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How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

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Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#211

Post by thaumasiotes »

manigandham wrote: post #85

1) If Zoom can do this then it's a MacOS security bug. 2) UX matters. Users don't care about the technical details, they want a smooth experience and that can be the difference between a billion-dollar business or a failed startup. And yes the desktop version is more stable than the web-based UI. 3) Malware is defined by what it does, not how it's installed.

> 3) Malware is defined by what it does, not how it's installed.

Well, from the tweet thread:

> If the App is already installed but the current user is not admin, they use a helper tool called "zoomAutenticationTool" [sic] and the AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges API to spawn a password prompt identifying as "System" (!!) to gain root (including a typo).

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#212

Post by miguelmota »

What I like about zoom is that I can click on a zoom link and it opens up my video conference pretty quickly. Last thing I want is to go through installation steps when people are waiting for me on a call. I understand the security implications but it's a trade-off between user experience and lesser security.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#213

Post by mynameisvlad »

reaperducer wrote: post #46
lukevp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use Teams Live for this? We have been using zoom and Teams alternately and Teams performance and ease of use has been much better in my experience, but we have yet to do a 200+ all hands so I was curious if there were some footguns with teams live that you may know about. Teams live works on a lot of platforms and also has a web version.

Why not use Teams Live for this? My wife was on a Teams videoconference last week. 125 people in four locations from New York to Southern California. An hour into it, half of the people were simultaneously dropped, and not from any particular geography. It was random. And nobody could reconnect for a very long time. It took 45 minutes to restart the meeting. The company is no longer using Teams.

Teams live events (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e...) which the parent comment was refering to is actually a specific feature in Teams that is only available for certain levels AFAIK but supports vastly more people than a standard Teams meeting.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#214

Post by btilly »

impendia wrote: post #44
t0mas88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?

I'm a college professor, and I'll share my perspective. For one, Zoom did just work. (At least as a participant, rather than an organizer.) I tried it out, and it immediately worked. It did what all of us were expecting, with no fuss. I also tried MS Teams. It seems designed with a different philosophy: that you use the software to do many different things, and you want them all integrated. (For example, it posted my…

And, then, in the end... it didn't work. I was trying to teach a class, but my students couldn't see what I was doing. I had no idea why.

Were you on a mac?

If so, you may have encountered https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_... which has been outstanding since October and has no sign will be fixed properly any time soon.

The workaround is quit programs until you find the one that somehow causes Microsoft Teams to not understand that it really does have permissions. For me it seemed to be XCode. But it could be others...here is a partial list:

  - Harvest – Confirmed
  - Sonos – Confirmed
  - Cisco VPN – Issue reported by others
  - Microsoft To-Do – Confirmed
  - Contacts+ (formerly FullContact) – confirmed
  - Apple Photos – confirmed
  - Teamviewer – reported by others
  - Prompt/popup for app review from App Store – still have questions here. This seemed to be it, but haven’t been able to confirm
  - Brackets – reported by others
  - Citrix Workspace Version: 19.10.2.41 (1910) – confirmed
This is an example of why "just works" is so important.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#215

Post by ummonk »

tambourine_man wrote: post #173

Zoom's got a tradition of being, let's put it like this, way too clever for everyone's own good. See previous “lets install a server on this Mac that is not removed when you uninstall the app and leaves your camera open to the entire internet” for more examples. I use it on a VM, I suggest you do it too.

I use the web browser version, and refuse to even install Zoom. It's borderline spyware.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#216

Post by afandian »

pottertheotter wrote: post #17

I installed Zoom on macOS yesterday and I thought that the install was crashing because this is not the expected behavior. I would double click the download, try to install, and then the installation program would "crash", so I'd try it again. Did that a few times before I realized it was installed. Until now I thought it had somehow gotten far enough in the installation process before crashing that I could at least…

I did this too and didn't put two and two together til now. I just assumed it was a buggy installer that broke with that version of MacOS and tried a different machine

I've defended Zoom in the past for ethical 'slips', but weidly this has tipped me into hating it.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#217

Post by cpeterso »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #180
aequitas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just had a corporate presentation with around 250 people. Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication, this was also stated by management, that Zoom should only be used for 'big' meetings like this. I think they know the other solutions will not work as well for bigger groups. I've not had issues with using either solution for small group meetings. Actually I have to go out of my way to run Zoom in t…

> Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication > to run Zoom in the browser [...] I have to use Chrome instead of Firefox. Just a note, Slack and Teams calls also won't work in Firefox. It's really annoying. Hangouts works fine in Firefox though, somewhat unexpectedly.

Here are the Firefox bug reports for Slack calls:

https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/12975

And Teams calls:

https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25070

Slack originally relied on non-standard, Chrome-specific WebRTC behavior and now is prioritizing development of their Electron app over web support.

There is a Firefox extension to spoof Chrome's User-Agent string for Teams. I haven't tested it, but it appears to work for people: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/teams-phone-f...

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#219

Post by joshuaissac »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #105
lonelappde wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect. Look at the second tweet in the thread. It's a phishing popup that misidentifies itself in order to steal priveleges intended for System, not Zoom. https://mobile.twitter.com/c1truz_/status/124473767519161958...

That's still an OS prompt, they just put their own message at the top, as you're allowed to do.

Yes, they are allowed to put a fake message (identifying the requester as System instead of Zoom), but that does not make it OK.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#220

Post by enricotal »

afandian wrote: post #216
pottertheotter wrote: post #17

I installed Zoom on macOS yesterday and I thought that the install was crashing because this is not the expected behavior. I would double click the download, try to install, and then the installation program would "crash", so I'd try it again. Did that a few times before I realized it was installed. Until now I thought it had somehow gotten far enough in the installation process before crashing that I could at least…

I did this too and didn't put two and two together til now. I just assumed it was a buggy installer that broke with that version of MacOS and tried a different machine I've defended Zoom in the past for ethical 'slips', but weidly this has tipped me into hating it.

Ok this is it... I was able to disinstall it with

$ brew cask install zoomus $ brew cask uninstall zoomus

so long and thank you for all the fish... Zoom

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