[Festival] IFF's now on Slack!

[Ximin Luo]

If you don't want to have this conversation, then don't post comments with inaccurate statements that conflate different concepts. Or actually listen to the points being made, instead of dismissing them as unimportant or trivia.

IRC is not ideal for sure, but you can enable forward-secure only TLS on it. But anyway, this is meant to be a public discussion place. Whilst protection against automated mass surveillance is still important in these cases (to make it more costly for the attackers), that is not a primary reason to avoid Slack.

There are many reasons to avoid Slack. You rely on a centralised third party with a proprietary protocol. Slack calls the shots, you tie yourself to them, and you can't switch away easily. It works in the browser, with a huge attack surface. It is much worse than Gmail - if *YOU* use Gmail it doesn't mean *I* have to also use Gmail with other people I talk to. Gmail does not have a bad security record. Easy alternatives already exist - for example, there is a #noisysq channel on OFTC IRC.

One of the reasons why the internet security is so horrible, is *because* people make arguments like this to pass off convenience for security - and I don't just mean communications security, but your economic security, of reliance upon centralised hierarchies. It is especially ironic that *this group* is contributing to the network effort of moving to centralised communications mediums. Well done for repeating history, even when outwardly trying to warn the world about it!

Core free open source software projects will *never* move to Slack over IRC, whilst the above issues exist. (For sure, some of them have shoddy practises in the area of communications security). Why should this group?

X

On 27/10/15 13:22, Bernard Tyers wrote:
> Please. For the love of every God in the sky (and every other place Gods live), can we not have this conversation. I have no interest in it anymore.
> 
> IRC is as open to surveillance as Slack is, it’s plaintext, no encryption. Twitter is closed source. How many people are using their Gmail address for communication here?
> 
> None of these tools are ideal. Their purpose is to enable communication. This is not communication.
> 
> IP over carrier pigeon is fine with me.
> 
> 
> 
>> On 27 Oct 2015, at 11:49, Smari McCarthy <smari at occrp.org> wrote:
>>
>> I'm agreeing with Ximin and Holger. Slack is a closed-source, centralized IRC replacement, and not even a particularly good one (sorry). We can talk about US money and other stuff like that, and we should, but how about we do it over a decentralized communications platform that isn't directly anathema to a free an open Internet?
>>
>> Rather than me continuing to rant about this, just take a moment to imagine that did so, about software licences and stuff like that. :-)
>>
>> E-mail is pretty good.
>>
>>   - Smári
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 12:18 PM, Ximin Luo <infinity0 at pwned.gg> wrote:
>> On 27/10/15 11:36, Jillian York wrote:
>>> On 10/27/15 11:27 AM, holger krekel wrote:
>>>> Is it a good idea to tie the "internet freedom" community to Slack
>>>> Technologies, a large for-profit highly venture-capital driven company
>>>> in silicon valley?  And to help their marketing by advising people
>>>> to shout "i want to be a slacker"?  Centralized easy-to-surveil
>>>> communication systems are the problem, not the solution in my view.
>>
>> Thank you holger for making this point. I was going to myself but wondered if anyone gave a shit...
>>
>>> Is it a good idea for the "Internet freedom" community to take US
>>> government funding? Is it a good idea for us to use Twitter? I'd argue
>>> those are far worse things than Slack...
>>>
>>> Sorry, but your argument is overwrought and unnecessary. You don't have
>>> to join the Slack channel. And you certainly don't have to interrogate
>>> the organizers of the conference publicly because you've got a
>>> holier-than-thou attitude about which tools are best.
>>>
>>
>> Why this reaction? There are different reasons for taking govt funding and using twitter, than using Slack.
>>
>> Government funding: hard to market "internet freedom" in current economy, need to get shit done regardless, need to get paid.
>>
>> Twitter: reaches a wide range of people, good for publicily.
>>
>> What is Slack good for that IRC doesn't provide? Formatting and smileys are more important than running your own infrastructure, depending on 3rd parties that don't respect you, who don't release their source code, and have a crappy history of protecting their users' data?
>>
>> (I also support trying out things like Mattermost, if other people want to play with that.)
>>
>> We make compromises working in this world whilst trying to achieve our principles, but we must *never* forget the fact that these are *compromises*. Don't let those things become a norm in your head.
>>
>> And this is not about having a "holier-than-thou attitude". Remember that from the point of view of the rest of the world, the entire "internet freedom" community has a "holier-than-thou attitude". holger was in no way insulting or aggressive.
>>
>> X
>>
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>>
>> -- 
>> Smári McCarthy - Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
>> Sarajevo / https://www.occrp.org / +387 60 3347 323 / @smarimc
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