I feel like the good faith presumption for this company has to have shifted by now. Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse? Documenting participants (face, voice, language, location, etc.), recording content, etc. We're talking about the data of 200M+ users.
I see people on HN defending Zoom all the time.
>The company has acknowledged that much of its product development has been based in China, and that some Zoom calls were accidentally routed through Chinese servers.
>The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab said it found serious concerns over Zoom's security protocols, and said the company's large workforce in China left it "responsive to pressure from Chinese authorities."
>The government of Taiwan banned official use of Zoom due to security concerns, as have New York State schools, the U.S. Senate, and the German ministry of foreign affairs.
>Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in early June that the company has chosen not to encrypt free calls in order to cooperate with law enforcement.
>The government of Taiwan banned official use of Zoom due to security concerns, as have New York State schools, the U.S. Senate, and the German ministry of foreign affairs.
This is good enough reason to not use it.
Also I stopped using zoom and trying to avoiding it as much as possible after the very first vulnerability scandal[0] came about
The NYC Department of Education (DOE), one of the largest in the nation, banned Zoom in April but "following several weeks of collaboration with the company, [NYC DOE is] now able to offer Zoom as a safe, secure platform for use across the DOE" as per a letter Chancellor Carranza wrote on May 6th, 2020.[1]
Public school teachers tried other video conferencing solutions but, for better or for worse, Zoom's UX was always easier to use or less janky than other paid or opensource offerings at scale -- and that's saying something because Zoom's UX isn't what any of us might call super smooth.
Funny and true but also because companies should really scrutinize this kind of software more carefully. Your meeting app "participates" in some of the most delicate conversations.
I used Zoom exactly once. I was invited, I installed the software and Chrome extension as a regular user. I had a mediocre experience in the meeting but didn't pay too much attention, and then proceeded to uninstall the software when I got a prompt that I need to do it as admin.
For me this was a clear warning signal that they want the software to be there especially in companies (that didn't block it) where many users may end up installing it but then aren't able to remove and just forget about it.
Then I started reading about their installer "mishap", their general encryption scheme weakness "mishap", their encryption key routing through China (!!!) "mishap", the redefining of E2EE "mishap", the default settings "mishap", and the mishaps just piled on to the point where I personally believe only a great deal of ignorance or blissfulness could allow a company to still use it.
I get schools and individuals do, it's "free", meaning they don't pay with money and they don't need to look any further than that. But I refuse to ever use it again and when I got Zoom invitations I politely declined, offered to host the meeting myself, or else just asked to be sent the meeting notes on mail. I have no reason to believe Zoom intends to fix their issues but rather to hide them better next time.
I'm not sure if you are kidding, but that's not the reason. It was a decision by the security team and a reaction to multiple security issues that were found in the Zoom client. Google employees can still use the Zoom web client on work computers.
China has been accused a number of times of engaging in industrial espionage. As a company developing a lot of high technology products, I think Google is entirely justified in keep Zoom out of its technology infrastructure.
If it wasn't clear, I was just being sarcastic about Google's huge number of messaging products... I fully agree with your statement, their move totally makes sense from an IP protection standpoint.
I'm not surprised. My company has also done this. Basically it's because we don't have an agreement with them about data protection, and we can't have company information going over 3rd party systems without a contract.
Is there a non-Zoom client that can connect to Zoom meetings? My company implemented RingCentral about a year ago, which appears to just use a rebranded Zoom architecture for the online meeting component. They're not going to get rid of it anytime soon.
Zoom does have a SIP/H.323 bridge https://zoom.us/roomconnector . I believe it's the decision of the meeting host's organization whether to enable it, and there may be an extra cost associated with it.
Zoom is a company I have loved so far, but a lot of this is starting to really rub me the wrong way and I really don't want to have to go find another solution.
However, without some sort of reversal, this is enough for me to deal with the mess of doing that.
I've tried Google Meet, Jitsi, and some other things, but Zoom is the only service that my 6+ year old laptop can handle for more than 5 min without nosediving into 100% CPU usage and freezing up.
Does anyone have other suggestions? Either for other services or for troubleshooting Jitsi?
You could give Whereby [1] a try. I really liked it when it was named "appear.in" (that's now a completely different company), and used it for a bit, until my work switched to Teams.
Whereby is, as far as I can tell, completely owned by a Norwegian registered company.
A Whereby-developer here. It's awesome you recommend us. <3 But we'll also kill your CPU ^_^
You can turn on "mobile mode" in advanced device settings, and it should be a bit better. But we're a bit limited in how CPU-friendly we really can be, living in the browser. Not that we can't improve, there's certainly extra tricks we could try - but not easily without also lowering fps and resolution.
I don't think "low resource use" is a big selling-argument for our product. Video can be quite heavy.
Actually, if you are using 4+ rooms, we will in many cases be better than some other webrtc services because we for these bigger rooms use a server in the middle to distribute all the streams. That will result in lower resource use. You only encode and send once, and it is distributed by the server. But if other webrtc kills CPU on 4 or less, we probably won't be much better.
This "more than 4 room" is not p2p and end-to-end encrypted, since the server (SFU) needs to read and change some headers. So it is a tradeoff. There's now "insertable streams" which allow you to do encryption on the media client side, but it's a test for now: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...
Hey! I've been using Whereby at work for a while and it's great.
However, I should mention that it's not possible to join calls through the mobile app (as far as I can tell), and the web app on mobile wouldn't capture my Bluetooth headset's audio properly somehow.
Again, thanks for the great work. Just thought I'd let you know :)
Thanks! It is very valuable with feedback like this, even if in this case we're painfully aware of it. :)
I was working on fixing up that when COVID-19 hit. Now we're trying to stamp out more obscure audio+video bugs (like bluetooth, which can be unreliable). We're in process of hiring a few more people so we can hopefully put someone on caring more for the non-logged in mobile app experience.
You do get a join button once you've logged in. But I must confess it is not a good experience by default. It used to be on the top of the priority list, but then scaling and any video/audio issues jumped to the top.
We have used a lot of time making it work on Safari. And we continue to use quite substantial resources on it. Their webrtc implementation is quite new, and not as stable as Chrome and Firefox. And with new code comes new bugs.
There is currently a bug with audio, where it'll crash in Safari, -- and we have had some issues reconnects that was more our fault (though Firefox and Chrome is much more forgiving). We have a workaround for the first, and will be doing a fix for the second once we're reasonably sure it won't regress other browsers.
Is it any of those issues you talk about? Or is it something else? (I'm not personally familiar with the Safari issues, btw, since I'm a Linux user, but I keep an eye on Firefox and Chromium-based browsers)
are you using it on the browser, or are you using the jitsi desktop version (which seems to be distinct and not cross-compatible)?
Are there settings you adjusted?
Are you just doing one-on-one meetings (that works fine for me too) or group calls of 3+ (which is what I need to do everyday where it immediately becomes unusable)?
I'm also using a linux distro based off ubuntu/debian.
> are you using it on the browser, or are you using the jitsi desktop version
I am using Jitsi in//on the browser [for me, Firefox].
I don't know if I have a preference as I have only "just started using" the past few months via being given a link I click on whilst I am on my laptop... so unfortunately I cannot speak about Jitsi via Desktop Version at this time.
> Are there settings you adjusted?
Besides simple sound volume off of my OS//headphones, I use whatever the default settings are.
> 1-1 meetings or 3+ group calls?
Group calls, each time would be roughly 5-12 people.
For other info just for giggles:
The laptop I do this on is connected wirelessly to my home wireless network, about 6 feet away from my wireless router; my wireless router may have multiple people using it at a given time since I share. I'm in US-California-Silicon_Valley on Comcast.
Jitsi Meet had some troubles in Firefox due to some WebRTC implementation differences. It is being worked on and the situation has improved, but I'm not sure whether all outstanding issues have been resolved. You could try Chromium and see if it gets any better.
Due to the god awful state of Microsoft Teams conferencing, we recently started trying Chime at my new job. There are still some hiccups, but I can vouch that the quality of both audio and video is very good on Chime.
We have also used GoToMeeting with a good amount of success. Anything but Teams, haha.
https://goteam.video/ (Disclaimer/Plug: I work for the company that built this). It's WebRTC based but should work fine in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and latest Edge (ie the Chrome variant). We've just added optional end-to-end encryption for multiparty sessions based on the recent "Insertable Streams" feature available in Chrome M83+.
HighFive seems to be popular where I'm at. I like, it works. I have a couple of minor UI complaints but overall it's fine. I haven't seen it in use with large (say, >20 people) meetings, though.
My group (6 of us) did the oposite. We used to use Skype till we had continual problems of people getting infinite "loading" screens, we switched to Zoom the last 3 or 4 games because of it.
I have to say the video quality is much better and the DM being able to screen share while we can still see each other is great. Also the "Brady Bunch" view is great, being able to see everyone at once is awesome.
I'm not very happy with all of the news trickling out about Zoom but I really do like their product.
> I'm not very happy with all of the news trickling out about Zoom but I really do like their product.
That's my position, too. I teach at a large public university in Japan, where the school year begins in April. At the beginning of March, we were expecting to start classes in person as normal a month later. By around March 20, we had decided to teach most of our classes online; a week later, "most" had become "all." Teachers and students had little to no prior experience with online education, and their level of general digital literacy varied widely. From the plethora of tools available, we had to choose software that everyone could use and that would be reliable and scalable.
Despite concerns about security issues, Zoom was chosen as our videoconferencing platform. That seems to have turned out to be a good choice, as it is stable, can handle large groups, and offers features (breakout rooms, video and audio recording, attendance reports, etc.) that are useful for university classes. That fact that it hasn't (yet) been blocked in China was also a factor in choosing it, as we have students stuck overseas who need to take part in classes. Anecdotal reports from colleagues who teach at other universities in Japan suggest that the non-Zoom platforms have not performed as well.
Now that teachers and students are used to online classes, I hope we can also try other tools in the future. But considering how well Zoom performed during our hectic ramp-up to online teaching, I give it my grudging support for the time being.
Are you trying to do one-on-one of many-to-many calls? If you're doing just one-on-one there is very basic webrtc in web browser service[1]. I've also made my own for quickly connecting with people online[2], not sure if it's your use case though...
Are any of the participants using Firefox? There's a known problem with Firefox's WebRTC and Jitsi wherein even a single Firefox participant can create performance issues for everyone.
Is Google really any better? They may simply be better at hiding their surveillance apparatus. We need to decentralize, i.e. destroy large non-decentralized organizations.
US citizens have a significant better chance at fighting a warrant. Personally, we've been using Jitsi for video. It's not amazing, but it is free in many senses of the word.
Zoom is a US company founded by an immigrant from China with 700 employees in China where the software and product development teams are. All 700 of those employees can be leaned on to break security generally or to break it for one specific person or meeting, even if we don’t believe there management of the Chinese or American parts of the firm won’t just do what the CPC ask them to do.
No it is not. I'm planning on switching to jitsi for my personal and non-profit projects, and I guess I'll advocate for it at work. Switching from Zoom to Google/Microsoft/Cisco anything is like switching from Evian to Aquafina.
Absolutely, don't be ridiculous. Google is not and will never be complicit to Chinese censorship in America.
This is classic whataboutism and we don't benefit from such hyperbole.
After evaluating a number of solutions, we chose uberconference (no relation to uber). I really like it, especially that the conference is just a phone number.
Jitsi is great! If they can figure out a good webinar solution it could be an absolute killer. As it stands, it's (in my opinion) really just useful for small scale interactive meetings at this point, not 100+ participant events.
It's really great as a face-to-face solution though, where Zoom and many others are actually kind of overkill.
I should've made it clear when I say "events" I mean more webinar style events. 100+ participant meetings where everyone is an equal participant isn't useful, but that sort of thing isn't uncommon if you're holding all hands calls or annual shareholder meetings etc.
Well, no – not if you still need audience participation with video and/or audio. Things like annual/quarterly meetings and such where people have a right to speak etc. It's really not that different from a typical video conference, just that the moderator has controls to mute/unmute people and participants can't unmute themselves. Polling/voting/chat features I reckon are secondary I reckon.
I've wanted to like Jitsi, but the quality difference with Zoom is noticeable. Same with Google Meet and anything I've seen that uses WebRTC. They remind me of RealPlayer back in the early 2000s in terms of blockyness.
I would love to know about any Zoom competitors, free or paid, with comparable quality.
If you have your own jitsy server, you can define the max quality up to 1080p i think, the free jitsy service/server has probably really low 'max' video quality.
BigBlueButton is also interesting, but it's more like a Schooling-tool...but also without a client (aka just need a browser)
I think you’re overstating the complexity a bit. When people mention Zoom I don’t fuss over whether it’s desktop, web (do they even offer it?), mobile, or whatever.
>Do you love the company, its leadership, its product, or its pricing?
you didn't ask me, but imo they haven't existed long enough to garnish love for their company and leadership.
They had a product and a price point at a time with huge & abnormal sudden demand. I think this alone was enough to make them successful in the short term.
