem to be mucking about in fancy helicopters at the moment.
last I checked there are no restrictions on employment of Syrian people in the EU/UK, unless they are related to the government or military etc.
I keep hearing people complain about Matrix's interface (Riot), but the little I've used Slack, it looks exactly the same except for the color scheme.
If the sanctions demand this, then the sanctions are outrageously unethical. If the sanctions don't explicitly demand it and banning ethnic Iranians is just "erring on the side of caution" then yes, sorry, but Slack is being outrageously unethical. Even if the sanctions do demand it, to me this is a reason to seriously consider either moving Slack to another jurisdiction like Canada, the EU, Switzerland, etc., or proudly face the fine.

What's the alternative? Just hide your Iranian/Persian colleagues and friends under the digital rafters? It's plain wrong, and I refuse to be on that side of history.
If Slack needs to risk a massive fine then that's their duty, so yes, face the fine, take it to the Supreme Court. To be honest, doing anything else is unpatriotic as well as unethical.
advertising is the biggest thing 'educating' voters, and usually it's usually something along the lines of here's why <party> <candidate> is bad, vote for me instead. News media is trash and unreliable as they too pander to advertisers or are just spewing nationally distributed talking points.

Bernie who was the most vocal about changes was taken out by Hillary, but no one batted an eye. No one really wants change to the healthcare and pharma industry as it will hurt the entire ecosystem (especially advertising $).
I paid for a private hospital in France ~15k for a surgery and 14 days in a single-atient room with quality food and available nurses. Only the drugs (and anesthesia) are subzidized and paid for by the national healthcare. The high-quality room, the transportation, the doctor and his team were paid by me.

If a 2 hour surgery and 14 recuperation days cost is around the same in the US, you're not overpaying; if it's not, you are, even if you're well-off. And it's true for any country.
I agree that preinstalled OSX and Windows offer a better end-user experience. I disagree with some of your other statements though.

> In terms of out of the box stability and support?

How many devices have you used that came with Linux "out of the box?"

> package management hell on Linux

This is actually amusing to me. Windows has had this problem for a long time, they call it DLL Hell. Their solution was to duplicate everything and also to have multiple libcs that are incompatible with each other. Developers seem to forget this exists until they actually try to ship something on Windows. Nowadays, companies will just ship all of their dependencies they need.

Reasonably, developers are reticent to do this on open-source platforms, but this is what results in package friction. Semantic versioning would also fix this, but it's unrealistic to think we could get the tens of thousands of packages in a distribution to follow this. I personally don't think Snap or Flatpack is the answer here either, but Nix is.

Sidenote, I'm curious how you got into "package hell." I generally think things from outside the distro-provided stuff should be installed into /opt. Would you install things into System32 on Windows? My guess is that you either added an additional repo, or you installed a packaged generated by some open source code outside of any repos.
I disagree completely. Self-loathing and the desire to be desirable was the only reason I ended up losing weight. Shame not feel nice, but it does provide social pressure, which if not addressed maladaptively can be a good thing.