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Ask HN: Why does Zoom Desktop examine all processes and arguments?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Zoom Desktop examine all processes and arguments?

#131

Post by dylan604 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #103
yakubin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> handy for sharing a PPT without fear of an embarrassing email showing up in during a meeting. When you share a single window in Zoom, notifications are still visible to others in the meeting when they overlap with the window you're sharing. That's the case for e.g. Slack notifications.

I literally quit all messaging apps when presenting to people for any period of time more than ~10s.

You could also disable notifications if your OS has that kind of feature. Mine does, so I took advantage of that after the first incident of being interrupted. It's a nice feature.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Zoom Desktop examine all processes and arguments?

#132

Post by dang »

ianlevesque wrote: post #5

Zoom is basically malware with video chat.

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments and/or shallow dismissals to Hacker News. It degrades discussion noticeably, and we're trying for better here.

(Of course, the greater part of this damage is done by upvoters, but they can't upvote nothing.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: Why does Zoom Desktop examine all processes and arguments?

#133

Post by scubbo »

eertami wrote: post #123
zippergz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people here who are saying "Teams and Meet are just as good" are the people who use Zoom in a browser. The audio and video quality, and resilience to poor connections, is much better in the desktop app.

>The audio and video quality, ... is much better in the desktop app But is the quality actually better, or is it post-processing tricks to make it seem better on commodity hardware/audio setups? If it is actually better, surely this should be measurable and there should exist evidence to support such a claim.

> is the quality actually better, or is it post-processing tricks to make it seem better

Serious question - if the experience is the same, why does this distinction matter?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Zoom Desktop examine all processes and arguments?

#134

Post by travoc »

slownews45 wrote: post #113
travoc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can avoid this reputation by saying “our security analysts block Zoom because they think it might be untrustworthy spyware.”

That's def a better response then I can't figure out how to call into the zoom call! That said, a fair number of folks don't credibly have "security analysts". Unless you are interviewing / working for some sort of high security / security analyst type job the world may move on pretty quickly without you.

Yes, this excuse doesn’t work for personal calls and interviews, but most of my vendors seem to understand.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Zoom Desktop examine all processes and arguments?

#135

Post by heavyset_go »

thrower123 wrote: post #83
woodruffw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unlikely stretch, but it looks like they're also attempting to read `/proc/PID/exe` -- they could be doing something (extremely) cursed like attempting to parse the program linkages and filtering by programs that link to `libX11`. But that's me straining to explain this in the context of the GP's hypothesis.

Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by laziness. I can easily believe somebody just wrote a chunk of naive code that grabbed all the running processes, and it worked, and they moved on.

Hanlon's razor is a great principle to apply to personal relationships, but it falls apart in these situations.

You can explain away any deliberate malice or negligence using it, even when there are clear incentives to enage is such behavior, unless there's absolute evidence of malice. By then it's too late because you've already been swindled, and the principle ignores the lengths organizations will go to cover that evidence up.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Zoom Desktop examine all processes and arguments?

#137

Post by ghostpepper »

nonameiguess wrote: post #128
jlgaddis wrote: post #59

> Is there any way to prevent it? Mounting /proc with " hidepid=2 " should prevent it from seeing processes owned by other users, although it would still be able to see your processes. Alternatively, it shouldn't be too hard to create an AppArmor profile that blocks access to /proc. Other options might include things like SELinux, seccomp-bpf, namespaces, cgroups, etc., depending on what's available on your host. Or…

You can edit /usr/share/applications/Zoom.desktop to run inside of bubblewrap, similar to how the Arch Wiki suggests doing this for Skype: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap#Skype_for_Linux Since this puts it in its own PID and mount namespace, it won't see any processes except itself and its children. You can even try not mounting /proc in the container this makes at all and see what happens. This is effect…

This is very cool. I was going to suggest running it inside a container/namespaces but I didn't know about bubble wrap.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Zoom Desktop examine all processes and arguments?

#140

Post by GekkePrutser »

agustif wrote: post #55
elliekelly wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must have uninstalled their app on my Macbook ten times now but somehow it keeps coming back. I’ll click a link to join a meeting and the app launches.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210076 They recover the app from your backups if available when launching. Try appCleaner or something like that, and you might need to delete it from any TimeMachine backups too, lol

This is exactly the kind of dickery I hate zoom for. The same thing with installing a backdoor and then blatantly refusing to remove it when found out. Luckily Apple did the job for them :P

Their attitude is so wrong. I don't understand how people still use it.

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