Not OP, I love the company's leadership and the product (not the privacy issue part). It's awesome to see Eric leaving Webex and building a product that seems and sells superior to Webex. It's not that easy to beat yourself at your own game and he's proved. That is one thing I like about Zoom
But that's an integral part of the product. There is a lot of reason for suspicion floating around the company and the product itself, and the long string of security screwups and misdirection confirms every bit of that.
What's the point of having even good functionality if it comes attached to such concerns? Most products have a good side but choosing one is always about picking what's the worst problem that you can live with rather than the best feature.
No, for the majority of people that is a part of the product they do not care about. That's educated tech people at Google, which had to forbid the use of Zoom, and high school teachers alike.
Subtle yet severe privacy invasions do not matter to the glaring majority of people because they cannot associate it with direct consequences.
If I have been using Zoom and the Chinese government now has 200 hours of my facial and speech data, at first it doesn't impact me. I don't see the impact, I don't feel it aside from some people yelling on HN.
The consequences are either subtle and easily dismissed (e.g. ad tech/marketing when Instagram secretly listens to the phone mic and suddenly you see products that were part of the conversation) or severe and too far out to relate it to a Zoom call 23 months ago (e.g. border control when entering China for tourism).
If you're not an activist then chances are you do not care about online privacy.
I think people care when they are properly informed, in a setting where they are ready to hear such information. The primary reason they seem not to care is because "everyone is using X, so I guess it can't be that bad" and an information/concern overload.
We are constantly bombarded with new concerns and this particular topic requires expert opinion to truly know which software you can trust. Then there is the problem of choosing which expert to trust. And you still have to have time left simply to live your life. It's just not an easy thing to let yourself be concerned with this.
In my personal experience, I've yet to meet a person that turned out not to care once I've taken the time to discuss this with them one on one.
In my workplace and from my perspective, I don't know how Zoom became trustworthy in the first place except through growth hacking and selling iPads with their software on it under the 'Zoom Rooms' name.
Besides that, why defend a company or a corporation in the first place? It's a damn shame that people are more enervated by corporate strife than by the suffering of our fellow beings.
To be fair, Zoom is the best video conference software I've ever used. It's so much better than Skype or anything created by Google, Facebook, etc. When I first started using it at work 5 years ago, I was blown away at how stable it was, and how many people could connect at the same time. It just worked.
You're getting downvoted, but they really do have a solid product. A lot of their growth does come from their aggressive sales and marketing, but their video conferencing solution is by far the best I have used—it Just Works™ in a way that none of their competition seem to be able to match. (And I've used most of their competitors.)
Which is a shame given issues like the OP and all of the security/privacy problems they have had recently.
Totally agreed. The thing I think contributes most to this impression is how local voice is recorded at all times on the client, and then replayed at a higher speed to the other participants if the connection drops briefly. This enables others to hear what was said, without having to listen to the speech at the original pace, which would result in a delay. Genuis!
This has been standard practice with video calling products for many years. I know at least FaceTime and Duo do it. It might even be built into WebRTC?
Then again talking about videoconferencing solutions and immediately comparing to Google or Facebook, and not mentioning something like Cisco Webex is like talking about mail and immediately comparing to Yahoo.
And before you say "but Zoom is free", obviously it's not. From the carefully orchestrated lie about "end to end encryption", to the routing of calls through China, and to the topic of this article. At every step they catered to companies more willing to look just at the price and never ask a single question.
Yahoo Mail is one of the best web email clients today. Any gmail user that I've talked to who has tried Yahoo Mail prefers the Yahoo UI overall.
Having said that, the US government installed a linux kernel module (approved by Marissa Mayer) that sniffs traffic on Yahoo Mail servers, so don't send anything you don't want recorded.
At least Skype and Webex don't accidentally route your calls through China. I don't really like Skype but Webex shines compared to either Zoom or Skype. And I'm talking meetings with triple digit attendance, meetings with dozens of simultaneous breakout sessions and screen sharing, etc. By far a better experience than Zoom.
The thing that Zoom really has going for it is that it's free and heavily marketed. This made it popular with a lot of people. But it's exactly the people who are least prepared to make an informed decision (and yes, I count a lot on "company men" here). The reasons are sprinkled all over every Zoom article.
Except that Skype non-accidentally routes your calls through Microsoft's servers, and it was originally a P2P application. End-to-end encryption too started being "complicated", "unfeasible" and "unnecessary" after they acquired the company. Thanks, but no thanks.
But that's exactly the point, others do things more transparently and if you don't like them you're at least in a better position to make an informed decision. Plus there's a major difference between Microsoft and China. Take the current article for example.
You're willing to hand-waive all of the many, many proven, and intentionally hidden major issues with Zoom but you suddenly become worried that Skype works as advertised, poorly as that may be? Would you apply the same principle to your food and taking the one that lies on the label about dangerous ingredients? Or do principles change with accounts?
Aw man, I didn’t know those iPads were a Zoom product. For some stupid reason I was under the illusion that my company made a home-grown Zoom meeting room solution.
It never really worked properly for us, but what worked a little too perfectly was the camera control.
I had so much fun pointing the camera towards the open door and zooming in so far that we could all lip-read a conversation happening across the office. Or, due to a lack of forethought, creating the official CrotchCam(tm) by letting the camera auto-focus and then zooming in to the unfortunate victim's midriff.
If they have a workforce in China, there are 100% spies working there. Putting it another way, China would be foolish not to have spies working at Zoom, just like it would be foolish to not have spies working at Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. You should assume all of those companies have been infiltrated by the major countries of the world, or they are working with them. To believe otherwise would be extremely naive.
The first time I read that Zoom is the shell (in the USA) while the majority of work is being done in China, I thought the exact same thing. That China has everyone's face 3D scanned by now (multiple photos from multiple angles), everyone's voiceprint, everyone's IP, transcripts of what was said and by who...
Now they are trying to rebuild their shattered rep, while still handing anything and everything to their patrons.
"That China has everyone's face 3D scanned by now (multiple photos from multiple angles), everyone's voiceprint, everyone's IP, transcripts of what was said and by who"
As a native Chinese, I haven't been scanned by 3D scanner. How do you get this conclusion?
Presumably they mean that if you use your web cam with zoom they would be able to construct a 3D model of your face from the camera feed as you move your head around.
Some comms you want to monitor, some you want to disrupt... And Chinese authorities like big gestures, sending messages, "we know who you are and what you do, we can get you anytime, you are not safe anywhere".
Yes, and we may all be disembodied brains living in vats inside a teapot. This is why I don't find such arguments very compelling for showing we should necessarily assume we are being surveilled. The same argument can be applied to situations that have nothing to do with the internet too.
Those are certainly possible ways in which the surveillance could still be happening, because nothing is certain. But the argument is necessarily probabilistic (in the Bayesian sense) and not binary. So yes, I have to take this into account to determine my final risk, but there is no point in necessarily assuming I am being surveilled because then I might never do anything at all.
> Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse?
It makes perfect sense to boycott Zoom based on their security issues, but does the presumption of innocence mean nothing anymore? It shouldn't be difficult to prove that Zoom is actively trying to block Chinese activists.
China banned Zoom during the trade war. Are you going to treat that as evidence that Zoom isn't colluding with the CCP? Why is Zoom not embracing end-to-end encryption to free users evidence that they are beholden to China, but Zoom committing to end-to-end encryption for paid users not evidence of the contrary? This type of circumstantial cherry picking is how conspiracy theories sprout.
For some reason, China periodically bans and unbans websites before banning it completely. Reddit is one example of this. It looks like Zoom is moving away from the Chinese market altogether:
does the presumption of innocence mean nothing anymore
In a court of law, yes. In the court of public opinion, it has never been that way.
I don't blame people for being suspicious of Zoom. Why wait until the harm has already been done to move to something else?
Zoom knows it has a credibility problem. If Zoom really cared, it would do something to distance itself from China and the Chinese government. But it doesn't.
I don't blame people for being suspicious of Zoom either. I just find it sad that so many readers of Hackernews are endorsing logic that is so unscientific.
In what way is it "unscientific"? That's an odd choice of words in this situation. What we're aiming for is rational and in this instance, it's perfectly rational to be suspicious based on an abductive argument and unproven extrapolation. As another commenter aptly noticed, once you're able to prove it, the harm has already been done.
Having read the original comment again, I can see how it can be interpreted as suggesting to avoid Zoom as a precautionary measure, rather than accusing Zoom of wrongdoing. However, plenty of people are treating this incident as proof that Zoom is lying about encryption.
Don't want to sound I'm defending Zoom or CCP, but how does en masse surveillance work technically in this case? How practical it is to go over all the voice data (not manually I presume)? Text based mining and censoring is possible but there still is a huge gap and language expertise isn't cheap. I might be missing a few references but it'll be great if someone could point me to these links.
I might be wrong here, since I only have this from hearsay, and I certainly won't touch Zoom. But, wasn't the "end-to-end encryption" a term they used in a blatantly deceptive way? The two ends not being the two users, but the user A and zoom servers, and zoom servers and user B? Please do correct me if I'm misinformed.
I think Zoom is probably best used for hangouts-on-air type things, where you are literally publishing the contents of the call to the world in realtime anyway; for anything else it's off my list.
There is really no excuse for "accidentally" routing through Chinese servers for a service. To me the reasons are as shallow as Google's "error in algorithm".
Just recently YouTube "accidentally" deleted the account of a pro-democracy channel in Hong Kong with more than 600k subscribers [1]. Incidentally, this has never happened to pro-Chinese channels.
I get the vibe with anything China related. Like it takes an over abundance of facts not to be attacked. Zoom fiasco is interesting though. I don’t do anything I don’t mind be monitored on there so sort of careless for now
> Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse?
Why does this event move the needle one way or another? The group had a paid account so Zoom knows who they are, and this was a publicized event. All the Chinese government needed to know was an event they don't like was happening, with the services of a company they can exercise soft power over.
I totally agree with you, there's a very high probability that the Chinese gov is recording everything.
But is that any better than being 100 % sure that the US gov is doing it?
I mean, what is the point of "the Chinese may be listening this is horrible!" when we know for a fact that the US are listening and most probably multiple european countries.
Nowadays, you must assume that whatever you do online is recorded by multiple states and may be used against you one day.
I am more worried about dictatorships recording everything than other regimes. Does not excuse recording at all, just an appreciation of the level of risk.
Thanks for your reply, but I fail to see how a dictatorship would do worst things with these recordings than a democracy, say like the USA, UK or France, where intelligence services operate outside the law as Snowden (and many others) have shown over the last decade.
Also, I see that I'm being downvoted and I would be really interested to know why I'm wrong. I mean it, I love the level of discussion here and I really like constructive criticsm.
Intelligence services may operate outside of the Law in pretty much all countries but the difference is that democracies typically have a Rule of Law as to how the data can be used against you. Not a perfect safeguard but way better than dictatorships where power has a blank check to do anything to you, anytime.
You are oversimplifying the issue, in my opinion. Zoom has R&D office in China. If Chinese authorities come to Zoom with a violation of local law, Zoom has two options. First ignore the request and this means that the company is likely to be banned in China or comply with the request and get blowback in US. This issue is not unique to Zoom and each company makes its own decision. For instance, Google and Facebook fail to comply and are banned in China. But Apple does comply with Chinese laws and there are number of apps that are simply not available in China but are available in US. However, I wouldn't make a judgement that Google is good, but Apple is bad. Nor is this issue limited in China. Same thing applies to EU. EU has passed GDPR laws that all US companies have to comply with if they want to do business in EU. Again, some decided to comply with GDPR, others exited the market. Even in US this issue exists. When the government tells Google that they can't offer their services to Iran or sell to Huawei. Google chose to apply. You can try to make an argument that complying with US government orders is good, but complying with other government orders (EU, China, Brazil) is bad. This may work for you if you are an American, but the rest of the world knows about the Patriot Act, Edward Snowden and NSA. You could also make an argument that complying with any government is bad and the way PRISM is enabled by US tech is terrible. But if US companies start ignoring US laws, no matter how terrible they are, the only right thing to do is to shut the company down. It's called a rule of law. I am writing this not to say that Zoom is good or bad, but to prevent oversimplifying the issue or vilifying specific companies, countries or governments.
How on earth could a user "prove" this? Mention some secret on a call and then watch for the Chinese government to act on that secret? Give us a break. It's much safer to assume surveillance and protect oneself accordingly.
We have definite proof of surveillance by the Five-Eyes, why would China would be better at hiding evidence of surveillance. Claiming that something can't be measured at all doesn't help your argument either. That type of reasoning is only acceptable in theology.
There are plenty of Chinese dissidents, including the the activist that is the subject of TFA. The default assumption is to assume noncorrelation between things until proven otherwise. That's a defensible position, yours isn't.
I only said that it is safer to assume surveillance. I didn't say it was more fair or more "defensible" or whatever. In reply you've offered "default assumptions" and "burdens of proof" and "theology". Whom do you attempt to convince with this [EDIT:] sophistry?
Oh and nice job implying that Chinese dissidents have the duty of "proving" to the world that the Chinese government surveils them. Snowden is not a dissident, he is a whistleblower. Also, in general, telling people who suffer that they ought to educate the rest of us about the particular details of their suffering is not cool.
> its product development has been based in China, and that some Zoom calls were accidentally routed through Chinese servers.
