151–160 of 277 posts
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
> Why would it do that? We can answer part of that with just a little more reading. What's pid 3844872? For me, the series of queries against /proc happen from a process that, just a bit earlier, called exec. So it's not really zoom reading "all processes and arguments" but ... `pidof gnome-session`, so I guess zoom is looking for the pid of gnome-session. To what nefarious purpose zoom intends to put this knowledge…
I installed the Zoom client just to have a look for myself. The syscalls in question emanate from freshly forked processes that immediately execvp() the command `pidof` (on my system it finds it under /usr/bin, so it's the system command, not anything fishy shipped by Zoom). Actually, the command-line argument to the command is, in succession:
gnome-session
gnome-panel
gnome-shell
gnome-session-binary
ksmserver
cinnamon
cinnamon-session
mate-panel
mate-session
xfce-mcs-manage
xfce4-panel
xfce4-session
I suppose Zoom goes through the whole list on my system because it finds none of them. The fact that it stops on parent's system suggests that Zoom stops when it finds one. This hints at a very crude way to determine the desktop environment!
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They are grayed out for everyone else, so they can’t actually read the contents. Caveat being if you move the window around really fast sometimes it’s possible to catch a glimpse.
Maybe that's changed, but a couple months ago we tested it on vanilla Ubuntu in the team at $dayjob and we could see everything. Nothing was grayed out.
> Why would it do that? We can answer part of that with just a little more reading. What's pid 3844872? For me, the series of queries against /proc happen from a process that, just a bit earlier, called exec. So it's not really zoom reading "all processes and arguments" but ... `pidof gnome-session`, so I guess zoom is looking for the pid of gnome-session. To what nefarious purpose zoom intends to put this knowledge…
^ This is the correct answer. I installed the Zoom client just to have a look for myself. The syscalls in question emanate from freshly forked processes that immediately execvp() the command `pidof` (on my system it finds it under /usr/bin, so it's the system command, not anything fishy shipped by Zoom). Actually, the command-line argument to the command is, in succession: gnome-session gnome-panel gnome-shell gnome-…
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3376679/qt-how-to-detect...
Zoom has a paid feature to view processes of other meeting attendees. Yes. Scary.
This seems to be a viral inaccuracy: https://www.howtogeek.com/664624/does-zoom-really-monitor-wh... That article claims that Zoom does have a feature allowing hosts to see whether people have the zoom window focused while someone is presenting, but it doesn't allow the host to actually see running processes. Note that I can't, nor do I claim to, vouch for the accuracy of the explanation in the link. Just something I…
It used to but it was removed.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000538083-Atten...
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> Im on a Mac so I can’t issue the same... dtruss
Sadly running dtruss on (modern) macOS requires disabling system integrity protection.
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If you must use zoom, use it in a browser; uninstall their app.
I didn't know that Zoom allowed that. Thank you.
When you click on a Zoom meeting, it will prompt you to launch xdg-open -- cancel it. Then hit launch again -- cancel the xdg-open again -- and then the "Join from browser" link should pop up after a few times.
Sometimes it tries to capture you, I had to click on trucks and trains for 15 minutes before it let me in, and then had to apologize for being 15 minutes late to the meeting.
Another angle for Zoom to do that, is that it is a massive Chinese spyware application, which can target users by meta data or IP, like it did by messing with the calls of activists. A bit like how anti-virus companies are sometimes charged with exfiltrating secret documents.
And for people giving ways to prevent it, can you please provide some context for those of us who aren't OS experts?
If you must use zoom, use it in a browser; uninstall their app.
By all means, use it if you feel it's necessary, but you're giving up a lot!
Zoom has a popular feature which allows for screen sharing a single application window instead of the entire desktop. I assume this is how its discovering running applications with GUI windows open in a cross-platform manner. Perhaps there is a better API for this? Its not a common use-case that an app would need to know all of the other open windows, but it seems like a perfectly valid use case, and frankly handy fo…
The screen sharing functionality is handled by a mix of protocols of the windows manger and service providers announced over dbus.
Even if you want to map GUI windows to processes you would do so by getting a list of windows from the window manager and getting the pid property of the windows, but if you have a list of windows you don't need to scan processes anymore...
There might (I'm not sure) be valid use-cases for this behaviour but I'm pretty confident screen sharing of specific windows isn't part of it.