> Jin’s co-conspirators created fake email accounts and Company-1 accounts in the names of others, including PRC political dissidents, to fabricate evidence that the hosts of and participants in the meetings to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre were supporting terrorist organizations, inciting violence or distributing child pornography. The fabricated evidence falsely asserted that the meetings included discussions of child abuse or exploitation, terrorism, racism or incitements to violence, and sometimes included screenshots of the purported participants’ user profiles featuring, for example, a masked person holding a flag resembling that of the Islamic State terrorist group.
Ah. So it's not quite disrupting meetings, it's framing people as pedophiles an terrorists.
I think it's been mentioned on hn before, but it sure seems like we should look twice at anyone who gets charged with child pornography - could be someone getting framed.
But crimes of mere "possession" (e.g. child pornography, drugs) are especially susceptible to framing because the existence of the contraband in a person's personal effects are all that is needed to presume guilt. Child pornography, or really any digital asset, is doubly suspect because it is so much easier to "place" these digital assets on someone's computer or phone, whereas with drugs you'd need physical access to someone's home or personal effects.
I have brown friends who get searched every time they are pulled over or go through airport security. I have had friends who were told to STFU and take a frequenting ticket or spend the night in jail (and thus risk losing their minimum wage job). I even had a friend who was led to a cop car by the FBI but (thankfully) he refused to get in because there was a mysterious baggie in the back (which was surreptitiously spirited away on camera). Nothing happened in any of these cases.
Sigh - you can't trust cops even with physical possession and cameras rolling [1].
On July 24, 1973, Dallas Police Officer Darrell L. Cain fatally shot Santos Rodriguez, a 12-year-old Mexican-American child, while interrogating him and his brother about a burglary. Cain shot Rodriguez while conducting Russian roulette on the brothers in an attempt to force a confession from them.
In fairness, that was the 70s. But the 70s were also "one generation ago," so it's not exactly ancient history.
(I could imagine myself being skeptical about your comment before having wised up a little, so I thought I'd chime in to say yes, this really does happen.)
For drugs, it depends on your social status. It’s not unheard of for cops getting caught planting drugs on low status individuals to justify an arrest. Turning off your camera and “finding” a bag of heroin is often enough to secure a conviction, since juries trust cops.
Perhaps, but once you've been falsely accused of something and have no alibi to clear your name, it will probably reshape for the rest of your life how you make decisions on such evidence.
Charges are based on evidence shown to a grand jury. The law presumes people are innocent until proven guilty, and we should give people the benefit of the doubt, but it’s totally reasonable to talk about the charges in a news context. Charges being filed means some meaningful threshold has been passed.
"means some meaningful threshold has been passed."
In UK we've been putting innocent people in jail for 20 years, because of bugs in accounting software. It was going unnoticed and noone would believe them untill recently. We are talking hundreds of people.
If it happened to a single person, noone would ever find oit the truth.
This Financial Times article is paywalled, and, moreover, the FT didn't actually do any of the investigative journalism required to show this. Private Eye, however, did, and their report is free online: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i... -- Private Eye was very good at banging the drum for many years and eventually the mainstream media cottoned on and -- following that -- several miscarriages of justice were reversed.
Note that in Britain, following a Tory amendment to the law, you can only get legal aid if you have assets less then £37.5k -- so if you own a home, and are charged (incorrectly!) with criminal proceedings, which you then win, expect to sell it to pay the legal bills. Once you win, you'll get...nothing. No fees. Just a "release the defendant from the dock" and you're good to go. If you get imprisoned, and THEN are found innocent later on, maybe, say, 30 years later (as has happened!) expect to get....nothing. I really recommend "The Secret Barrister" both as a book and a blog. Nobody stands up for funding criminal justice properly -- because what politician wants to support the rights of the accused? -- but it's badly breaking. https://thesecretbarrister.com/2016/02/02/mr-gove-must-now-h...
Charges filed means they've pissed off someone powerful, no more no less. It's up to you to evaluate the evidence based on what's publicly known. Generally when the government doesn't show its evidence, it should be treated with extreme skepticism.
I don't mean necessarily in this case, but I did mean in general. However, simply pointing out a section heading isn't enough (and I didn't see anything on page 47). What do you think of the evidence they presented?
Additionally, grand juries are well known to simply be tools of the prosecution with >90% of grand jury presentations voting to indict, in part because the prosecutor can present whatever narrative they want, in secret, without any checks other than their conscience without a counter narrative.
I’m not pointing to page 47 I’m pointing out that there is 47 pages of the government describing the evidence it has. That’s typical for an indictment. The government doesn’t “in general” refuse to show the evidence. That’s just not how it works.
Grand juries aren’t “known to be tools of the prosecution.” That’s just something defense lawyers and public interest people say. A grand jury is just a group of ordinary people tasked with deciding whether there is enough evidence to even bring a case. The secrecy is there to protect the defendant as much as it’s there for the government. If the prosecutor’s case is weak, then the allegations don’t even become public. Grand juries do vote to indict at a very high rate. That’s because prosecutors only bring cases they know they can win (and indeed they have an ethical obligation not to bring cases they don’t think they can win).
There is a lot of misinformation about how the justice system works. I have seen it from the inside, working for a judge. These cases are buttoned up top to bottom. They’ll arrest a guy for robbing a store. They have him on security camera. They have tracking information from his cell phone. They have his text messages with the guy who he fenced the goods to. They searched his car and found stolen items.