Curious, did you background check every employee/contractor to make sure they are Chinese race free?
Did you do every byte of your network traffic audit to make sure they are not Chinese IP routable? How often do you update your firewall rules?
Because if you don't do either of these, if you run a successful company, someone will write an article to complain you have employed a Chinese developer and routed traffic to China.
There’s a big difference between routing an encrypted packet through China and decrypting that packet on a server located in China.
Likewise, there’s a big difference between employing a Chinese national in the US and having a large part of you engineering organization operate from within China.
> having a large part of you engineering organization operate from within China
Shockingly, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, IBM, Redhat, Cisco all have engineering team in mainland China. Do a job list search please.
> decrypting that packet on a server located in China
In your infrastructure setup, for hostnames in a cluster, how do you separate China servers and non-China servers? Do you put a subdomain or something? And how do you link user's nationality to which server they are supposed to connect to?
What if there's a US hosted meeting, a mainland Chinese user joins the meeting? Is it an ethical thing to happen?
Should the packet decrypting happen in a US server? China server? or server located in a third neutral country instead?
What if a US citizen joins a mainland Chinese hosted meeting? Is it wrong for Zoom to decrypt packets in China?
> In your infrastructure setup, for hostnames in a cluster, how do you separate China servers and non-China servers? Do you put a subdomain or something?
Yes, these are exactly the sorts of things one does. The PRC is so distinct in terms of legal norms that servers hosted there need to be treated differently. If PRC would adhere to the legal norms of most of the rest of the world, and stop trying to start a cold war with the U.S, this would not be necessary.
> And how do you link user's nationality to which server they are supposed to connect to?
It's not so much about nationality, but about jurisdiction. For calls where no participants' connections originate from a PRC IP block, don't use the PRC infrastructure. For calls where at least one connection originates from the PRC, terminate the call wherever meets the legal requirements (that PRC participant may have special obligations to their government) and is technically convenient. It's not really that hard.
> What if a US citizen joins a mainland Chinese hosted meeting? Is it wrong for Zoom to decrypt packets in China?
Again, it is not a matter of citizenship, but of jurisdiction. If the call is hosted in PRC, that's not even a question; if PLA asks, you must decrypt the packets on the host, or at least provide keys.
In each case, you bring up nationality or citizenship, but when it comes to these scenarios, these are not relevant. Chinese nationals legally present in U.S. jurisdiction have most of the same rights as U.S. citizens, and all of the same legal obligations. In terms of obligations, the same is true in PRC: if you are present in PRC, you are obligated to follow the PRC's law, whether or not you are a national.
That's what happens when a lawyer designs IM/conf app. Follow your design, the switches/routers need to confirm the "jurisdiction" of each TCP/IP packet? What wonderful idea, please do submit your RFC to IETF.
> but about jurisdiction. For calls where no participants' connections originate from a PRC IP block, don't use the PRC infrastructure.
That's basically where the Chinese got the idea of building the Great Firewall started. Some IP addresses are from evil capitalist USA and need to be filtered.
> Curious, did you background check every employee/contractor to make sure they are Chinese race free?
That's immoral, illegal, and silly; effectively nobody is doing this, and if most people found out about that, they would try to put a stop to it. The PRC is a state, that state does not have a monopoly on representing any race.
This is not a Chinese people problem, it's a CCP problem. Chinese people in the ROC don't do this sort of thing.
這不是華人的問題，這是中共的問題啊。中華民國的華人不這樣做。
> Do you audit every every byte of your network traffic to make sure it is not Chinese IP routable? How often do you update your firewall rules?
Yes, I operate servers and routers that simply do not route to or from PRC IP blocks. It's often the right thing to do, given that “reputable” server operators like Baidu seem to be the source of a huge proportion of the impersonation and spam, and often zero legitimate connections. When I get DMARC reports, more than half of the reports are PRC IPs impersonating my mail host, hopefully for reflection rather than full-on impersonation.
> effectively every US media is name calling companies/universities who have a slightest business with China or Chinese people.
Business with PRC and business with Chinese people are separate matters. I don't know of any North American university that doesn't have "the slightest business" with Chinese people; and "effectively every U.S. media" is not "name calling" them all.
What I have seen, is a select few journalists reporting on the proven PRC-funded academic espionage schemes, where the PRC is illegally bribing academics to privately provide advance copies of U.S. government funded research. The coverage of this has been sparse, and there are whole major outlets who simply have not mentioned it.
> Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in early June that the company has chosen not to encrypt free calls in order to cooperate with law enforcement.
This is incorrect. They don't offer end-to-end encryption, but it is encrypted between each client and the Zoom servers, and they have promised there's no way for a Zoom employee to spy on a conversation without visibly joining the meeting. https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1268061790954385408
> They don't offer end-to-end encryption, but it is encrypted between each client and the Zoom servers,
I think it's absurd that when talking about private messages the bar for privacy would be so low as to say that client-server encryption would be a "feature"-
> they have promised there's no way for a Zoom employee to spy on a conversation without visibly joining the meeting
That's false unless no one at zoom has logins to any of the servers that route the calls or deploy code to them. Let's be clear and specific about the terms. "no way for" and "not allowed under guidelines" have very different technical meanings.
A promise is a promise. The "no way to spy" is likely just compliance. A lot of companies have compliance guarantees in place, like SOC2, which is about processes and documentation/audit trail. So the thing blocking you from reading customer data is another person in the organization having to confirm it's a legitimate action.
Government level surveillance is not the same as an employee listening in on a whim. It's an organized endeavor, which comes with a process, so it may as well be ok from compliance point of view.
> This is incorrect. They don't offer end-to-end encryption
It's all about end-to-end encryption, so it's correct. If they decrypt it anywhere on the way then three letter agencies can always listen to what you say with a proper letter.
IMO that's not "incorrect" so much as it is "ambiguous about the type of encryption being referred to. Even the most spy-happy, malicious service could offer HTTPS encryption, so hearing "they do encrypt some stuff" doesn't address concerns about Zoom willfully monitoring customers
Neither does the second part about promising not to spy on a conversation; surrendering conversation metadata would be almost as bad from a privacy perspective.
Either it is E2E encrypted, or it is unencrypted on zoom servers and the only claim that they can reasonably make is that they haven't provided their employees with the tools to observe a call invisibly.
This is addressed in the Alex Stamos twitter thread.
It _is_ E2E encrypted. And from what I understand the "promise" is a technological promise, not a process promise; you can check the exact terms of the promise in the paper.
The paper’s ideas are not yet implemented. Right now, it’s encrypted to whatever keys Zoom likes, including the PRC’s. Same system as Apple’s or Google’s
OK, but if we were to take this stance it than literally the whole thread is pointless debate, right? It started with this:
> Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in early June that the company has chosen not to encrypt free calls in order to cooperate with law enforcement.
The entire debate is about the not-yet-implemented E2E encryption (that's where Zoom "does not encrypt free calls"). And the Alex Stamos thread explains very well both why that is a sensible choice, and how they will implement E2E encryption& what are the limitations.
If we're discussing about current implementation, it doesn't make sense to be outraged that "Zoom doesn't offer encryption for free calls" - if we talk about E2E encryption, it doesn't offer it for anyone; and if we talk just about HTTPS, it offers it to everyone. So in fact we must've been discussing the future implementation not the current one - right?
Encrypted = private to most people. There’s no reason to muddy the waters with the fact that Zoom encrypts some data temporarily at some time with keys that they control, because that isn’t what anyone cares about.
I've been currently using Zoom during the pandemic because as a product it's still the best (and I signed up for a discounted year of pro), but I won't give them any money again.
Tesla canceled Zoom due to these privacy concerns expressed in this article. We use Microsoft Teams now and it's much better. Everyone already used it as an instant messenger before this and since it's part of the Outlook ecosystem i've found that it's much better. It's also saved a ton of useless meetings that run really long because i can just call someone straight through Teams instead of setting a meeting.
As much as I don't like consolidation of tech, I've had really good experiences with Google Meet. No scummy practices like forcing users to pretend that the app installer doesn't download just to connect from the browser either. What are Zoom's advantages?
I haven't personally used Google Meet, but part of what drew me to Zoom:
- General preference for non-ad supported business model.
- Google Meet wasn't an option until very recently.
- I really dislike hangouts and how it leaks chat all over Gmail (among other things), and this has biased me against their other products.
- Similarly, I was a huge fan of Google Voice which was way ahead of its time and which they abandoned for years until many other multi-billion dollar companies rose up and took the space.
- I've anecdotally heard Meet had worse video/audio quality from friends.
- I tend to try and avoid Google chat products since they're usually a mess and often killed.
Of all of these, the first and last are really the only valid reasons.
Google Meet does have its own scummy practices though (adding itself to meetings without asking which confuses participants and is extremely annoying, Benedict Evans tweeted/wrote about this).
Maybe Jitsi works well enough to actually use? I already have a Matrix server, I could try getting friends to use that instead (realistically probably will be difficult).
> I've anecdotally heard Meet had worse video/audio quality from friends.
The best part of Zoom taking off is suddenly Meet appears to be getting new features almost daily. It's like a product Google suddenly cares about again. Audio and video quality have also greatly improved. It's really like a completely different product from 6 months ago.
I think the pandemic has brought into harsh relief how critical some of those quality of life features were, and advanced their urgency within Google. They're adding so many millions of users per day, and already had a strong initial base product, that building these additional zoom-competitive features is a no-brainer.
And Google Meet is able to bring to bear some of their absolutely amazing advances with ML for things like predictive sound for dropped packets and the new denoiser function they've launched, along with live captioning and some other just incredible features.
There are a few little things that bug me with Google Meet: their newly introduced grid view doesn't display yourself as one of the tiles, for some reason. I don't want to pay $25/mo/user for an enterprise account _just_ for the video recording feature, which I will have to do come September, if they don't extend the current offer to make that available to all GSuite tiers. And I wish it recorded the transcription. But overall, it's a pretty great product, and its tight integration with Google Calendar and Slack, along with its frankly fantastic meeting room hardware has made it our software of choice for some time now for conferencing.
Plus, it's a sunk cost for GSuite users. Aside from a licensing fee for the meeting rooms, I'm not paying an _additional_ per-user monthly fee, which for a small consultancy like mine, matters.
The main reason I liked Zoom was because it was so easy to install. I've had zooms with non-technical people over 70, and not one of them needed help installing it.
The same cannot be said of Google. Heck, as a technical person I have trouble getting Google Meet to work consistently. That was Zoom's main advantage -- their ease of setup and use, and "it just works". We now know that part of the reason that is the case is because they do some very unorthodox things that are security nightmares.
Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Zoom has always been on the very far end towards ease of use and away from security.
Am I the only one who finds Zoom more difficult to use than Google Meet? I am not a regular user of Zoom, and do not want to install the app on my computer, but Zoom apparently requires the meeting organizer to go into their settings and enable a "Join from your browser" link for participants [0]. This is quite user unfriendly, and if I have to watch some seminar on Zoom I can't be asking the organizer to enable this option.
Note this is coming from someone who uses Firefox and Duck Duck Go to resist Google's monopoly (i.e., I'm not a Google fanboy.)
I think you are right that Google Meet in general is easier to use. However, I think that's at least in part because Zoom is so full of options. I mostly realize this when playing games via Zoom with friends. "your laptop that has no video on is making it so that we cannot see you iPad's video!" - "just turn on 'hide non-video participants'". "you need to get closer together or move the iPad further away because the edges of your video get cut off" - "Just double click the video and it will stop cropping". "Can you stop sharing your screen? I'd much rather see participants" - "Just click the icon in the top right to swap video and shared screen. You could also turn on dual monitor support".
Fair point. The ever-present tradeoff between features and simplicity... I guess for my fairly vanilla use case of talking to my friends or colleagues at work, there are just a lot of easier options.
I’m glad Zoom is forcing Google Meet to innovate, though.
Security and ease of use are not by default mutually exclusive. Depending on circumstances satisfying both may be a challenge, but it’s not a blanket impossibility and we could probably hold certain companies up to a standard that corresponds to their multi-billion valuations.
A virtual “slider” on which you can only dial up security by hurting usability is only a useful map, not the territory.
> It’s worth keeping in mind that even though security and ease of use tend to inversely correlate with each other, they are not by default mutually exclusive.
I actually disagree with you. I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive.
I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability.
Now to be clear, I absolutely believe we should have a lot more security than we do, and we should be giving up usability to do it. But I think that it is necessary to give up usability.
> 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure.
You have to install a plugin on every browser and device. That's not user friendly. Also some sites break and you have to understand why.
> 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user.
You have to have an account on the app store. You can't log into the same account on more than five machines. You have to put your password in every time you install an app.
That's all a lot harder than clicking on a link in an email.
> 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually.
You have to install 1password on all your devices. You have to mange your passwords with 1password. I'm an expert and even I have a hard time getting it to catch every update and every password field. 1password is a usability nightmare. Having the same password everywhere is a lot easier (and obviously less secure).
You're looking at one aspect after the initial setup and ignoring maintenance.
You're assuming that an extra step always implies a usability penalty, but that's not true.
"Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability)
Notice the presence of "safely" there. You should be penalizing the alternative in each of these examples for the non-zero risk of data breaches and getting pwned. Then we can have a more productive debate about which cost is greater.
It's not really much of a comparison if you pick things like 'the security mechanism breaks in some way' and no similar failure modes of the 'no security' variant. It's a serious usability problem if an insecure interaction gives you bogus information or if all your accounts are compromised because you use the same password everywhere.
If that's the point it seems like a particularly inaccurate and cherry-picky one. Security is not what's introducing the failure modes, the adversarial universe is. The no-security solutions have catastrophically worse usability in that reality. You're comparing the usability of things with security features with the usability of things without security in a hypothetical non-adversarial environment. I can posit a world in which security features never fail or introduce usability friction, that wouldn't be a useful starting point for a comparison either.
Generalizing your point, introducing or expanding on any feature or functionality always implies proportional degradation of some other feature via new failure modes. (“Security feature” being a special case.)
First, does that always hold true?
Second—if we pretend it’s an axiom—careful and competent approach may allow to shift such degradation to aspects orthogonal to usability (instead of being perceivable by end user, failure modes could cause overhead, say, to maintenance or engineering teams).
Https is worse from a usability standpoint because of the need for trust stores and keeping them up to date. While it's mostly taken care of by the browser, it can still cause problems when you don't have anything in your truststore that can verify the other certificate.
Ssh vs rsh suffers a similar problem. If the certificate on the other side changes, you have to update your local config to allow the new certificate and will either be blocked or have warnings until you do so.
Pretty much with anything that requires certificates, usability is worse because you have to maintain the trust store in some way.
In both cases you mentioned the effects are very negligible and certainly worth the tradeoff, but strictly speaking, the usability is worse.
I think security and usability are tradeoffs ... past a certain point. I have a hard time believing most products couldn't improve both substantially before needing to start considering the trade-offs.
I believe that the degree to which security negatively affects usability is variable, and in some cases could be negligible, depending on engineering and product teams’ competence.
Please don't make your arguments this way on HN. It poisons the community and evokes worse from others. Worst of all, if you're right, i.e. if you're in possession of some truth that others don't know, you end up discrediting the truth by mixing it in with personal attacks, calling names, or other aggressiveness.
That phenomenon gets stronger the less-known the truth is, because people will more readily look for reasons to reject a contrarian/minority view than a familiar one. It's important not to supply spurious such reasons, and that means articulating the truth (or what you believe is true) in a way that avoids gratuitous admixtures.
Your policy isn't working. It's letting open-and-shut misinformation like this, the outright denial of the existence of a well-known field of research going back decades, go unchallenged. That's Creationism-level intellectual malpractice. You may succeed in making HN more polite — or, more likely, rude in a more subtle way, like Winston Churchill — but if you do it by reducing it to an echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions like this, is that really a win? How can you improve the epistemic functioning of the community?
I'm going to take a break for 81 days now, unless I need to respond to something specifically about something I've written. We'll see what this place looks like then. I'll probably follow it with a longer break.
You're a great contributor and I appreciate your passion. In fact, any internet forum with HN's mandate which is kragenless has got to be fucking up somehow. I particularly appreciate that your passion is completely unpredictable. That's extremely unusual, (and believe me, after doing this for 8 years, I know). So please come back sooner than 81 days, or at least make future breaks shorter rather than longer.
You've been at this longer than I have, so I don't feel like I have much to offer by way of insight, but let me try one thing. Any large, open internet forum has a serious upper bound, a cap on how good it can ever get. Misinformation and ignorance float in like open sewage. There's nothing we can do about that. It's frustrating. Actually it's crazy-making, because the more we all do to improve the community and make it better, the more it invites an influx of sewage, because sewage-spewers always want to spew in the highest-quality environment they can find, and there are zero barriers to entry here. (Lest I hurt anyone else's feelings, I should add that I'm not calling the other commenter a sewage-spewer, even if he may be wrong about the tradeoff between security and usability. Rather, this phenomenon is best described in the general case.)
Given that there's zero we can do to prevent this, the only agency we have is around how to react to it. There, I think we've learned something. Misinformation is not best combated by attacking the misinformed. One of my teachers once told me: "I did a Ph.D. in psychology, and here is what I learned from my Ph.D.: that punishment is not good for learning." Rather, misinformation is best combated by relating with the misinformed person while correcting the misinformation. How do you relate with a misinformed person? That's up for grabs. I don't think we've learned any formulas for that; the only thing I feel pretty sure of is that it can't be faked. Clearly, though, "you're full of shit" is not the way to get there.
Attacking the misinformed person puts their nervous system into flight-or-fight mode, which on the internet reduces to fight-mode. Worse, it fires a polarizing laser into the community, because while some readers will agree, others will be on the opposite side of the question, and still others will be neutral on the question itself but will freak out in response to the attack. Attack invites counterattack, and what gets lost in this process is the open state in which people are available for new information. Fight mode is like a muscle spasm, while receptivity requires relaxation.
The model underlying how we moderate HN doesn't have to do with politeness. I agree that enforcing politeness does not improve epistemic functioning; it just creates a fear of breaking the rules, and fear is a shut-down state. Meanwhile in other people it provokes a 'wtf? fuck politeness' reaction—and quite rightly.
The policy here isn't about politeness—nor 'civility', which is a word we stopped using a year or two ago for similar reasons. If I had to pick a word as of right now, I might pick 'openness'. We're interested in what practices of behavior are the ones that can encourage each other to stay in an open state—that is, a state in which we're able to hear each other and exchange interesting information.
The bottom line is that any large internet forum is going to be an 'echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions'—any attempt to prevent that is doomed—but we have the opportunity to be a somewhat interesting echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions, that is, a community which is able to respond interestingly, and the way to have that is to practice openness and the things which encourage openness in others.
I went around the office helping colleagues setup Zoom around mid-March before the UK went into "lockdown" and told people to work from home if at all possible, because it was obviously going to happen soon and the company wanted at least a stop-gap solution in place while everyone was still in the building with easy access to our IT team.
In my experience setting up accounts and installing the Windows software for 15+ people in one afternoon, I cannot believe what you're saying. Unless Zoom has gotten way easier to setup and use since March, it is a nightmare.
It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure was basically like this:
1) Enter email into website
2) Click link in email
3) Enter name and password
4) Invite others or skip
5) Click to start a meeting, which actually starts a download
6) Install software, meeting starts automatically
7) End meeting
8) Manually log in to Windows client despite it starting a meeting on your account immediately after installation
That is not easy or accessible to non-technical people at all, especially with how they hid certain buttons as really pale grey during the signup process. It was also a nightmare trying to oversee this process, and repeating it on each machine for those who got lost trying to do it themselves took ages due to waiting for emails, people deleting the email thinking it was spam, downloads not starting due to requests timing out, etc.
Then, a few weeks after we all started working from home, Zoom removed the automatic Company Contacts list and suddenly we could only contact colleagues through existing group chats. No warning, no explanation, not even a reference in the changelog or help pages on their website - rather, the help guides still said the feature was available and explained how to toggle it on or off. Everyone spent that morning adding all their colleagues as personal contacts by manually entering emails one-by-one and then accepting all the invites they received in return.
Zoom is useful once you get it working, but it is definitely not easy to get it working for non-technical people.
My company tried to use Google Meet. With a group of around 16 people, Google Meet had all sorts of connection quality issues—people's voices cut out while talking, sounded garbled, etc.
A week later, we tried Zoom instead. We could hear everyone clearly. We've used Zoom ever since.
I had some say in the decision to continue with Zoom, and I feel kind of bad about choosing it, but it's hard to argue with the results. We had similar issues with Slack video calls (although we still use those for small groups—not my decision!), Microsoft Teams, and a product from LogMeIn called Join.Me. Unlike Zoom but like Google Meet, these products are all based on WebRTC, and I'm starting to conclude that WebRTC is just a crappy technology for large-group video calls.
We admittedly haven't tried Jitsi. Perhaps I'm part of the problem, but I don't want to be the one to suggest a random product no one has heard of. Especially when that product is also based on WebRTC.
A little bit more than a few weeks ago when lock down was in full effect when everyone realized that products like Skype, line video, and Google meet etc had all had these massive head starts but were left to languish and were all actually awful when it actually matters.
The more I learn about zoom as a company the more I can't wait to delete it but all the comparable products have all been terrible in comparison.
The reason I'm not using Google Meet is because there's no guarantee about the continuity of the service a few years down the road. I think it's a reasonable fear about every Google product (except for search, gmail, and YT). I don't wanna rely on a service that gets discontinued by Google just like their other popular products e.g. Reader, Plus, Glass, etc.
Strongly agree. It seems every few months or years the tide shifts and we all move to something else. And one may use different choices for different groups or larger or smaller audiences.
If it works well enough, it would be a fine choice to connect with your friends/colleagues while you are stuck at home due to the corona virus. A few years down the road there will be new products!
Zoom is SO much more seamless than Meet. Its desktop clients exist, are usable, and don't force you to keep trying Chrome whenever something breaks. (I swear Google never tests their prodcuts on FF/Safari...)
Meet also has a very fixed layout. Its mic control bar on the bottom cuts off the names on the bottom row of participants. The UI on "waiting to connect" page is hilarious; it has a line of vertical dots for changing settings, and a line of horizontal dots for monitoring audio. There's a small concept in design called discoverability -- doesn't exist for Google, lol.
No idea. We're on Meet at my company, and I'm very happy with it. Works well in the browser, connects to Google calendar without any fuss, and I haven't had any issues with dropped calls or low quality.
Not being bound to the browser can be a huge advantage. I usually use at least two Zoom windows. One with a panel view of all meeting participants and a second with either a shared screen or the speaker view. In some cases I split the chat out as well. I find it super important to not only see what's being shared, but also be able to watch people's reactions.
Zoom makes it also easy to see who has noise coming from their microphone, what audio and video up and down bandwidth is looking like. Lots of little things like this that matter if you spend most of your day in remote meetings.
Wow, looks like I have been living under the rock for a little bit. The monetization strategy was not clear to me, but I though that eventually having premium accounts would make sense. The launch of Stellar was a little confusing.
You should be able to reset your account to negate all your keys and set things back up if you lost access to all previous devices.
I ended up doing this anyway in the end, after deleting everything I could before I stopped using it.
They do make you wait seven days before you can do it after you make the request.
I still have the account because I don't want to lose access to my username (didn't delete it), but it's otherwise empty and unused with fresh keys that have no history with anything.
I wonder if we'll hear the "they're a private company, they can do what they want, it is only censorship if the government does it" routine.
I remember about a decade ago when certain parties were so concerned with voices being silenced and "erasure." The same people are now cheering when Facebook, Twitter, and the like shut down certain kinds of speech, with great discretion as to how the "rules" are implemented. These parties have been quiet, so much so, over China.
They can do whatever they want as a private company. I can do whatever I want as well. Including leaving zoom. They should have the right to enforce whatever standards they want, and we have the right to disagree and leave.
I really don't understand this. I am not American so may have a different perspective, but if by being private, you are ok with censoring, then you are ok with anyone banning blacks from their businesses, or not hiring gays, or only allowing women to go up the corporate ladder if they sleep around. After all, it is their private company, so why should I care about sexual harassment, blocking people, etc as long I am not the target? Heck, lets have white-men only private schools again, let's leave those blacks/gypsies/whatever out, after all, it is a private school so it should be able to discriminate against anyone.
I can anticipate the counter-argument to this: "well, discrimination based on race and gender is illegal, so they can't do that".
Which is true, but kinda misses the point: it amounts to a position that discrimination and censorship is ok as long as it doesn't run afoul of local laws. If local laws reflect the totality of ethical and moral positions, that would be fine, but I think we all know that laws tend to fall far short on that metric.
But I'm also sympathetic to the overall thrust of this. Let's say for a minute that hosting/distributing child porn wasn't illegal. Would you then call Zoom out as somehow evil for shutting down accounts that broadcast child porn live? I'll assume that people would be happy with Zoom shutting down something like that, and are also generally fine that there are laws banning child porn.
So then it's impossible to hold a "no censorship at all" position, at least not without being a hypocrite. It's really "I don't like censorship, but it's appropriate in some narrowly-defined cases". Once we agree on that -- which we kinda have to, because that's the reality of the situation -- then it just becomes a matter of agreeing on what those "narrowly-defined cases" are, and of course I'd expect there to be disagreement.
For example, I'm fine with a private company deciding they don't want to be used as a platform to distribute racist hate speech. But I'm not ok with a private company shutting down the account of someone organizing events around the Tiananmen massacre. But as long as people (including myself) are willing to say "well, none of the other videoconferencing solutions are good enough for my needs, so I'll look the other way", they can get away with whatever they want.
The thing is, imo, we need to stand up for our values. Segregation ended because people raised up. Sexual Harassment laws the same.
But seems now, if it is a Tech company, people judge them differently. Wether Facebook or Twitter or Zoom, 'oh I can vote with my feet'. But if that was the case 30-40-60 years ago, we wouldn't have the 'progress' we see now.
