Can you imagine Slack letting people DM strangers in another org? Think of the abuse. Oh wait, it did do that Slack, which became popular as a team chat app in part because it's not email, is now letting users invite anyone, via email, to correspond using direct messages in the Slack app. The collaboration biz, in the process of being acquired by Salesforce, announced the service, called Slack Connect Direct Messages, last October and …
This is what drives me nuts about a lot of tech companies and their constant brainfarts
So many examples to choose from, let me see, which one sticks in my mind the most
Oh, Microsoft of course....by default not showing the file extension for associated files, leading to the ability for a malicious person to make an executable look like a harmless text file
But man how convenient is that, no 3 letter extension to confuse lusers, by default!
I don't trust MS's 365 nor googles central we store your email offerings, even where the protocol for communication is quite small and quite clear. Why would anyone use Slack that could possibly leak so much about your org is beyond my comprehension. I mean apart from IBM with an average employee age of 16, who would use it?
+1
I mean apart from IBM with an average employee age of 16, who would use it?
I was on a contract there when there when the project I was on switched over to Slack - the group of graduates on the project were tasked with evangelising Slack and the multiple channels that they setup for the project - I was glad to be shot of the whole lot on my last day
It allows you to post documents for group discussion. I’m in a Scottish political party and we use it for policy discussions. Our manifesto due out soon would have been much, much harder to do using email.
It’s free and secure enough. Entry to our space and folders is by invitation only.
It's not really something you need to trust. I find it useful for exchanging messages with my remote, distributed team. The information we exchange is mostly fairly ephemeral - review this PR, anyone know what X means. It's basically the equivalent of going and talking to someone when we were all sat in the same building.
There's nothing very confidential being exchanged, so I'm not sure what your concern is. If you are saying "anything in the cloud is a risk", then the question is, compared to what.
Compared to not having this type of comms at all, yes it's a greater risk, obvs
Compared to using something that you host yourself? Probably a lesser risk, unless you are spending an extraordinary amount of effort keeping whatever it is you are using protected and patched. If Slack gets compromised and significant data leaks, that's their business fscked. I therefore assume, perhaps naively, that they are putting significant resources into making sure that this doesn't happen. Maybe your organisation is really good at security, and so you can do a better job than Slack - but that's atypical
Sure, just look at all the recent CVEs for NNTP and IRC implementations...
Hmm.
But then Slack hasn't had one since, um, February.
Yes, this is an extremely persuasive argument.
Slack: Proudly bringing you half-assed versions of things that have been around for decades.
Yes.
It's interesting how companies that actually do extensive user testing, like, oh, TechSmith, say, so rarely seem to show up in this "we rolled something out and people hated it" stories.
(I don't have any connection to TechSmith. I've met a couple people who work there, and talked to some about their user testing, and I've used a couple of their products.)
we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages
If they really didn't realise custom invite messages could be used for abuse or spam then they shouldn't be in the IM business in the first place.
As a freelancer, I work with many remote clients each week and they more often than not use Slack for communications with their distributed teams. Having a single centralized communication tool for instant contact with current and new clients is just brilliant. Yes, there could be potential issues but the benefits far outweigh them.
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