Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 562 posts

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

#341

Post by mellow2020 »

deathgrips wrote: post #152
ordinaryradical wrote: post #4

Aiding in the Chinese media's censorship is not good for China nor the world. When a government destroys the ability for it to be criticized it becomes untethered from consensus reality; megalomaniacs can take the reins and a kind of national hubris forms that can lead to devastating conflict and oppression. All governments need open dissent and criticism to keep from going down this path. Zoom should not be aiding a…

You're not considering the real and terrifying strengths that dictatorship has over democracy. In true democracies the politicians never undertake a plan that lasts longer than one election term because they have no incentive to do so. In China they feel free to undertake 20 year plans with large upfront investments because the party does not care about winning an election every 2-4 years. Why do you automatically as…

Even taking what you said at face value, what you're describing is a strong body with no mind. If you could get a lifespan of a million years, but had to spend it in a coma, would you want to? If you could live a million years, but only as a passive passenger, while other people (or dice, why not) control your actions, would you want to?

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

#342

Post by christophilus »

ketamine__ wrote: post #259

Just curious if anyone has tried creating rooms or logins (or passwords) that reference Tiananmen and had their accounts closed? I'm imagining that doing this on a company account could be a painful revenue destroying form of protest.

Perth Tolle who runs the FRDM ETF also had her account knocked offline. She is a human rights advocate who has been outspoken about the HK situation. It’s looking pretty bad for Zoom.

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

#343

Post by yeahforsureman »

Redoubts wrote: post #212
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…

> Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse? Why does this event move the needle one way or another? The group had a paid account so Zoom knows who they are, and this was a publicized event. All the Chinese government needed to know was an event they don't like was happening, with the services of a company they can exercise soft power over.

That's weird use of the term "soft power".

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

#344

Post by TechBro8615 »

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.

Seriously. Just a week ago, Facebook employees went on strike because FB refused to censor Trump’s messaging. NYT reporters forced the opinion editor to resign for allowing a Republican senator to publish an op-ed. Meanwhile, I’ll bet many of those same people consider censorship of Tiananmen Square to be wrong.

Apparently, there is good censorship, and bad censorship. What’s frustrating is that the proponents of “good censorship” do not even realize this irony, or at least they call it a false equivalence when you point it out to them.

To address that “false equivalence” criticism, I would be curious to hear from someone who thinks Facebook or Twitter should annotate Trump’s posts. Do you also think that they should annotate posts about Tiananmen square to include links to the Chinese government’s narrative that actually, there was no massacre and it was a CIA-instigated riot?

Who decides which posts to annotate and what to annotate them with? It’s not just the CCP who believes the Tiananmen square massacre didn’t happen; there are millions of Chinese citizens who agree with them, just like there are millions of Americans who disagree with Trump. So is there a difference between a mob of Americans asking to annotate a Trump post about a BLM protest with a CNN article, and a mob of Chinese people asking to annotate an Ai Weiwei post about Tiananmen Square with a People’s Daily article?

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

#345

Post by mindfulhack »

gonehome wrote: post #7

This kind of thing is the exact reason why I was disturbed by the Keybase.io sale to Zoom and abandoned my account. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23105253 ) I've been currently using Zoom during the pandemic because as a product it's still the best (and I signed up for a discounted year of pro), but I won't give them any money again.

Thank you for the idea, just deleted my keybase.io account.

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

#346

Post by drdeadringer »

mushufasa wrote: post #336
drdeadringer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My laptop is at least that old and Jitsi is fine for me. Linux Mint OS, Firefox browser, both up to date.

are you using it on the browser, or are you using the jitsi desktop version (which seems to be distinct and not cross-compatible)? Are there settings you adjusted? Are you just doing one-on-one meetings (that works fine for me too) or group calls of 3+ (which is what I need to do everyday where it immediately becomes unusable)? I'm also using a linux distro based off ubuntu/debian.

> are you using it on the browser, or are you using the jitsi desktop version

I am using Jitsi in//on the browser [for me, Firefox].

I don't know if I have a preference as I have only "just started using" the past few months via being given a link I click on whilst I am on my laptop... so unfortunately I cannot speak about Jitsi via Desktop Version at this time.

> Are there settings you adjusted?

Besides simple sound volume off of my OS//headphones, I use whatever the default settings are.

> 1-1 meetings or 3+ group calls?

Group calls, each time would be roughly 5-12 people.

For other info just for giggles:

The laptop I do this on is connected wirelessly to my home wireless network, about 6 feet away from my wireless router; my wireless router may have multiple people using it at a given time since I share. I'm in US-California-Silicon_Valley on Comcast.

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

#347

Post by freeopinion »

mushufasa wrote: post #331
tppiotrowski wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to do one-on-one of many-to-many calls? If you're doing just one-on-one there is very basic webrtc in web browser service[1]. I've also made my own for quickly connecting with people online[2], not sure if it's your use case though... [1] https://peercalls.com/ [2] https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/moonlite

It's for group calls. Jitsi worked fine one-on-one but as soon as a third person joined it became unusable.

Are any of the participants using Firefox? There's a known problem with Firefox's WebRTC and Jitsi wherein even a single Firefox participant can create performance issues for everyone.

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

#348

Post by buran77 »

amrrs wrote: post #109
tmpz22 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zoom is a company I have loved so far Do you love the company, its leadership, its product, or its pricing?

Not OP, I love the company's leadership and the product (not the privacy issue part). It's awesome to see Eric leaving Webex and building a product that seems and sells superior to Webex. It's not that easy to beat yourself at your own game and he's proved. That is one thing I like about Zoom

> not the privacy issue part

But that's an integral part of the product. There is a lot of reason for suspicion floating around the company and the product itself, and the long string of security screwups and misdirection confirms every bit of that.

What's the point of having even good functionality if it comes attached to such concerns? Most products have a good side but choosing one is always about picking what's the worst problem that you can live with rather than the best feature.

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

#349

Post by aikinai »

trilinearnz wrote: post #315
pfarnsworth wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Zoom is the best video conference software I've ever used. It's so much better than Skype or anything created by Google, Facebook, etc. When I first started using it at work 5 years ago, I was blown away at how stable it was, and how many people could connect at the same time. It just worked.

Totally agreed. The thing I think contributes most to this impression is how local voice is recorded at all times on the client, and then replayed at a higher speed to the other participants if the connection drops briefly. This enables others to hear what was said, without having to listen to the speech at the original pace, which would result in a delay. Genuis!

This has been standard practice with video calling products for many years. I know at least FaceTime and Duo do it. It might even be built into WebRTC?

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

#350

Post by lorenzorhoades »

gonehome wrote: post #7

This kind of thing is the exact reason why I was disturbed by the Keybase.io sale to Zoom and abandoned my account. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23105253 ) I've been currently using Zoom during the pandemic because as a product it's still the best (and I signed up for a discounted year of pro), but I won't give them any money again.

Tesla canceled Zoom due to these privacy concerns expressed in this article. We use Microsoft Teams now and it's much better. Everyone already used it as an instant messenger before this and since it's part of the Outlook ecosystem i've found that it's much better. It's also saved a ton of useless meetings that run really long because i can just call someone straight through Teams instead of setting a meeting.
Post reply on HN