And while I am opposed to child porn, if it is legal, I am not in favour of having private companies doing the censorship, but I would ask for people to be active on changing that law. Since that is opening a door I am not comfortable opening. We had YouTube/Twitter banning/blocking content that went against WHO guidelines, but we also had WHO guidelines being retracted one day after they were published. We had for days/weeks recommendations from the WHO that were just flat wrong, and we shouldn't let private companies censor information based on 3rd parties that are not 'innocent'.
And as your point stands, you are ok with shutting and account based on child porn (Assuming in this context it was legal), but would you be also for someone being banned documenting Police brutality in the BLM protests? Both are(in hypothetical) sense legal, so the only thing we have here is your own morality doing that judgement. And different cultures/religions will have different views on all that, thus I believe as long as it is legal, private companies should never have the right to censor 3rd party speech if they provide a platform for that speech.
> And as your point stands, you are ok with shutting and account based on child porn (Assuming in this context it was legal), but would you be also for someone being banned documenting Police brutality in the BLM protests?
No, and that's exactly the point I'm trying to make. Perhaps I'm doing a bad job of it.
> Both are(in hypothetical) sense legal, so the only thing we have here is your own morality doing that judgement. And different cultures/religions will have different views on all that, thus I believe as long as it is legal, private companies should never have the right to censor 3rd party speech if they provide a platform for that speech.
And that's where I think you and I fundamentally differ in our beliefs. I think, absent a law either way, companies may -- and perhaps should -- feel free to exercise their own judgment about what they're comfortable broadcasting from their platform.
And again, why is "the law" so revered here? The law (at least in the US) is filled with racist and racist-enabling garbage. Why do we hold it as some final word on morality? I don't think we should. Changing the law takes time, effort, and money. Companies refusing to broadcast certain types of speech can be a part of activism and lobbying in order to change laws. And if ultimately the will of society is that this refusal is wrong, there are remedies (legal and economic) for that, too.
I believe I do understand your point of view; I just don't agree with it.
> Would you then call Zoom out as somehow evil for shutting down accounts that broadcast child porn live?
Yes? Obviously? They should report the account-holder to the police - or, if the police refuse to do their jobs, to armed vigilantees - for arrest and prosecution (repectively lynching); if such people want to broadcast video evidence of their crimes, lets make sure to deliver their Darwin award ASAP.
> So then it's impossible to hold a "no censorship at all" position, at least not without being a hypocrite.
I'm a hypocrite about plenty of things, but this isn't one of them.
Edit: to be a bit more explicit, laws against posession (rather than production) of child sexual abuse material are a mechanism to protect child molestors by making it dangerous to posess evidence of their crimes. (And also a mechanism to attack fine upstanding file-sharing websites by uploading such material and then reporting them to the FBI or equivalent.)
This is the recipe used by some agencies to avoid scrutiny: have private companies do the job for them.
Your argument’s end point looks like your freedom to only use video conferencing tools that respect your ideals. Would I do that, I’d have to leave my job and stop talking to pretty much anyone.
A counter argument to this would be to acknowledge that in actuality a free market is regulated. It has to be regulated in order to be free. That's because there are bad-actors who lie, manipulate the market, deceit the public, with no discrepancy and with complete impunity.
It's not a violation of the free speech guarantees of the constitution, which is what people are usually discussing when that line comes out. I don't think what Zoom did should be illegal. That said...
There have recently been a whole lot of apologists saying "yes their founder is from China and their developers are in China but that doesn't make them a Chinese company". Fair enough, but when that company further starts intentionally enforcing Chinese law on US customers, I have no problem calling it a Chinese company. And I will not use a Chinese company's communication product unless forced to.
I have to be internally consistent and agree that it's at Zoom's discretion as a private-sector company whether to host specific content or provide services to specific people and viewpoints, just as it is for Facebook/Twitter etc.
Two things are additional considerations that may change how this sort of action ends up for Zoom:
1. Zoom will be judged in the court of public opinion for their decision to align their moderation of access to their service with the CCP. This is likely a different degree of backlash than you'd see with, say, shutting down the accounts of US-based hate groups.
2. Zoom may come under scrutiny—without concrete evidence—for introspecting the content of communications through its platform that would otherwise be presumed to be private. This is different from Facebook/Twitter etc., for which much of the content that drives moderation decisions is public.
Zoom is not abridging anyone's constitutional right to free speech, nor would they be able to. How they are judged for their specific actions, though, is entirely at the discretion of their user base and public opinion.
>I wonder if we'll hear the "they're a private company, they can do what they want, it is only censorship if the government does it" routine.
The implication here is that they did it under pressure from the CCP, presumably because most (all?) of their programmers are from China. Blizzard got raked over the coals as well over a similar incident (search "blizzard blitzchung").
Are Zoom events like the one in the article public, such that any person who logs into Zoom can access as part of their interface, with out looking for it, the event in question?
Does the content of the event persist in a way that makes it easily sharable, with comments?
If the answer to both of these is “no,” I contend that the communications on these platforms is “private” and should be regulated by the US Government against censorship (though I have no hope that it will be). My reasoning is this:
(1) Zoom has no expectation that private communications will harm their business. In the same way Ma Bell never took responsibility for the zillions or drug deals and kidnappings that got coordinated over their system.
(2) Lack of viral potential means the possibility of inciting violence, cyber bullying, and other negative consequences of mass internet communication is diminished.
Both of these points have a correlating contention about censorship on Twitter, Facebook, etc: they (not the government) ought to censor content that has the potential for negative outcomes like those I mentioned. Is it difficult? Absolutely. Will there be disagreements? For sure. But, they can afford to figure it out, and our society can’t afford for them to not to.
NB: We need nuance and reasoning here. Falling back on first principles and calling it a day is not enough; those principles were articulated at a time where speech replication depended on industrial machines and were limited by how fast a pony could run. We’re talking the ability to beam information practically into every child’s brain 24/7 anywhere on the planet using psychological tricks to engage them.
It's a fallacy to say that with a "slope" of states A B and C, with C implying B has been reached, that moving from A to B means you'll necessarily go to C next. The fallacy doesn't mean we can't go from B to C or that it isn't easier to get to C from B than A.
The slippery slope is a logical fallacy. But people aren't logical entities for the most part, and the real world doesn't even vaguely resemble a philosophy classroom.
They want to dump on platforms for taking action against hate speech and instigating violence because "someone else censored political activism". It's a disgusting point of view.
Isn't the base argument is tolerance/inclusivity good, intolerance bad. (Intolerance like inciting violence, suppressing criticism, homophobia, xenophobia, bigotry, the usual.) And simply taking steps that make make the world better according to this base argument is also good?
This of course can become slippery and slope-y eventually, if a propaganda machine takes over as the tolerance authority, but I don't think that's a real problem compared to what the other problems the argument is trying to address.
This xkcd comic didn't age well: https://xkcd.com/1357/. Liberals used to cheerfully link to this whenever a conservative was deplatformed. I don't think they'll trot out this xkcd anymore when their favored people are being censored.
Nope, it's still a great illustrative comic. The people that disagree with the censorship are the ones showing Zoom the door. It's all individual choice, from Zoom and from those who agree / disagree.
I don't agree with Zoom's censorship because I don't agree with China's laws. But I'm not in China, so I have the luxury of expressing my opinion about pretty much anything. Zoom, having operations in China, chose their path. Fine with me, it just means Zoom are lower down my list. That's precisely the scenario depicted in the comic.
This has always been a really stupid comic. I like most of Randal Munroe's work, but this one has always rubbed me the wrong way.
But then again, Americans are always conflating the principe of free speech with your first amendment.
Exluding private companies from free speech discussions has no real use when they have monopolies or oligopolies, and your websites keep getting shit down because people are complaining to your ISP about content, or when payment services such as Visa and Mastercard refuse to do business with you.
Private company does not reduce their client base by itself . Either way it's outside pressure, by vocal minority , in case of youtube/twitter , or powerful minority, in case of zoom.
Either way it's bad
Is there an objective way of distinguishing between an activist and a bigot? The CCP can just say that they consider this activist to be a bigot.
Internet platforms should never have been in the business of censorship. Unfortunately, liberals encouraged them to censor their political opponents for short term gain. The result is sad but predictable. Any speech that offends someone powerful is now subject to possible censorship.
The easiest distinction between activism and bigotry is to tolerate everything except intolerance itself. Activists mostly fight for more rights/freedom, and bigots mostly look to prevent that. It's not a perfect boundary, but I've found it works well for the significant majority of cases.
Article has been updated with a statement from Zoom:
> Update: A Zoom spokesperson confirmed to Axios that the account had been closed "to comply with local law" and said it had now been re-activated.
> “Just like any global company, we must comply with applicable laws in the jurisdictions where we operate. When a meeting is held across different countries, the participants within those countries are required to comply with their respective local laws. We aim to limit the actions we take to those necessary to comply with local law and continuously review and improve our process on these matters. We have reactivated the US-based account.”
> — Zoom statement
> Between the lines: This suggests Zoom closed the account due to concerns in China, which forbids free discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement.
It's time for western companies to stop pretending it's possible to be economically successful in China whilst remaining true to their purported western values.
Speculation: Chinese zoom users were required to switch to Chinese version of Zoom last September. There were probably mainland users using international version + VPN to participate in the event, probably some sort of local regulation that prevents users in CN from interacting with international meets, especially on no-no subjects. From 2nd link below:
>>Intensifying international tensions and the country’s upcoming 70th anniversary are cited as reasons for the block, according to Chinese media.
To be fair, many of the participants on the call were probably in the government's employ, so they got a realtime feed. BLM activists have to watch out for the same thing: lots of FBI and big-city police CIs.
> Between the lines: This suggests Zoom closed the account due to concerns in China, which forbids free discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement.
But why close the US rather than close the Chinese accounts?
Yes, it seems like this was ultimately a bit of a nothingburger.
As much as we may not like it (and I certainly personally don't), China has the authority to censor the internet within its borders. Zoom literally has no choice but to follow China's law within China's borders, if it is to provide its product there at all.
Zoom accidentally deactivated a US-based account, and fixed it when they found out.
At worst, in this instance, they seem to simply be guilty of an administrative mistake and slow customer support.
I assume you're getting downvoted because you don't seem to take issue with censorship of free speech ultimately being a problem, and why people take stand against tyrants?
Do you care to explain why? Because what I said is factual.
They stated they aim to "limit the actions we take to those necessary to comply with local law", in this case their action went beyond that limit, and now that they're aware, they fixed it.
And I see no evidence otherwise -- this is not something they've shown any pattern of behavior in. It appears to be a one-off.
Any conspiracy-mongering that Zoom is nefariously in cahoots with the Chinese government to intentionally try to sneak in an extra blocked account just begs credulity.
I'm not the only one who was waiting for the cover up lie for this incidence.
"if they make an excuse AFTER THIS STORY BLOWS UP, I think it's reasonable to consider their justification "retconned" and not actually the real reason they closed the account (which can be reasonably inferred to be CCP-aligned censorship)."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481177
It's also not the first time an American company would lockup a non-chinese user's account for saying/doing something china doesn't like.
A famous example is Blizzard's banning of a Hong Kong protester's account, seizing his earnings and backtracked after the story went viral.
The issue is that events like this break the fourth wall and remind us that companies are willing to bend over to make profits in countries controlled by tyrannical structures like the CCP, meanwhile we then are indirectly supporting the same behaviour of bad actors.
Explain to me how using Zoom in the US indirectly supports the CCP?
Because I don't see it. A huuuge segment of the American economy is based on trade with China. Just like we use gasoline that comes from Saudi Arabia.
Unless you're arguing that we cut off all free trade with countries that abuse human rights, using Zoom is no different from buying a water bottle at REI in this particular instance.
Also, there's a well-known theory [1] that rising economic living standards ultimately promote greater democracy and human rights, as the people in a country reach suddenly have the ability to demand more. We've already seen that happening in the past 10 years in China, particularly when it comes to corruption and environmentalism. According to that, the more we do business with China, and the higher standard of living they therefore more quickly achieve, the sooner they can pressure their government for more human rights. Now I'm not saying this is an inevitability or anything, in fact it's a hotly contested theory particularly with regards to China -- but I am saying that "boycott companies that do business in China" isn't crystal-clear morally superior. The reality is complicated.
The problem is china's problem is not contained within china. CCP will force Zoom or any other companies to give the data they collect in other countries and due to market forces those companies has to comply legally or otherwise. Now do you see the problem, why china's authority to censor the internet is not an isolated issue ?
It wasn’t an accident. They prob got a stern call from the CCP and they bent over and apologised and said they would block the accounts. Not expecting it to become a news piece.
In any case seems a paid user who’s calls are encrypted are not encrypted if a china based person joins the call. Making zoom a monitoring tool.
The U.S. government has no business telling Zoom what it must or must not host. But it can prohibit federal procurement of Zoom, prohibit contractors from using Zoom in connection with government work, keep a close eye on Zoom and its employees as potential intelligence threats, and prohibit Zoom from accessing federal benefits.
It should require pre-emptive disclosure by of foreign ownership, control and influence; as well as public disclosure of government censorship requests and fulfillments by publicly-traded companies.
