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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

#451

Post by vinay427 »

xenonite wrote: post #127

Only last week, it was announced by Zoom's CEO that free accounts are unencrypted, to enable law enforcement agencies. Now we read that PAID accounts are suspended for their contents. Hence, the encryption is obviously a farce.

The E2E encryption hasn't been released yet. Currently and in the future, according to their announcement, all calls will at least be server-client encrypted. Paid ones will apparently be optionally E2E encrypted.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/3/21279355/zoom-end-encrypti...

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

#452

Post by odinho »

odinho wrote: post #246
gnud wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could give Whereby [1] a try. I really liked it when it was named "appear.in" (that's now a completely different company), and used it for a bit, until my work switched to Teams. Whereby is, as far as I can tell, completely owned by a Norwegian registered company. 1: https://whereby.com

A Whereby-developer here. It's awesome you recommend us. You can turn on "mobile mode" in advanced device settings, and it should be a bit better. But we're a bit limited in how CPU-friendly we really can be, living in the browser. Not that we can't improve, there's certainly extra tricks we could try - but not easily without also lowering fps and resolution. I don't think "low resource use" is a big selling-argument…

Actually, if you are using 4+ rooms, we will in many cases be better than some other webrtc services because we for these bigger rooms use a server in the middle to distribute all the streams. That will result in lower resource use. You only encode and send once, and it is distributed by the server. But if other webrtc kills CPU on 4 or less, we probably won't be much better.

This "more than 4 room" is not p2p and end-to-end encrypted, since the server (SFU) needs to read and change some headers. So it is a tradeoff. There's now "insertable streams" which allow you to do encryption on the media client side, but it's a test for now: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...

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

#453

Post by vinay427 »

kup0 wrote: post #188
whycombagator wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only last week, it was announced by Zoom's CEO that free accounts are unencrypted, to enable law enforcement agencies. I missed that one, do you have a source?

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/3/21279355/zoom-end-encrypti...

That source doesn't support the GP comment. End-to-end encryption 1. doesn't exist yet for any user, and 2. does not mean free user calls will be less encrypted than they are today with server-client encryption. Zoom is not claiming that paid calls today are E2E encrypted.

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

#454

Post by est »

microcolonel wrote: post #449
est wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having a large part of you engineering organization operate from within China Shockingly, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, IBM, Redhat, Cisco all have engineering team in mainland China. Do a job list search please. > decrypting that packet on a server located in China In your infrastructure setup, for hostnames in a cluster, how do you separate China servers and non-China servers? Do you put a subdomain or something?…

> In your infrastructure setup, for hostnames in a cluster, how do you separate China servers and non-China servers? Do you put a subdomain or something? Yes, these are exactly the sorts of things one does. The PRC is so distinct in terms of legal norms that servers hosted there need to be treated differently. If PRC would adhere to the legal norms of most of the rest of the world, and stop trying to start a cold war…

That's what happens when a lawyer designs IM/conf app. Follow your design, the switches/routers need to confirm the "jurisdiction" of each TCP/IP packet? What wonderful idea, please do submit your RFC to IETF.

> but about jurisdiction. For calls where no participants' connections originate from a PRC IP block, don't use the PRC infrastructure.

That's basically where the Chinese got the idea of building the Great Firewall started. Some IP addresses are from evil capitalist USA and need to be filtered.

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

#455

Post by ct520 »

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…

“I see people on HN defending Zoom all the time.”

I get the vibe with anything China related. Like it takes an over abundance of facts not to be attacked. Zoom fiasco is interesting though. I don’t do anything I don’t mind be monitored on there so sort of careless for now

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

#456

Post by est »

microcolonel wrote: post #441
est wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see people on HN defending Zoom all the time. > its product development has been based in China, and that some Zoom calls were accidentally routed through Chinese servers. Curious, did you background check every employee/contractor to make sure they are Chinese race free? Did you do every byte of your network traffic audit to make sure they are not Chinese IP routable? How often do you update your firewall rules?…

> Curious, did you background check every employee/contractor to make sure they are Chinese race free? That's immoral, illegal, and silly; effectively nobody is doing this, and if most people found out about that, they would try to put a stop to it. The PRC is a state, that state does not have a monopoly on representing any race. This is not a Chinese people problem, it's a CCP problem. Chinese people in the ROC don'…

> effectively nobody is doing this

effectively every US media is name calling companies/universities who have a slightest business with China or Chinese people.

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

#459

Post by Thorrez »

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.

Which closed the account of a US-based activist for hosting a Tiananmen event.

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

#460

Post by baby »

Oh gosh :/ I was really happy for keybase, and I really like keybase product, and I’ve been defending zoom to colleagues and infosec people and... I’m super disappointed to hear this. Really really disappointed...

Zoom’s management has no spine.

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