[bjoli]

i am starting to become scared that my accounts with different companies will be closed retroactively. I have, through work, toured most of the free and some parts of the non-free world (including Iran, Cuba and sudan). That apparently makes me fair game to have my US accounts closed. Had I been a slack user I, by the look of it, probably would have had my account closed today, even though I have lived within the EU for all my life.

I am pretty certain I have logged into my mail, PayPal account and Digital Ocean account from countries embargoed in the regions my providers operate. PayPal I could lose without much fuzz, but jeez how I'd hate to lose access to my email.

[swozey]

I worked in webhosting forever and I've never heard of a company until this post actively digging through a users access to services to block them. What we'd do is use products like Maxmind where if you tried to sign up and pay from Iran, etc, you'd be automatically denied. I've never, ever heard of audits to SSH logs to track this stuff down. We'd audit ssh logs if there was a server that was hacked, etc, usually to see if they hacked other servers so we could take them all down at once or find out (they'd often have irc running) what groups they were in to get more info on how they did it, etc.

This is absolutely ridiculous. I've opened up Slack while in Cuba to check on work things at my American company who does no business there. I don't have anything to do with our Slack bill and I'm a US citizen. So if someone goes to see their family in Iran/etc and just happens to open Slack they'll get banned? That's hamfisted as all hell.