I'd just like to see more evidence and information before making judgment here.
There's no response from Zoom whatsoever, which is odd. Could this have been other users maliciously reporting the account as abuse, and it was closed automatically? Or something else similar?
Or if China is putting pressure on Zoom, then how exactly?
If Zoom, an American company, really did intentionally close the account of someone living in the US, because the Chinese government asked them to for political reasons, that does sound outrageous.
But it's so outrageous that I actually have a hard time believing it's true. It feels like business suicide. I want to hear Zoom's side here first -- which I expect we will soon, since this story broke only 2 hours ago.
My guess is that they were under pressure to close all the accounts in the meeting, backpedaled after the article, and reenabled the non-Chinese ones. Honestly, if they just did this to begin with, it'd be understandable? They just fucked up and blocked the non-China accounts too, triggering the China Watchers of which this reporter is a prime member of.
I ultimately see companies adopting the TikTok model, where Chinese users basically get their own sandboxed app and company structure subject to Chinese law that nobody else can communicate with.
And arguably as a society standing up for democracy and free speech should begin to not use any such platforms who sandbox to support these bad actor governments.
>If Zoom, an American company, really did intentionally close the account of someone living in the US, because the Chinese government asked them to for political reasons, that does sound outrageous.
That link (the one in your other comment works) doesn't really say anything the article doesn't already.
All it says is that the account was shut down a week after the event, and that "it seems possible ZOOM acted on pressure from the CCP to shut down our account".
That appears to be pure conjecture however, which is why I want to hear Zoom's side. Nobody's disputing the account was blocked, but there's zero information on why.
How is that outrageous? US companies cow tow to CCP all the time, e.g. the NBA. If you're trying not to get blacklisted by the world's second largest market then it makes plenty of sense.
I don't think this compares directly to the now-commonplace kowtowing that you are referring to. That would be more akin to Zoom, for example, retracting and apologizing for some public statement that it made in recognition of the Tiananmen Square protests.
Instead, this is a US-based communications platform, barring its US-based users from discussing something that is offensive to a foreign regime, and doing so outside of any official rules that they have made public.
Now, of course, you are correct, this has nothing to do with any kind of deeply held values. It is merely about money. I don't think that makes it better.
Is anyone here boycotting use of Zoom? I have a few clients that ask me to use it and I'm trying to think up a good response as to why I don't have it installed. For those of you that have rejected it on principle, what are you all saying?
I will not use it. Have used it once with some friends when it seemed churlish not to, but have refused to and suggested using Jitsi Meet since then with others including at work.
Work insists on Microsoft Teams now. Oh well. At least I am only probably being spied on by the "good guys" now, right?
This is very interesting. I do trust mozilla. However many of the security concerns stem from the dubious thing the Zoom installer does, which Mozilla's scorecard does not cover. I feel a little more at east with a Mozilla recommendation, however.
Not just Zoom; China has effective means to pressure.
> In 2019, LinkedIn blocked Zhou's account from being visible in China, telling him in a message it was because of "specific content on your profile." LinkedIn restored his account after media attention.
But what this means is that someone from Chinese government gives a call to to MS or LinkedIn management and ask for these things, suggesting that any other option would result in less purchases of their office licenses and etc.
It is ironic how the western public generally frowns upon the silencing of dissident throught in China, and at the same time welcomes precisely the same behavior for "sensitive topics" back home.
There is a vast difference between letting the government suppress speech, which is what China does, and letting private companies suppress speech, which is what happens in America.
When the government does it, you can't express that idea anywhere. When private companies do it, you can still express those ideas somewhere else.
I would agree if there were multiple competing private companies with comparable market shares, representing the opinions of different social groups. This way, if certain companies started applying censorship that wouldn't reflect the interests of the users, they would lose the market share and would have to listen more to what people want.
Instead, we have an effective monopoly on online search, monopoly on content monetization and a monopoly on social media. These monopolies are sustained through network effects and lack the feedback loop.
Edit: I would even say, they have a wrong type of feedback loop, since they are directly incentivized to censor the opinions that go against the vocal social groups, since that could result in decreasing profits.
China could technically spin off their censorship functions to a privately owned company that would wholly depend on the state-issued license to operate and would keep doing exactly the same thing. Would it make them more democratic or change anything for the end users?
I think, the distinction between private and government is a technicality. What is more important, is how many independent parties are making the censorship decisions, and whether they report to a single vs. distributed source of power. From that angle, the government-dominated Chinese web is very similar to Silicon Valley-dominated western web.
> China could technically spin off their censorship functions to a privately owned company that would wholly depend on the state-issued license to operate and would keep doing exactly the same thing.
If the private company requires a state-issued license, and that license is dependent on the content on the site, then it's still government censorship.
In America, you can still start a competing private company and allow any opinion you want. In China you can't do that.
In theory, yes. In practice, since Google and Facebook are free to end users, outcompeting them would require raising enormous amounts of capital. So you would depend on the approval of a rather small (and mind you, non-elected) group of individuals.
I really don't think it's about the wording you put on the decision maker's badge. It's about who's interests they represent and the structure of their incentives.
Government-drivern censorship is bad, because their incentive would become to stay in power no matter what. Monopolies act the same way.
> China could technically spin off their censorship functions to a privately owned company that would wholly depend on the state-issued license to operate and would keep doing exactly the same thing.
I think that's exactly what's happening for certain online services eg iCloud[1], AWS China[2]
Perhaps the greatest difference is that the US government and large corporations don't even need to employ a lot of violent repression to get the media to jump through hoops and do parlor tricks; their ideological control is deeper and more effective than that of the Chinese state.
Remember when the American government got all the payment processors to blockade WikiLeaks because of political speech? Don't pretend that the American government doesn't suppress speech.
This article's about Zoom. Which, ironically, has a lot better case for "hold your video call elsewhere" than Twitter does for "engage with the American political class elsewhere".
The sad fact is, nobody's principled and everybody's just reaching for arguments based on which "side" is being gored.
> and letting private companies suppress speech, which is what happens in America.
Considering that private companies are now becoming more powerful than many governments/countries, maybe this is something we should take another look at.
> When the government does it, you can't express that idea anywhere.
Can't you argue that you can always move to another country, just like you can use another company?
> When private companies do it, you can still express those ideas somewhere else.
Depends on the private company and its scale/monopolistic position.
That said, the US public does certainly seem to be mostly apathetic about the giant US government surveillance system, even though that system, if the right sort of political will appeared, could be rapidly turned into a system of social control rivaling what China has.
Please keep this and other canned arguments off HN. They're typically used as reflexes to try to stop discussion, which isn't in the spirit of intellectual curiosity. If a comment is bad, explain specifically what's bad about it, or downvote/flag as appropriate.
"Whataboutism" is a strange case because the name is catchy and sounds convincing, but it's a fallacy. Comparables are relevant. Humans evaluate things by comparing them.
Pointing out inconsistencies is also relevant because it adds context to an argument. The same thing can appear completely different depending on the context it's surrounded by. Negotiating context (what's included vs. excluded) is a critical aspect of debate, not something that can be shut down with just a word.
Adding information can be perfectly legitimate, or it can be distracting or misleading. In the latter case the proper response is to explain specifically why, not play a wild card like "whataboutism" which basically says "I determine the context and you're not allowed to change it." That amounts to power to control an entire discussion.
Previous explanations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20338307 and links back from there. I particularly like the analogy to programming languages, because it illustrates the issue in a non-political context (though static vs. dynamic is about as intense a flamewar topic is it gets in programming discussions).
Just to get it straight, I don't like what China is doing to public speech, and I don't like what the West is doing either. I grew up in a country (Soviet Union) that took it to the extreme, and I don't like where this road is going.
I strongly believe that the key to building a long-term stable society is a culture where people of opposing beliefs are still able to peacefully debate with each other, and respect the other's opinion even if they don't agree with it. Just like the professional boxers that would let out their worst at the ring, but would find it inconceivable to try and hurt their opponent's private life or family.
Not applicable because no attempt was made to "discredit an opponent's position".
GP is clearly not saying that "... therefore, Chinese oppression is okay."
My takeaway would be that we have work to do with China, and that in observing the flaws in their society from without, we can gain perspective on what's going wrong here as well and work on that too.
It isn't, because you are wrong. Do not compare (I assume) the warnings around Trump's lies to be comparable to blocking human rights activists from a platform outright.
TBF, that is actually true, just not that much more so than the median politician (who votes in favor of things like the patriot act, as evidenced by it having passed).
Seriously. Just a week ago, Facebook employees went on strike because FB refused to censor Trump’s messaging. NYT reporters forced the opinion editor to resign for allowing a Republican senator to publish an op-ed. Meanwhile, I’ll bet many of those same people consider censorship of Tiananmen Square to be wrong.
Apparently, there is good censorship, and bad censorship. What’s frustrating is that the proponents of “good censorship” do not even realize this irony, or at least they
call it a false equivalence when you point it out to them.
To address that “false equivalence” criticism, I would be curious to hear from someone who thinks Facebook or Twitter should annotate Trump’s posts. Do you also think that they should annotate posts about Tiananmen square to include links to the Chinese government’s narrative that actually, there was no massacre and it was a CIA-instigated riot?
Who decides which posts to annotate and what to annotate them with? It’s not just the CCP who believes the Tiananmen square massacre didn’t happen; there are millions of Chinese citizens who agree with them, just like there are millions of Americans who disagree with Trump. So is there a difference between a mob of Americans asking to annotate a Trump post about a BLM protest with a CNN article, and a mob of Chinese people asking to annotate an Ai Weiwei post about
Tiananmen Square with a People’s Daily article?
> NYT reporters forced the opinion editor to resign for allowing a Republican senator to publish an op-ed.
That is quite a naive interpretation. It's not like the Times Opinion pages have never seen a Republican op-ed. The issue is that the op-ed in question advocated for violence against American citizens based on factual errors and flimsy premises.
A few months ago, the NYT published an op-ed from the leader of the Taliban. In 1941, they dedicated a full page to an excerpt of Mein Kampf. How is it consistent to give them a voice on the pages of the paper, but to deny the same privilege to a sitting US senator?
It’s an opinion section, and labeled as such. The NYT explicitly does not endorse its content, nor do they designate it as “factual“ reporting. The idea that reporters revolted and the editor of it resigned because a mob disagreed with an opinion in it, seems farcical given that the purpose of such a section is to present opinions opposite those of the editorial board (literally, op-ed).
If it’s full of “factual errors and flimsy premises,” surely NYT readers are smart enough to decide that for themselves. If not, surely the NYT can solicit an opinion from an opposing viewpoint to rebut those “errors.”
It’s not like he is some radical with no voice; he’s an elected senator, and could choose to publish in any number of periodicals. The NYT isn’t “giving him a voice”; he already has one.
People's primal need to 'kill the bad thing' is completely dysfunctional in our modern world, and on the Internet, hopelessly unrealistic. (There's always Tor. You can't completely get rid of something...not if it has enough interest.)
I even feel bad for the platforms due to this push and pull, with them always in the middle. Always being pressured one way or another: 'Allow this content, you're censoring us!' or 'Take down this content, it's abhorrent!'
Since the companies are the organisational equivalent of sociopaths anyway, surely they can make the hard decisions. Why not just have filters? If users don't want racist, terrible content, then just tick a box in their settings that will tune their personal algorithm to not show it! Then it's their fault they're only siloing themselves further into their own echo chamber - not the platforms'.
The E2E encryption hasn't been released yet. Currently and in the future, according to their announcement, all calls will at least be server-client encrypted. Paid ones will apparently be optionally E2E encrypted.
That source doesn't support the GP comment. End-to-end encryption 1. doesn't exist yet for any user, and 2. does not mean free user calls will be less encrypted than they are today with server-client encryption. Zoom is not claiming that paid calls today are E2E encrypted.
Yes but Zoom was saying that E2E is something they want to offer for their paid users, but that they will not offer it for free users. I think it's relevant to the parent comment in that they were asking for more information about what Zoom said concerning encryption on free vs paid users.
I think most people mean E2E when they say encryption, because server-client encryption is almost a given now, and does nothing to stop companies from helping law enforcement.
A similar silence occurred when Marriott fired the guy over the tweet about Tibet. In fact, they were forced to apologize [0]. I kinda hope Zoom is forced to apologize by China as well to at least clarify the type of company they are.
Furthermore, if they make an excuse after this story blows up, I think it's reasonable to consider their justification "retconned" and not actually the real reason they closed the account (which can be reasonably inferred to be CCP-aligned censorship).
eh they probably just can't be bothered. how many other accounts have they closed? what other normal company things is the company doing on a day to day basis, journalists can't expect to circumvent the whole company calendar for something they latched on to as controversial.
this is a misaligned expectation from the journalists and everyone swayed by what the media, and thats true without making any opinion on the particular issue at hand
you have to assume this is going to harm the company for their lack of defensive response to mean anything. but maybe they are still converting customers into paying ones, maybe there is still enough liquidity for a secondary offering, maybe there are partnerships in the works that are more important and lucrative that don't care about the media frenzy
This is a bit of a rabbit hole but my misunderstanding in the early days of the internet was HOW people might choose to relate to one another via the internet, and I dramatically underestimated the amount of negative interactions there would be...
