Zoom closes account of U.S.-based Chinese activist after Tiananmen event

Post by SahAssar » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #165

ciarannolan wrote: post #8

I feel like the good faith presumption for this company has to have shifted by now. Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse? Documenting participants (face, voice, language, location, etc.), recording content, etc. We're talking about the data of 200M+ users. I see people on HN defending Zoom all the time. >The company has acknowledged that much of its product…

> Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in early June that the company has chosen not to encrypt free calls in order to cooperate with law enforcement. This is incorrect. They don't offer end-to-end encryption, but it is encrypted between each client and the Zoom servers, and they have promised there's no way for a Zoom employee to spy on a conversation without visibly joining the meeting. https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/126…

Post by frabbit » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

frabbit wrote: post #157

paulgb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wanted to like Jitsi, but the quality difference with Zoom is noticeable. Same with Google Meet and anything I've seen that uses WebRTC. They remind me of RealPlayer back in the early 2000s in terms of blockyness. I would love to know about any Zoom competitors, free or paid, with comparable quality.

Jitsi Meet works fine as long as you do not use Firefox. W.r.t. the general meme about WebRTC, this is old (2018) and explicitly does not claim to be anything other than suggestive: https://jitsi.org/blog/a-simple-congestion-test-for-zoom/

Post by orsenthil » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

miles wrote: post #79

staycoolboy wrote: post #64

Is anyone here boycotting use of Zoom? I have a few clients that ask me to use it and I'm trying to think up a good response as to why I don't have it installed. For those of you that have rejected it on principle, what are you all saying?

I generally share a smattering of links like these: Zoom banned from New York City schools due to privacy and security flaws https://www.fastcompany.com/90486586/zoom-banned-from-new-yo... Google Told Its Workers That They Can’t Use Zoom On Their Laptops Anymore https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/google-bans... Elon Musk's SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-…

Post by free_rms » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #22

john_moscow wrote: post #10

It is ironic how the western public generally frowns upon the silencing of dissident throught in China, and at the same time welcomes precisely the same behavior for "sensitive topics" back home.

There is a vast difference between letting the government suppress speech, which is what China does, and letting private companies suppress speech, which is what happens in America. When the government does it, you can't express that idea anywhere. When private companies do it, you can still express those ideas somewhere else.

Post by saalweachter » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #94

strogonoff wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Security and ease of use are not by default mutually exclusive. Depending on circumstances satisfying both may be a challenge, but it’s not a blanket impossibility and we could probably hold certain companies up to a standard that corresponds to their multi-billion valuations. A virtual “slider” on which you can only dial up security by hurting usability is only a use…

> It’s worth keeping in mind that even though security and ease of use tend to inversely correlate with each other, they are not by default mutually exclusive. I actually disagree with you. I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive. I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability. Now to be clear, I absolutely believe we should have a lot more security than we…