Re: [racket-users] Slack IRC bridge malfunctioning
Matthew (and Neil), hello. (and being conscious of Neil's implied suggestion that this may be drifting off-topic for the list) On 9 Feb 2016, at 1:26, Matthew Butterick wrote: Neil's critique ought not be lightly dismissed. Oh, I certainly didn't intend to _dismiss_ Neil's critique (and I don't read Jack Firth as doing so either), much less dismiss it lightly. For me (and this is clearer to me after thinking about Neil's remarks), this is now less of a technical question than a commercial one. The question of whether an organisation has my data seems less salient than the question of what they plan to do with it. If a company says they're not going to exploit my data for money, but it later emerges that they do, then I and a lot of other people/companies will stop using them, and that gives them a direct bet-the-farm interest in being 'honest'. That is, the business model means that I don't have to greatly _trust_ them to be honest actors (with scare-quotes round quite a lot of that). If there was a service like Slack's which worked without sharing data -- for example, by using end to end encryption or doing everything P2P -- then I would prefer that, all other things being equal. I've almost completely migrated from Dropbox to Tresorit for more or less this reason. So for Slack, it comes down to trade-off, and it seems to me that Slack isn't a bad offender here; Neil noted this, and I find their privacy policy broadly reassuring, to the extent that it seems to contain quite a few hostages to fortune if they were to plan on exploiting the data for money. More interesting than Slack, though, are Neil's two points that (i) there is now a pervasive expectation that nothing is ephemeral -- everything is logged somewhere; and (ii) that the ubiquity of one or two dotcom business models limits the expectations of students, startups and investors. Re (i): one could expand this into both a socio-legal privacy point, and an aesthetic or even I'm sure spiritual point about ephemera. That would send us wildly off-topic. Re (ii): I had not thought of this point, or at least not in such concrete terms; and mulling it over in the last couple of days, it is a very sobering point indeed. Having everyone think the same way is all sorts of nasty, and means that I do now share at least some of Neil's distaste for the situation. The internet's become a very different place from what it was going to be 20 or 25 years ago. *sigh* All the best, Norman -- Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [racket-users] Slack IRC bridge malfunctioning
Neil, hello. Separately from the question about the wisdom or not of a Slack/IRC bridge, you mentioned On 7 Feb 2016, at 20:31, Neil Van Dyke wrote: much less bridged to this billion-dollar data-grabbing intermediary Slack dotcom. Is that a thing that Slack do? I've previously been comfortable using Slack in a light way, precisely because their business model appears to be a freemium one, as opposed to one which exists by monetising user data. That is, I can (I thought) understand where their money comes from, in such a way that exploiting user data (for some value of 'exploiting') would represent a potential reputational danger rather than a fundamentally necessary income stream. Since I use it for stuff which is not public, but professional rather than Personal, it seems to fit into a vague category of uses where I'm probably comfortable with the tradeoffs of a cloud solution. Have I deceived myself with respect to Slack (as distinct from the model in general), or is this down to a matter of where you or I or others might locate those tradeoffs? All the best, Norman -- Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[racket-users] Slack IRC bridge malfunctioning
The Slack channel that mirrors the messages in the IRC hasn't seen any messages in the last few days. I checked the archives and there are a few messages in the Slack channel that didn't make it across the bridge into irc-land either. Would whoever set up the bridge between the two be willing to check it out? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [racket-users] Slack IRC bridge malfunctioning
It's too late now, but an opinion for students who will go on to develop systems over the next few decades... IMHO, it might have been better if the IRC channel had never been logged/archived in the first place, much less bridged to this billion-dollar data-grabbing intermediary Slack dotcom. Non-logged and ephemeral is most traditional (pre-Web) use of IRC, for casual interactions and community building, like might happen in impromptu discussions and at the water cooler. Organizations often like surveillance of internal communication (exceptions including executives' communications, and some highly liability-sensitive situations), because data can increase the power of those who have it. But they're discarding some of the potential for community-building and candor. Bigger-picture, when we think about non-profits doing it, they're also further conditioning people to tolerate pervasive surveillance, and setting another example for people to consider that as the way things are done, and to imitate. Incidentally, I know of one incident that #racket had, due to the initial logging that was set up on it (which was a bad idea, IMHO), and the incident was only remedied because the third-party logging and gateways had not yet been set up. Neil V. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