That's why I keep calling for a NEW Internet to be created based on HORNET technology. HORNET is basically the same as the Tor network, but with speeds similar to the current internet.
Sites can't be traced or blocked and neither can its users. There will be free speech, along with all its excesses (terrorism, child porn, illegal content sharing etc.).
If everyone migrates towards the HORNET internet authoritarian regimes will either have the choice to block the entire internet (causing massive economic damage) or allowing free speech.
Well, authoritarian regimes wouldn't be first to shut this down. Western corporations will, because of illegal content sharing, no enforceable DMCA, and all this
It will be technically infeasible to do so. Or do you mean telecoms? That might be possible, but they'll risk losing customers.
IIRC when the internet was young, there were many closed computer networks such as The Source and America Online. These tried to sandbox the internet, but people just fled to providers which would give them unfettered internet access. The same scenario will play out with HORNET.
Zoom seems to be botching this unique opportunity that the pandemic has presented to them. They are getting dragged way too deep into a geopolitical crisis. I know several companies in N. America that are already transitioning from them. That's all what their competitors wanted to see.
Aiding in the Chinese media's censorship is not good for China nor the world. When a government destroys the ability for it to be criticized it becomes untethered from consensus reality; megalomaniacs can take the reins and a kind of national hubris forms that can lead to devastating conflict and oppression.
All governments need open dissent and criticism to keep from going down this path. Zoom should not be aiding and abetting the regime in this way.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.
This observation seems more immediate these days internationally than ever.
This feels like the kind of thing that the CEO of Zoom should be asked about under oath by a congressional committee. It's supposedly a US company so it would be interesting to see just what influence the Chinese government has over it and why.
This applies fairly universally. As in any company based in country Z and operating in countries A through Y with differing laws.
It's an intractable problem that's always been present, but what were once 'edge cases' are now front and centre as a result of technology bringing the world closer together, and therefore highlighting the areas of conflict.
Case in point: Australia's law that enforces software companies to create a backdoor in encryption for reasons of law enforcement[0][1][2].
You're not considering the real and terrifying strengths that dictatorship has over democracy. In true democracies the politicians never undertake a plan that lasts longer than one election term because they have no incentive to do so. In China they feel free to undertake 20 year plans with large upfront investments because the party does not care about winning an election every 2-4 years.
Why do you automatically assume that elections provide a reality check? Would you say that the Democrats and Republicans in the USA are tightly coupled to reality given their frequent elections? On the contrary I believe that elections merely tie legislative actions towards what voters perceive as electable. It doesn't matter what the PATRIOT act does as long as a political ad can sell the idea of "safety" to you. Politics in democracies have devolved to little more than entertainment.
On the other hand, China has achieved something very close to a technocracy where rules are based on expert opinion. The economy is controlled by economists, health policy is controlled by epidemiologists, and media censorship is controlled by political and social scientists. You are more likely to advance based on competence in Chinese politics than you are in the USA, where elections are just a high school popularity contest. The Chinese government has plenty of terrifyingly competent bureaucrats.
There are advantages to the efficiency of authoritarian power, but how do they handle peaceful transition of power? How do they handle abuse?
A lot of democratic stability comes from it being hard to change things quickly, separation of power, and the existence of a lot free speech so it's hard to cover things up. Ultimately, with a dependence on the people.
I could be persuaded that there are better ways to structure things within that, if a lot of thought was put into how to handle a tyrant's rise and how to handle a transition of power. I probably could not be persuaded that limits on speech and government censorship are good long-term for the health of a society that I'd want to actually live in. I think it's a good thing for governments to ultimately be accountable to their people.
I generally agree with the sentiment that elected leaders fear getting voted out, while dictators fear getting dragged out. The ability to vote seems important for long term stability.
In China's case, it seems they've done away with terms entirely for Xi. Speech and dissent is tightly (and violently) controlled, and even when there's just potential for future dissent, entire groups are put into camps to destroy their culture to supposedly reduce that risk.
The west has problems too, but there's a reason people emmigrate out to countries that are more free when they're allowed to.
Enormous economic growth and strategic planning have allowed their people to accept this abuse for now, though the party should be worried if that ever changes.
>There are advantages to the efficiency of authoritarian power, but how do they handle peaceful transition of power?
Europe had hereditary transitions of power, which were about as peaceful as any other form of transition of power. In Rome you would choose your successor and he would be the next emperor.
> I probably could not be persuaded that limits on speech and government censorship are good long-term for the health of a society that I'd want to actually live in. I think it's a good thing for governments to ultimately be accountable to their people.
Just because it's supposed to work that way doesn't mean it actually works that way. Do you think Americans are using free speech well? Do you feel like the government is accountable to you? In America you have free speech but it's not practically useful for anything. Have a go at trying to stop some government abuse of power.
> "Do you think Americans are using free speech well? Do you feel like the government is accountable to you?"
Yes.
> "In America you have free speech but it's not practically useful for anything. Have a go at trying to stop some government abuse of power."
The protests happening now, civil rights movements in the 60s, the changes after the pentagon papers, the suffrage movement. "Me Too" and its impact on culture, awareness of the continuous lies coming from the current administration. There are an enormous amount of historical examples of free speech being critical to improving the society.
I think you're very wrong, but you're free to be wrong (at least on this website).
> Do you think Americans are using free speech well?
I think that's irrelevant, since being a free individual is the main reason being alive and healthy is desirable, not the other way around. If people just existed to keep an abstract group of people alive, with no person in that group actually mattering, actually being allowed to develop as the person they are, not the group they are in -- what's the point of having people at all? What would we be doing that insects or algae aren't already doing much better?
> Just because it's supposed to work that way doesn't mean it actually works that way.
Sure, but if it's not even supposed to work that way, or is even supposed to work the opposite, then that's still a lot worse.
Even taking what you said at face value, what you're describing is a strong body with no mind. If you could get a lifespan of a million years, but had to spend it in a coma, would you want to? If you could live a million years, but only as a passive passenger, while other people (or dice, why not) control your actions, would you want to?
This is why a successful democracy is one where only well educated and thoughtful people vote. Making it easier and easier to vote is a losing formula.
I know you are trolling. But, what country are you using as an example? And what is the “this” in the comment you are replying to (I think you are attempting to make a point rather than actually responding to the content)? And finally, investing in education is a better solution than suppressing the vote.
How are you defining a successful democracy? If 20% of a nation elect a philosopher king type leader, is that more "successful" than 90% of another nation electing a tyrannical despot?
Well, this presumes that it's a government acting in good faith. Sure, something like the UK or a EU country should have dissent and criticism to keep democracy healthy. However, countries like China, Russia, and NK, have no interest in fostering a healthy dialogue and it wouldn't be very conducive to their government's interests.
> it wouldn't be very conducive to their government's interests.
It depends on your timeline. If you eliminate dissent you may be able to push through short-term aims or develop a facsimile of national unity, but you will naturally eliminate nuance from your geopolitics. Even one or two generations into this experiment, you can wind up with a leader who truly "drinks the koolaid," who assumes the state propaganda to be reality. At that point, the regime is doomed.
> wind up with a leader who truly "drinks the koolaid," who assumes the state propaganda to be reality
There possibbly is no leader in history who drank the state propaganda koolaid as deeply as Chairman Mao. He accidentally murdered tens of millions when the propaganda turned out to be incongruent with reality. Meanwhile he stayed in power by butchering millions of potential opposition members, and by having nukes and ten million soldiers which impressed Nixon enough to bow and scrape before him.
The lesson has been learned by Chairman Xi. As long as he brutally cleans house domestically and is a MAD-level military threat, absolutely no one can doom his regime.
What's going to happen when he's gone? Does the next leader understand well enough? How about the next?
It's the same reason we're seeing so much strife in the US. In the US, societal opinion and legislative action hardly follow the same path. In fact, IIRC, public opinion has almost no impact on legislation. Wonder why everyone here feels like we're going down the wrong track?
Wishful thinking is a temptation, but it doesn't lead to reasonable analysis. Xi is in fine health at the age of 66. His father lived to the ripe age of 88. His mother is still alive, at 93. We can expect him to receive better medical care than they did, since he is leader of China and they spent several decades getting purged, imprisoned, overworked, and starved by the party. If the Chinese people look for a change in leadership, they had best look somewhere besides the calendar.
Imagine that we lived in a world where new technology is developed all the time, although not everyone gets access to all new technology simultaneously. In such a world, wouldn't it be possible for the powerful dictator of the most populous and technologically advanced nation in that world to receive seemingly miraculous life-extension treatments before most people knew of their existence?
Besides, if current dystopic trends continue, most of us won't have 40 years to wait for the expiration of our despotic sovereign overlords...
Is the regime doomed? The people are screwed, sure, but once a government turns into a self-serving dictatorship, it can stay that way for a long time.
Usually the first thing dictators do is disarm civilians and beef up the military, so the only way out is via a military coup (which usually just trades one regime for an equivalent one). In just 2 decades, North Korea will have had a dictatorship for a century.
The problem for China is that Xi Jinping has essentially installed himself as dictator-for-life. He now rides to and fro on a tiger from which he dare not dismount.
The CCP witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and instead of opening up to a peaceful transition to democracy they chose to double down on top-down authoritarian policies. At the same time, they’ve sought to leverage markets for economic growth. The result is a conundrum: how to reconcile Marxist ideology with the prosperity of markets?
This is where “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” comes in. This is an ideology of doublethink which can only be maintained through force. All of the censorship taking place, both inside and outside China, has the goal of ideological suppression for any speech the CPC deems a threat. And so here we are.
Communists don't think that political dialogue exists as a genuine process between rational actors. They think that people's political beliefs are a product of their environment and class. This is why they don't like free speech and don't like debates. They think that schools are only capable of indoctrination. Therefore they seek to turn this indoctrination in favor of the workers rather than the bourgeoisie.
Edit: if you disagree, please explain why. Marx believed that history moved according to dialectical materialism where almost all individuals are little more than atoms in a moving body.
Well, because even though people on HN loves to preach "open dissent and criticism", HN hates actual dissent and criticism against the HN party line. So I am not surprised she/he got downvoted.
I set up a Jitsi Meet server at home.
It's main resource use is bandwidth. CPU/RAM use for the server is minimal.
I used:
- VMWare Workstation:1CPU/2Core, 6GB RAM(I have RAM to burn)
- Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop default install (so I could use the base snapshot for other things)
- Hardware: i7 2600(yea it is old!), 32Gb RAM, generic gaming desktop with updated GPU.
- To Install Jitsi itself:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KR0AhDZF2A
No end-to-end encryption? Don't care, it is coming to MY home and it DOES have SSL for client to server encryption.
I boot from known good snapshot when I want to use it. Turn it off otherwise. I guess I should figure out accounts etc but it hasn't been an issue to just let it run free for anyone to use while I am using it.
For those HN people who have all the tech-know, just build a Jitsi VPS somewhere with super decent bandwidth.
Hell, I would expect some HN people to be able to automate that shit and give me a website with a nominal price to have my own personal Jitsi Meet server, complete with Domain Name and Jitsi account management.
We have seen high profile cases with gamers and athletes being influenced to limit what they say about China. This case seems to be with a much less notable person, but I wonder how often this happens and is never seen. Many tech companies publish metadata about requests they receive from governments (such as DMCA, search warrants, etc.) It would be nice to see some transparency on requests to censor.
I want to stop using zoom. But the experience is far higher quality than anything else I've used. Maybe part of that is the strong suggestion and herding towards using the desktop app and not the browser.
Let’s see where “but it’s a private company and they have the right to ban any user the want”, “it’s not censorship if it’s not the government doing it”
Well I hope this illustrates why that argument isn’t a good argument to make.
I'm trying to understand the justifications for this is the activist is US-based. If CCP has an issue with someone within their own country, that is one thing but this is something totally different.
The law in China mandated this and hence any firm based in China cannot be trusted for content. To be honest, it seems like fair if one respect that when traffic going in. But for that we start to have 2 commerical worlds. One China+world and one China. Hence, China can profit from the world but no one can touch China. With that, due to the weight of that market, gradually you will have self-sanction. Good luck humanity, if you think basic human rights have a world and a China standard. China standard will rule you ultimately.
I’m no longer using Zoom due to the numerous security issues and infractions in addition to Zoom appearing to be a Chinese state controlled organization. I’ve also started to inform my less technical friends/family that Zoom should be avoided at all cost.
On a related note: Has anyone else noticed that non-technical people have started calling any and all video conferencing “zoom”? I keep hearing the phrases: “...have to get on a zoom” or “they’re doing a zoom”.
Why doesn’t the US just pass a countervailing law against censorship? When China tells a company to censor its employees or users, the company could just point to the US law saying it can’t. Then China has no leverage over it because the company’s hands are tied.
I don't understand this reasoning; the leverage is that China will ban the entire company from doing business in China, how would this law help anything?
I also don't think US laws applies in China, so if a company wants to do business in China, it has to follow Chinese regulations. Just like a company doing business in the US having the follow US regulations.
