Google bans Zoom from employees' computers • Hacker News Board

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#391

Post by dodobirdlord » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #25

zozbot234 wrote: post #2

What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before. They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach.

> What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before. > They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach. If an engineer from Microsoft has to speak to an engineer from Google, and you think they should both be dog-fooding their own video application... how do you see that working? Just both dig their feet in and never talk to each other? Seems silly…

Who sent the email scheduling the meeting?

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#392

Post by DeathArrow » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

mattip wrote: post #385

jMyles wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The threat model for a school is kids/others disrupting sessions and creepers using access to gawp at (or communicate with kids). Not if the school actually cares about the future of its students. From a blog post[0] we published at NuCypher a while back: > If we fail to take action now, we risk a world in which unsavory actors - domestic and foreign - have built rich, comprehensive profiles for every one of our ch…

Is Google or Facebook any better in this regard?

It highly depends on the definition of the good guys. If you live in US, that might be true. If you live in the rest of the world that might be false.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#393

Post by skc » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:53 AM UTC

Must be nice to be an upstart. You have a throng of tech savvy people to defend you at best and forgive you at worst.

If this was a Microsoft/Google product it would be pilloried to death.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#394

Post by DeathArrow » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:56 AM UTC

Google banning competition? Totally unexpected.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#395

Post by watwut » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:04 AM UTC

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #196

jMyles wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's threat model may not be your threat model, and it definitely isn't the threat model of my daughter's school. A corporation like Google may be concerned using native applications, written in unsafe languages, written by developers from other corporations in China. That said, Zoom isn't wrong for everyone. Google's threat model surely differs in some way from a school, but the specific threats you named seem…

The threat model for a school is kids/others disrupting sessions and creepers using access to gawp at (or communicate with kids). Since the Chinese government is unlikely to feel the need to compel Zoom to do that, the fact that they have all the keys centrally stored is not a problem. Google's threat model actually does include state level attack (And specifically by China) to steal IP or access confidential user da…

It is also the few parents with no contact order trying to get contact to kids.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#396

Post by wakenmeng » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC

fiblye wrote: post #376

magduf wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If China wants to waste its resources having people spy on me on Zoom while I play board games with friends on it, then this seems like a good thing to me. But I wouldn't use it for work meetings.

China doesn't have any concerns about wasting resources. They have more than enough to spare. Vacuuming up any sort of mundane daily task people do is good data to feed into some AI that can easily distinguish fluff conversations from useful interactions worth investigating.

Why you said like you are sure that China is spying the Zoom streams? Where's ur evidence? or just "obviously"?

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#397

Post by fiblye » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:16 AM UTC

wakenmeng wrote: post #396

fiblye wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China doesn't have any concerns about wasting resources. They have more than enough to spare. Vacuuming up any sort of mundane daily task people do is good data to feed into some AI that can easily distinguish fluff conversations from useful interactions worth investigating.

Why you said like you are sure that China is spying the Zoom streams? Where's ur evidence? or just "obviously"?

Not sure what your interest is in this, but I was responding to his not caring if China harvests his data. I didn't make claims about Zoom sending the data to China, but I've seen other people make comments around the internet that Zoom is sending the data to China, and they promptly get flooded with comments tearing them apart for having suspicions.

But you made me look into this. Apparently Zoom does "accidentally" (accidents like this don't really happen) send data to China. [1] It's very normal for companies to completely divide up their Chinese servers and non-Chinese servers, so the rerouting makes me suspicious.

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/china-zoom-data-2020-4

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#398

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:41 AM UTC

shbooms wrote: post #359

philliphaydon wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing Google Docs has over MS is the collaboration. Word in the browser is a billion times better for formatting than Google Docs. I loath using google docs. But when it comes to Collab, Google docs wins hands down.

> The only thing Google Docs has over MS is the collaboration. As someone who has had to build relatively complex tools in both Sheets and Excel, I would have to say Sheets has done a much more impressive job with their builtin formulas/functions than Excel.

[deleted]

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#399

Post by jMyles » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 6:57 AM UTC

mattip wrote: post #385

jMyles wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The threat model for a school is kids/others disrupting sessions and creepers using access to gawp at (or communicate with kids). Not if the school actually cares about the future of its students. From a blog post[0] we published at NuCypher a while back: > If we fail to take action now, we risk a world in which unsavory actors - domestic and foreign - have built rich, comprehensive profiles for every one of our ch…

Is Google or Facebook any better in this regard?

Is the fact that I specifically called out both of them in the post insufficient condemnation? :-)

Indeed - they're no better.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#400

Post by annie_chung » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 7:06 AM UTC

QUFB wrote: post #83

Some thoughts: 1. Google's threat model may not be your threat model, and it definitely isn't the threat model of my daughter's school. A corporation like Google may be concerned using native applications, written in unsafe languages, written by developers from other corporations in China. That said, Zoom isn't wrong for everyone. 2. Google is motivated to push their own solution for obvious reasons. 3. Tavis, or oth…

> That said, Zoom isn't wrong for everyone.

Why use it at all? I honestly don't know what's available in this space, since I don't need to, but is there really no alternative?

If they're building a product that does shady things (e.g., macOS install nonsense) and is full of security holes (e.g., zoombombing) that's enough to tell me I don't want to use it and I don't want my son's school using it.

Google isn't alone here. Just another data point.

At best it's a product full of security holes. At worst deliberately designed to spy on people. I don't care who those people are. I care about the intent.