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

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

#191

Post by gwbas1c »

acatton wrote: post #148
dmart wrote: post #129

Perhaps a better question to ask would be "why is any process allowed to do this by default in 2021?"

Because it's a legitimate behaviour. htop needs to do this, it's literally its main feature. You can use hidepid=2 to prevent users from seeing other user's processes list.[1] But I don't want my OS to ask me "do you want to allow htop to access the list of your processes" — à la Windows Vista — every time I want to run htop to see my user processes. The issue here is closed source software with no way to inspect wha…

I think the nags discourage sketchy behavior. It makes some of the lackluster product managers think twice about unreasonable program behavior.

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

#192

Post by gwbas1c »

MichaelGroves wrote: post #58

> Is there any way to prevent it? Do what I do: Run it on a burner computer connected to your guest network.

Jokes aside, you can probably get close to that by running Zoom in a VM with NAT.

Unfortunately, sound and camera tend to be sketchy in a VM.

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

#194

Post by xenonite »

xfitm3 wrote: post #136

It not only examines all processes and arguments - it leverages the microphone to act on ultrasonic cues for "integrations". Zoom is a privacy dumpster fire. https://devforum.zoom.us/t/ultrasonic-connection/3318

Ultrasonic sound transmission is what Cisco WebEx also claims to do. So it not something unheard of (although it is not hearable).

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

#196

Post by gwbas1c »

slownews45 wrote: post #74
jraph wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Zoom does not work on my computer*, can we try X instead?" With X = something the other end does not need to install, like Jitsi Meet for instance *no need to explain that's because you uninstalled it and blocked its domain on your computer.

Be careful with this. In some orgs you can get a bit of a bad reputation for being technically incompetent if you can't get zoom to run. Zoom is very invasive / flexible - so it's actually somewhat hard to have it NOT work. People will suggest you try connecting on your phone or dialing in if you really can't figure it out (note that it has a fallback to browser option if you get stuck trying to start meeting as well…

> I know of at least one job interview where they claimed they couldn't get zoom to run / couldn't connect - and that was basically decisive.

I used to interview candidates via Zoom. There were quite a few who couldn't figure it out. I gave 2nd chances interviews, mostly for optics for upper management. (And because sometimes hardware breaks at the last minute.) The candidates always failed the retry interview.

At least for software development, troubleshooting a camera and mic is a pretty similar skill to what our job is on a day-to-day basis. It's also very disrespectful to make someone wait at the beginning of a meeting while you troubleshoot, especially when I'm waving my phone and sending IMs that ask the candidate to just use their phone.

But, if a candidate fell back to their phone, I appreciated that they respected my time.

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

#197

Post by mnd999 »

jraph wrote: post #40
akira2501 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm missing something.. all of the required information is available through the X11 protocol. Reading the command lines of the processes is unnecessary and provides data that isn't useful in the window sharing context.

This would not work on Wayland, though.

Zoom doesn’t support screen sharing on Wayland, except through some propriety Gnome API. It also doesn’t run at all for me on sway, just crashes at startup.

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

#198

Post by Flame »

sniperjzp wrote: post #61
sails wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Teams do this in the same way? They offer the same feature

Not sure about Teams, but Google Meet allow you to share a specific browser tab, I don't know how to implement it without reading all the opened tabs.

Teams lets you share an application window or your display(s).

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

#199

Post by addicted »

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.

I’d argue that laziness is worse in security/privacy situations than malicious intent. At least malicious intent only exposes me to Zoom and whoever they answer to. Their laziness, however, which would probably also reflect itself in other security situations, exposes me to them as well as basically the entire world of black hat hackers.

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

#200

Post by est »

xfitm3 wrote: post #136

It not only examines all processes and arguments - it leverages the microphone to act on ultrasonic cues for "integrations". Zoom is a privacy dumpster fire. https://devforum.zoom.us/t/ultrasonic-connection/3318

Any application allows remote screen recording is basically a trojan horse.
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