Oh gosh :/ I was really happy for keybase, and I really like keybase product, and I’ve been defending zoom to colleagues and infosec people and... I’m super disappointed to hear this. Really really disappointed...
Perth Tolle who runs the FRDM ETF also had her account knocked offline. She is a human rights advocate who has been outspoken about the HK situation. It’s looking pretty bad for Zoom.
Curiosity cat: Has anyone had success motioning their org away from Zoom? I’ve pondered it, considering the enterprise is heavily O365 anyway, as are multiple partners who host weekly touchpoints via Teams.
At this point, is _any_ company not bowing down to the Chinese government? Is there ANY platform where I can talk about the aforementioned event without getting my account deleted?
This just prompted me to cancel my Zoom subscription... I could live with all the security flaws (which were patched quite rapidly) but not with this kind of unethical behaviour.
Why the hell would any company that cares about security have anything to do with the Chinese? There are fo many other countries they could be working with instead.
I just sent email to my company's e-staff (which I am on) saying I will not join another Zoom call. As an American free speech above all is my default. I do understand the Chinese governments worry on having social harmony given the fact that their revolution was driven by the disharmony and they worry about another revolution.
Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
— From Problems of War and Strategy - Mao Zedong
It's the perennial thorn in the side of big tech companies. If you want to do business in China, you have to abide by the rules (as you would in any country). However, in China this means that you have to engage in political censorship in order to do business there. Hopefully this is will be a lesson learned.
In typical internet activist fashion, always assume malice.
Zoom has 300 million participants a day. Even if they accidentally bans a Chinese activist with the same probability as any other person, the media will only report those instances because Zoom happens to have a Chinese American CEO.
SMH I am done with Zoom. If you value your privacy and freedoms I suggest you drop them too. There are very good alternatives by great teams that actually respect & protect your privacy.
Guys, guys, it's fine. According to everybody on HN who's so eagerly embraced Zoom and continued to use it even after the security issues, the only thing that matters is that Zoom is the best UX experience for video conferencing. Forget about the human rights, suppression of free speech or the fact that the company is wholly subservient to the CCP (not like anybody could've ever foreseen anything like this ever happening). Just focus on what's important: Zoom is a great product, far better than all the US NSA-ridden ones. So everybody should keep using it, no matter what Zoom or the CCP does.
The UX is actually not that good. The layout is bad, features are hidden all over the place. It’s not logical or intuitive.
It does have a lot of features though, I think that is what people like.
I mostly agree with what you are trying to say, but being snarky is against the hn guidelines. Edit: “against” is too strong a word - it isn’t a hard rule but I often see the hn community react negatively to sarcasm and snarkiness even though the content may be worthwhile.
I thought the the word “guidelines” usually implied something more flexible. Thank you for the clarification (I certainly appreciate the limited snarkyness and toxic sarcasm within the hn community).
"I got your hard rule right here" would have been a perfectly fine reply, I think, so your initial impression is probably not that far off the mark in practice.
After seeing plenty of discussions on HN where people expressed how they'd rather keep using Zoom despite 1) clear security issues and 2) the development teams living in China, I didn't feel there was any other way to express the issue (and the discrepancy in values). There seems to be a blindness to geopolitical realities in the tech world, and this occurrence is the perfect example.
This matters to me and might be enough to get me to switch away (as a former zoom defender). On the other hand, for the average person using Zoom for video calling their families, or for companies forced into WFH that finally set up a Zoom subscription and would have to go through self-imposed bureaucratic hell to swap platforms? I think the usability of the platform and simple convenience far outweighs any desire to switch right now. I wonder how sticky their consumer base actually is.
China stealing IP was a concerning issue in the past 2 decades and it's still an ongoing issue. Yet now we have companies willingly handing over data to a CCP-controlled entity. I'm not sure whether to cry or to laugh.
Is that relevant to Zoom? In this situation Zoom is competing an open market, and I find it interesting to see multiple world-class apps be innovated in China that compete worldwide. I also find the common over-reaction to being beaten in a “fair“ competition leads to some odd rationalisations from many in the US.
As a software developer in New Zealand, I find the IP laws relating to software within the US and the attempts at projecting those laws worldwide to be rent seeking behaviour at a national level. The US had an analogous issue a while back with the British.
Forget software, think about every other industry where IP is important to protect R&D. Car manufacturers, machinery, trains, planes, etc. And it's not just the US being hit, it's the EU too. Anywhere where significant and important R&D is being done. Of course Zoom is relevant when Western businesses are using Zoom for all their video conferencing. It doesn't matter whether it's an open market. Businesses are being lured in with a good product while not being aware of the fact that the product is essentially run by people in China who are subject to CCP influence and it makes them vulnerable to a completely different threat model.
People here simply do not care about the threat that the CCP poses to Western companies. The people here simply have no concept of geopolitical issues. It's incredibly depressing and dangerous. Even now I'm being downvoted again everywhere for pointing this out, because I don't know, they think I'm racist? Overblowing the issue? As if none of them have ever read anything about China or Chinese ambition (re: the CCP) or the CCP's behaviour in the past 20 years.
After all his morale handwringing about working for Facebook, he is now working for Zoom, a Chinese Communist Party spy operation. Not only does he work for them, his job is to shill them so that people trust them.
He should feel ashamed of himself and really makes his whole situation with Facebook seem quite silly. He is now actually working for the 'bad guys'
Would you please stop posting fulminating rhetoric to HN? No doubt your strong feelings are justified but the discussion this leads to is tedious, predictable, and nasty.
The idea here is to have thoughtful comments and curious conversation. "FUCK ONE THING and FUCK OTHER THING" is...not that. Also, can you please not use allcaps for emphasis? maybe it would be a good moment to review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Please do tell what should a curious conversation be about a U.S-based company which does a foreign country's bidding (China), and blatantly censors people and won't even let mothers of students who were killed in Tiananmen Square speak in a private online meeting..
This should be nothing short of condemnation and public shaming.
As you said, unfortunately I may have come across as a little strong and nasty, but these are situations where one cannot sid idly by, especially since stuff like this has been happening for years now (Regarding China, not only Zoom)
I don't know about you, but I'm curious about how best to go about destroying Zoom (the company) and eliminating all use of Zoom (the software tool) even among people who don't recognize the threat posed by corporate censorship.
governments monitor all major companies... including the US government (PRISM is pretty old now, so we can assume that they monitor others by now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) ). So if the traffic is not end-to-end encrypted, assume that they can view your traffic. Sometime they play on words and say that end-to-end means from customer to cloud... but the cloud should not have the key.
Also, the whataboutism trope is an example of canned arguments that don't belong in HN threads. One should respond either to the specifics of an argument, or downvote/flag a comment as appropriate, or just not respond. I wrote more on this elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481335.
S/he is not saying all governments are equal in all respects. As far as we know only the Chinese, Russians and the 5-Eyes have the technical capacity to monitor us all and have been caught out doing it.
So yes, you are correct: not all governments are equal, but the US and Chinese are similar in their practical totalitarian capacities.
In the US system you are free to criticize the government. In the Chinese and Russian systems you are not. That alone tells me all I need to know about who I want scooping up my data.
Whataboutism is usually done to defend something by making it look better in comparison but what the OP was arguing is that we should be pursuing end to end encrypted solutions exclusively because it’s not just the Chinese government who are doing the snooping. ie he’s not defending Zoom nor the Chinese government but suggesting the complaint against Zoom/China doesn’t go far enough
Exactly. Assume that governments and large companies can and will spy on you and act accordingly. Do not get suckered into some simplistic nationalistic narrative in which "our" side is good.
There's two problems with that line of thought. First, "our side" is not good but it is better. Notwithstanding the current unpleasantness, the US government isn't locking up and "reeducating" hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Second, good or bad, it is our side and the CCP is the other side: only an ethically and intellectually challenged person offers tacit support for the "other side" because their own side fails some specious purity test.
I don’t personally see it as a competition about which side is worse. I see the lack of end to end encryption as more like a security hole that needs fixing irrespective of whether you trust one side more than the other.
> As of 2018, it was estimated that the Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are being held in these secretive internment camps which are located throughout the region. In May 2018, Randall Schriver of the United States Department of Defense repeated claims that "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers in a strong condemnation of the "concentration camps"
OP was in fact not making that argument when I posted my comment.
Obviously I agree that E2E should be the default and that ideally you have no governments snooping. The initial comment was a far less substantive, “US spies too.”
There are political discussions and political discussions. We want one kind and not another. The site rules don't cease to apply when a topic becomes political—they apply more: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you or anyone takes a look at those past explanations and has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. But please make sure you've familiarized yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.
This is what everyone was afraid of with zoom. That like many other companies out of communist countries they aren't independent and will actively subvert democracy.
Plenty of companies elsewhere seem perfectly happy to do likewise. Offered as neither a defense of Zoom nor the CCP, but as calling out a tired strawman argument.
So everybody is cool with youtube removing videos and banning channels of RT, Sputnik and pro-Russia accounts; but Zoom doing just the same for the very same reason somehow makes everyone feel bad for Zoom .
The thing is, it's much simpler for you and the person your talking to to switch from Zoom to SomeOtherApp. But with Youtube - you can take your own videos off of it, but you can't take the ones you want to watch off.
RT and Sputnik spread misinformation and have coordinated efforts to influence another country's elections.
The activist in question was providing a forum for people affected by the Tiananmen massacre to memorialize their loved ones and ensure people remember what happened.
I'm fine with the first ban, but not the second, and I don't think it's at all weird or hypocritical to hold that position. "Spreading lies with the goal of sowing geopolitical discord" is not the same as "memorializing a historical event that China would rather sweep under the rug".
(And before you say "but the US influences elections all the time", yes, I agree that the US does do that, and I wish it wouldn't, but that's not material to this particular discussion.)
It is enough for the title to say just: "Zoom closes account".
That is already a horrendous misfeature of a communications application. It should not have a central authority which controls accounts (or even knows about all valid accounts).
Might be required for enforcement against illegal activity, either by law or by desire to avoid ending up as one of those platforms that endorses pure freedom of speech and ends up being labeled by society as a haven of crime and extremism. Would be hard to keep control of that without centralized control.
> those platforms that endorses pure freedom of speech and ends up being labeled by society as a haven of crime and extremism
Oh, You mean like physical conversations between people?
> Might be required for enforcement against illegal activity
"required"? You mean, it would _help_ governments enforce laws. If enforcing the law is a supreme consideration, then it's required. For me - it is not.
Physical Conversations isn't a brand of a company that would be negatively affected by bad publicity (although physical locations/neighborhoods with bad reputations that have trouble attracting investment etc are certainly good examples of this effect). You're not gonna say "avoid physical conversations, that's where criminals hang out." But people can say "avoid that neighborhood/avoid Zoom, that's where all the criminals hang out." So the neighborhood and zoom have incentives to police conduct occurring within their borders.
I hope I'm not drawing too tenuous of a connection to current events, but I can't help but notice the irony of so many Silicon Valley companies coming out in vocal (and financial!) support of the BLM movement [1], while turning right around and supporting a totalitarian regime in China.
It strikes me as deeply inauthentic that people can be so passionate about some social issues and utterly indifferent or complicit to others. I understand that people can prioritize different issues at different times, and some people say that it's even possible to care about one issue without the expense of another.
Nonetheless, that statement is not substantiated by the level of concern U.S. citizens and woke-minded folks around the world devote to issues like the soft economic power China wields over SouthEast asian countries, the oppression of Uyghur minorities in China, or the political status of pro-democracy countries like Taiwan (to name a few).
Do people only care about a political issue if people threaten to cancel them on Twitter?
War is coming. Any company doing business with China - and complying with the demands of the CCP’s security apparatus - needs to examine it’s choices no less rigorously than what we’ve seen in other human rights vs technology conflicts this week amd this year.
> "We are outraged by this act from Zoom, a U.S company," Zhou and other organizers told Axios in a statement. "As the most commercially popular meeting software worldwide, Zoom is essential as an unbanned outreach to Chinese audiences remembering and commemorating Tiananmen Massacre during the coronavirus pandemic."
I understand the sentiment, but I don't agree that Zoom is essential. Jitsi is a fine alternative. It's perhaps not as polished Zoom, but that's a fair tradeoff here, I think!
Please stop breaking the site guidelines. Nationalistic flamewar is not welcome here. Insinuations of brigading and other abuses are not ok (because the vast majority of the time, people are simply making them up to explain something they noticed and disliked). Going on about downvotes is also against the rules.
Yes, I agree. It seems each Chinese company has a secret relationship with the Chinese government.
But what they didn't notice is that the American embassy would censor your social account and content when you apply for Visa. American is the biggest surveillance country but takes it for granted.
I see people on HN defending Zoom all the time.
>The company has acknowledged that much of its product development has been based in China, and that some Zoom calls were accidentally routed through Chinese servers.
>The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab said it found serious concerns over Zoom's security protocols, and said the company's large workforce in China left it "responsive to pressure from Chinese authorities."
>The government of Taiwan banned official use of Zoom due to security concerns, as have New York State schools, the U.S. Senate, and the German ministry of foreign affairs.
>Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in early June that the company has chosen not to encrypt free calls in order to cooperate with law enforcement.