A group of security researchers found a series of vulnerabilities in the software underlying popular apps like Discord, Microsoft Teams, Slack and many others, which are used by tens of millions of people all over the world. At the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, the researchers presented their findings, detailing how they could have hacked people who use Discord, Microsoft Teams, and the chat app Element by exploiting the software underlying all of them: Electron, which is a framework built on the open source Chromium and the cross-platform javascript environment ..read more

‘Enjoy,’ a delivery startup that is run by a former Apple executive and which recently went public via a SPAC, may not be able to pay its workers money they are owed, according to a cache of internal Slack chats and emails obtained by Motherboard. Workers started speaking out on Enjoy’s company Slack this week after receiving an email from the company indicating that Enjoy might not be able to pay them at the end of the month.  “As Ron shared, we hope to be in a position for employees to be paid the amounts they are due. Unfortunately, given our current cash outlook, we are unable to prov ..read more

At this point in 2021, most remote workers are well familiar with the Zoom call that will not end. Someone drones on about nothing for an hour, the meeting seems to reach a natural ending point, and then someone else uses that absolutely cursed raise-hand feature for a 20-minute tangent. A barrage of Slack notifications knock-brushing into the call would be a nice parachute out of there. Busy Simulator is a web app that mimics the notification sounds for nine different platforms—Google Calendar, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Apple Mail, Outlook, iMessage, Google Chat, and Skype, plus a vibr ..read more

On Wednesday, Slack launched a new feature that allows users to message anyone else via direct messages, even if the receiver is outside of the sender's organization. In other words, the feature allows anyone to connect with you privately on Slack. Critically, even if the feature is turned off on your Slack, you'll still get an email notification and message from anyone trying to connect with you—including people who don't work with you and can use this feature to sneak harassment into your inbox.   After experts in content moderation, and several other people, complained about this ..read more

Slack recently deleted one of the company's own blog posts that explained how a local police department used the chat platform to share intelligence. The move came after some Black Slack employees flagged the blog post years ago, one employee suggested on Twitter. Slack removed the post in the past few days in the wake of widespread protests about police brutality after a white police officer killed unarmed Black man George Floyd. "These days, the Hartford Police Department’s intelligence sharing is primarily coordinated over Slack with more than 450 investigators and officers from all over th ..read more

It's been fifteen years since the American version of The Office premiered, and since then not only has the show gone from a scrappy underdog to a cultural touchstone, the nature of office work has changed dramatically. Starting today, you can fall in love with Jim and Pam all over again as every episode of The Office is recreated in Slack. The company MSCHF drops a new, weird internet toy every two weeks. The last drop was Boomer Emails, a newsletter that collates the weird emails that boomers endlessly forward to each other in order to both make you laugh, and show you the insular community ..read more

A group of five baristas who operate the espresso machines at Slack’s corporate headquarters in San Francisco learned on March 6 that they were losing their contracted positions just prior to a decision by the company to move to remote operations to curb the spread of COVID-19. Scared about losing their source of income and healthcare during a precarious moment for service industry workers, the baristas drafted an open letter to Steward Butterfield, Slack’s CEO, calling out the company for leaving them “out of jobs in the middle of a global pandemic” and demanding three months of severance ..read more

Given its traditional missions, which include subverting democracy around the world and providing U.S. leaders with unreliable intelligence analysis, it’s understandable that the Central Intelligence Agency would be among our less transparent federal agencies. Now, though, it’s gripping even more tightly to inconsequential information about what it gets up to than the ultra-secretive National Security Agency—and for no evident reason. Last year, VICE filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for any Slack domains in use by the CIA. The NSA, responding to a similar request, admitted t ..read more

Cybersecurity researchers recently found an issue that allowed them to, among other things, obtain a list of Slack channels belonging to video game giant Electronic Arts. The issue has since been fixed and EA said it found no evidence of compromise beyond the researchers' own investigation. But if it had been discovered by hackers before the researchers, they could have exposed channel names and other information related to secretive company projects. "Apparently some ex-engineer had left a piece of code exposed on a Github repo," Mossab Hussein, a security researcher from Dubai-based cybers ..read more

In the last few years, American workers across multiple industries have unionized or mobilized collectively in an attempt to get better wages, demand accountability for sexual harassers in the workplace, push for real action to slow down climate change, and in general, change company culture. The movement seems to be popping up everywhere: Amazon, Google, Gawker, Riot Games, Salesforce, Tesla, Kickstarter, Uber, you name it. In fact, approval ratings for unions among Americans are at the highest level since the beginning of the 2000s, according to Gallup. As proud members of a union, we at M ..read more