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

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

#391

Post by couchand »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #344
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 “go…

> NYT reporters forced the opinion editor to resign for allowing a Republican senator to publish an op-ed.

That is quite a naive interpretation. It's not like the Times Opinion pages have never seen a Republican op-ed. The issue is that the op-ed in question advocated for violence against American citizens based on factual errors and flimsy premises.

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

#392

Post by CarbyAu »

I set up a Jitsi Meet server at home. It's main resource use is bandwidth. CPU/RAM use for the server is minimal.

I used: - VMWare Workstation:1CPU/2Core, 6GB RAM(I have RAM to burn) - Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop default install (so I could use the base snapshot for other things) - Hardware: i7 2600(yea it is old!), 32Gb RAM, generic gaming desktop with updated GPU. - To Install Jitsi itself:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KR0AhDZF2A

No end-to-end encryption? Don't care, it is coming to MY home and it DOES have SSL for client to server encryption. I boot from known good snapshot when I want to use it. Turn it off otherwise. I guess I should figure out accounts etc but it hasn't been an issue to just let it run free for anyone to use while I am using it.

For those HN people who have all the tech-know, just build a Jitsi VPS somewhere with super decent bandwidth.

Hell, I would expect some HN people to be able to automate that shit and give me a website with a nominal price to have my own personal Jitsi Meet server, complete with Domain Name and Jitsi account management.

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

#393

Post by tkgally »

deadbunny wrote: post #297
rewgs wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has everyone forgotten about Skype? My D&D group switched from Zoom to Skype and the performance/quality is noticeably better. There's 5 of us and it's great. Free, no time limits, etc.

My group (6 of us) did the oposite. We used to use Skype till we had continual problems of people getting infinite "loading" screens, we switched to Zoom the last 3 or 4 games because of it. I have to say the video quality is much better and the DM being able to screen share while we can still see each other is great. Also the "Brady Bunch" view is great, being able to see everyone at once is awesome. I'm not very ha…

> I'm not very happy with all of the news trickling out about Zoom but I really do like their product.

That's my position, too. I teach at a large public university in Japan, where the school year begins in April. At the beginning of March, we were expecting to start classes in person as normal a month later. By around March 20, we had decided to teach most of our classes online; a week later, "most" had become "all." Teachers and students had little to no prior experience with online education, and their level of general digital literacy varied widely. From the plethora of tools available, we had to choose software that everyone could use and that would be reliable and scalable.

Despite concerns about security issues, Zoom was chosen as our videoconferencing platform. That seems to have turned out to be a good choice, as it is stable, can handle large groups, and offers features (breakout rooms, video and audio recording, attendance reports, etc.) that are useful for university classes. That fact that it hasn't (yet) been blocked in China was also a factor in choosing it, as we have students stuck overseas who need to take part in classes. Anecdotal reports from colleagues who teach at other universities in Japan suggest that the non-Zoom platforms have not performed as well.

Now that teachers and students are used to online classes, I hope we can also try other tools in the future. But considering how well Zoom performed during our hectic ramp-up to online teaching, I give it my grudging support for the time being.

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

#394

Post by dangjc »

Why doesn’t the US just pass a countervailing law against censorship? When China tells a company to censor its employees or users, the company could just point to the US law saying it can’t. Then China has no leverage over it because the company’s hands are tied.

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

#395

Post by knolax »

jessaustin wrote: post #322
knolax wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse? The burden of proof lies on you to prove they are.

How on earth could a user "prove" this? Mention some secret on a call and then watch for the Chinese government to act on that secret? Give us a break. It's much safer to assume surveillance and protect oneself accordingly.

We have definite proof of surveillance by the Five-Eyes, why would China would be better at hiding evidence of surveillance. Claiming that something can't be measured at all doesn't help your argument either. That type of reasoning is only acceptable in theology.

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

#396

Post by barry-cotter »

Aunche wrote: post #375
jentist_retol wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US citizens have a significant better chance at fighting a warrant. Personally, we've been using Jitsi for video. It's not amazing, but it is free in many senses of the word.

Zoom is a US company founded by an American citizen.

Zoom is a US company founded by an immigrant from China with 700 employees in China where the software and product development teams are. All 700 of those employees can be leaned on to break security generally or to break it for one specific person or meeting, even if we don’t believe there management of the Chinese or American parts of the firm won’t just do what the CPC ask them to do.

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

#397

Post by jessaustin »

knolax wrote: post #395
jessaustin wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth could a user "prove" this? Mention some secret on a call and then watch for the Chinese government to act on that secret? Give us a break. It's much safer to assume surveillance and protect oneself accordingly.

We have definite proof of surveillance by the Five-Eyes, why would China would be better at hiding evidence of surveillance. Claiming that something can't be measured at all doesn't help your argument either. That type of reasoning is only acceptable in theology.

The Chinese Edward Snowden is not currently living in Moscow. "I see no reason" is not a good way to start fallacy-measuring.

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

#398

Post by dang »

thePunisher wrote: post #106

Zoom is not a U.S. company but an infiltration by China. The entire company should be broken up and all ties with China cut. Its founder and CEO should also be investigated for illegal ties with China.

We ban accounts that do nationalistic flamewar on HN, so please stop doing that.

No, I'm not a communist agent.

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

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

#399

Post by tlear »

odinho wrote: post #256
tlear wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really liked it, then they broke it on Safari. I still use it on Firefox, but it is annoying to switch just for using it

We have used a lot of time making it work on Safari. And we continue to use quite substantial resources on it. Their webrtc implementation is quite new, and not as stable as Chrome and Firefox. And with new code comes new bugs. There is currently a bug with audio, where it'll crash in Safari, -- and we have had some issues reconnects that was more our fault (though Firefox and Chrome is much more forgiving). We have…

Safari does not crash, but audio is not working.

I will play with it today and send bug report. Might help you guys out, I really like it otherwise

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

#400

Post by knolax »

jessaustin wrote: post #397
knolax wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have definite proof of surveillance by the Five-Eyes, why would China would be better at hiding evidence of surveillance. Claiming that something can't be measured at all doesn't help your argument either. That type of reasoning is only acceptable in theology.

The Chinese Edward Snowden is not currently living in Moscow. "I see no reason" is not a good way to start fallacy-measuring.

There are plenty of Chinese dissidents, including the the activist that is the subject of TFA. The default assumption is to assume noncorrelation between things until proven otherwise. That's a defensible position, yours isn't.
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