Live data from Hacker News

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

axios.com

531–540 of 562 posts

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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom is a company I have loved so far, but a lot of this is starting to really rub me the wrong way and I really don't want to have to go find another solution. However, without some sort of reversal, this is enough for me to deal with the mess of doing that.

I've tried Google Meet, Jitsi, and some other things, but Zoom is the only service that my 6+ year old laptop can handle for more than 5 min without nosediving into 100% CPU usage and freezing up. Does anyone have other suggestions? Either for other services or for troubleshooting Jitsi?

My 8 year old Macbook Pro works fine for all video conference services. It uses a lot of CPU and the fans go crazy but it works.

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

#533
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The government of Taiwan banned official use of Zoom due to security concerns, as have New York State schools, the U.S. Senate, and the German ministry of foreign affairs. This is good enough reason to not use it. Also I stopped using zoom and trying to avoiding it as much as possible after the very first vulnerability scandal[0] came about [0] https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...

Is there a non-Zoom client that can connect to Zoom meetings? My company implemented RingCentral about a year ago, which appears to just use a rebranded Zoom architecture for the online meeting component. They're not going to get rid of it anytime soon.

Zoom does have a SIP/H.323 bridge https://zoom.us/roomconnector . I believe it's the decision of the meeting host's organization whether to enable it, and there may be an extra cost associated with it.

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

#534
post #246
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…

Hey! I've been using Whereby at work for a while and it's great.

However, I should mention that it's not possible to join calls through the mobile app (as far as I can tell), and the web app on mobile wouldn't capture my Bluetooth headset's audio properly somehow.

Again, thanks for the great work. Just thought I'd let you know :)

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

#535

I wonder if we'll hear the "they're a private company, they can do what they want, it is only censorship if the government does it" routine. I remember about a decade ago when certain parties were so concerned with voices being silenced and "erasure." The same people are now cheering when Facebook, Twitter, and the like shut down certain kinds of speech, with great discretion as to how the "rules" are implemented. Th…

Are Zoom events like the one in the article public, such that any person who logs into Zoom can access as part of their interface, with out looking for it, the event in question?

Does the content of the event persist in a way that makes it easily sharable, with comments?

If the answer to both of these is “no,” I contend that the communications on these platforms is “private” and should be regulated by the US Government against censorship (though I have no hope that it will be). My reasoning is this:

(1) Zoom has no expectation that private communications will harm their business. In the same way Ma Bell never took responsibility for the zillions or drug deals and kidnappings that got coordinated over their system.

(2) Lack of viral potential means the possibility of inciting violence, cyber bullying, and other negative consequences of mass internet communication is diminished.

Both of these points have a correlating contention about censorship on Twitter, Facebook, etc: they (not the government) ought to censor content that has the potential for negative outcomes like those I mentioned. Is it difficult? Absolutely. Will there be disagreements? For sure. But, they can afford to figure it out, and our society can’t afford for them to not to.

NB: We need nuance and reasoning here. Falling back on first principles and calling it a day is not enough; those principles were articulated at a time where speech replication depended on industrial machines and were limited by how fast a pony could run. We’re talking the ability to beam information practically into every child’s brain 24/7 anywhere on the planet using psychological tricks to engage them.

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

#536

Article has been updated with a statement from Zoom: > Update: A Zoom spokesperson confirmed to Axios that the account had been closed "to comply with local law" and said it had now been re-activated. > “Just like any global company, we must comply with applicable laws in the jurisdictions where we operate. When a meeting is held across different countries, the participants within those countries are required to comp…

Yes, it seems like this was ultimately a bit of a nothingburger. As much as we may not like it (and I certainly personally don't), China has the authority to censor the internet within its borders. Zoom literally has no choice but to follow China's law within China's borders, if it is to provide its product there at all. Zoom accidentally deactivated a US-based account, and fixed it when they found out. At worst, in…

The problem is china's problem is not contained within china. CCP will force Zoom or any other companies to give the data they collect in other countries and due to market forces those companies has to comply legally or otherwise. Now do you see the problem, why china's authority to censor the internet is not an isolated issue ?

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

#537
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame people for being suspicious of Zoom either. I just find it sad that so many readers of Hackernews are endorsing logic that is so unscientific.

In what way is it "unscientific"? That's an odd choice of words in this situation. What we're aiming for is rational and in this instance, it's perfectly rational to be suspicious based on an abductive argument and unproven extrapolation. As another commenter aptly noticed, once you're able to prove it, the harm has already been done.

Having read the original comment again, I can see how it can be interpreted as suggesting to avoid Zoom as a precautionary measure, rather than accusing Zoom of wrongdoing. However, plenty of people are treating this incident as proof that Zoom is lying about encryption.

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

#538
post #282

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? It makes perfect sense to boycott Zoom based on their security issues, but does the presumption of innocence mean nothing anymore? It shouldn't be difficult to prove that Zoom is actively trying to block Chinese activists. China banned Zoom during the trade war. Are you going to treat that as evidence that Zoom isn't c…

I might be wrong here, since I only have this from hearsay, and I certainly won't touch Zoom. But, wasn't the "end-to-end encryption" a term they used in a blatantly deceptive way? The two ends not being the two users, but the user A and zoom servers, and zoom servers and user B? Please do correct me if I'm misinformed.

Edit: I checked. They've got you fooled.

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

#539
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then stop posting political content. If you post political content you're gonna get political discussions.

There are political discussions and political discussions. We want one kind and not another. The site rules don't cease to apply when a topic becomes political—they apply more: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you want a more in-depth explanation of how we approach the question of politics on HN, I've written about it many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.

If you or anyone takes a look at those past explanations and has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. But please make sure you've familiarized yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.

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

#540
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S/he is not saying all governments are equal in all respects. As far as we know only the Chinese, Russians and the 5-Eyes have the technical capacity to monitor us all and have been caught out doing it. So yes, you are correct: not all governments are equal, but the US and Chinese are similar in their practical totalitarian capacities.

In the US system you are free to criticize the government. In the Chinese and Russian systems you are not. That alone tells me all I need to know about who I want scooping up my data.

but being in the US, I don't really care if a foreign government looks at my social media (what are they going to do?)
Post reply on HN