Wrongful convictions are rare. The legal clinics that help wrongfully convicted people actually spend tremendous amounts of time screening cases to find ones that are meritorious. And a lot of those are from the era before DNA testing came into routine use. See: https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&con...
> Based on a careful review of the available empirical literature, it is possible to assemble the component parts of a wrongful conviction rate calculation by looking at error rates at trial, the ratio of wrongful convictions obtained through trials versus plea bargains, and the percentage of cases resolved through pleas. Combining empirically based estimates for each of these three factors, a reasonable (and possibly overstated) calculation of the wrongful conviction rate appears, tentatively, to be somewhere in the range of 0.016%–0.062%
Prosecutors aren't supposed to publicize their evidence as doing so is prejudicial to the defense. Of course, they sometimes do so, precisely for that effect.
> The FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception... COINTELPRO tactics are still used to this day and have been alleged to include discrediting targets through psychological warfare; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment; and illegal violence, including assassination. According to a senate report, the FBI's motivation was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order"
The court of public opinion is far more important than real courts. You only have to look at enlightened HN comments on Ross Ulbright to see it in action, nearly all are convinced he's guilty of a charge that never went to trial and was dismissed with prejudice, which is rare.
But framing was also the alleged crime: conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. If Zoom had disabled the user accounts or the meeting (which I'd argue are also "disrupting meetings"), there might not have been a crime.
This is more of a general statement... but I find it odd how fast people write off stuff like this as "impossible" - or they just don't believe it could happen. Fair enough, its unlikely but all the same, stranger things have happened before.
I'd say almost every "claim" is worth investigating, even a little bit.
So much for “Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations” - it was clear this was nonsense when they said it, but the stuff alleged here is way worse than even I would have predicted.
These people are awful - Zoom should be avoided (along probably with any company operating primarily out of China, under influence of the CCP).
Any person with Chinese lineage is considered "our guy" obligated to do good to the homeland, or else they are traitors even if they never touch on Chinese soil. This sentiment is not limited to lineage and nationality but also surnames, birthing place and ethnicity.
Recent examples：
>Mike Pompeo’s China adviser has name chiselled off school monument
>removed his name from the genealogical chart of the “Yu Clan.”
Companies like Zoom are probably 5th column-like entities. Had someone told me something like this just a couple of years ago I would have called that person crazy or paranoid, but the latest moves from the CCP have cemented that belief for me.
Again, I was almost totally against Tik Tok's de facto nationalisation ordered by the Trump administration, but seeing executives like this one acting on the orders of the CCP as part of a huge IT company lead by a Chinese citizen (and I now presume also a CCP asset himself) has reversed that belief for me.
No way is the CCP not manipulating TikTok's black-box (cough cough "Machine Learning") algorithm to surface content that is better for them in some way. Should they be sold to America though or should they just be forced to die on the Chinese vine?
Yeah - this is the real risk with TikTok, not the data (or who hosts the data).
Moving the cloud hosted data to Oracle doesn't solve the underlying risk.
The real risk is CCP manipulating what's surfaced via the algorithm to sway public perception or to censor things they dislike. They've already done this explicitly with the protests in HK and Tiananmen Square, they'll do it in other ways that suit them.
The worst part is with TikTok the manipulation is more subtle, harder to see - are you seeing something because it's popular? or because the CCP is interested in you seeing it?
Are you not seeing something because it's not popular? or because the CCP has told Bytedance to kill it?
Moving the data to Oracle misses the point. The data is not important in this case, but the ability to control what the public sees is. Letting the CCP have control over that lever when they abuse it elsewhere: that's the risk.
This can be an issue anywhere, but the CCP has a terrible track record and no interest in a free press or free speech. What they're doing to the Uyghurs and what they've done to HK and how they treat people talking about Tiananmen Square. They don't take responsibility for any of it and they do what they can to suppress all of it.
It's a very machiavellian view and their soft influence on the US and western companies tied economically to China to self-censor or otherwise defer to the CCP's interests is alarming.
That recent article about Tim Cook killing an Apple TV show written by a couple ex-gawker editors doesn't bother me at all. Gawker was awful and we're better without it, shows glorifying it, or supporting the editors that worked there. This is Tim Cook deciding for himself he doesn't want to support those people, it's a principled position.
The other bit in that article about an Apple rep saying the two things Apple TV would never do are 'nudity and China' was a lot worse. The South Park 'band in china' episode was right. This is Tim Cook knowing what's expected of him to be able to operate in China - it's not a principled position, his hand is forced.
Ugh, china's control over apple has to be one of the biggest political compromises and also successes (for china) in the world. They can't do anything too awful since Apple is likable and high profile, but after the HongKong app censoring and tim cook's letter, it became apparent who was in charge.
No joke, when I first signed up early August it was literal Trump propaganda on every video. I had to train their algo to tell it that I wasn't interested in pro-trump videos - 5 days later they disappeared. This is a complete anecdote but, yes, it is plausible that some promoted videos have an agenda.
No, it’s just apples and oranges. The USA is a flawed constitutional republic that runs on a messy democratic process. It’s ugly sometimes, but it’s fundamentally good.
The US CIA runs a global secret network of unaccountable torture prisons.
When the US congress tried to investigate them, the CIA compromised the congressional computers to avoid oversight of their torture programs, then lied about compromising them.
The US military conducts bulk espionage on everyone inside the country, in violation of the country's own basic law.
The differences aren't quite as stark as you think.
I also believe that if you ask the average Chinese or Russian person (the US bogeymen of the season) they would also believe that their country is fundamentally good.
It turns out humans everywhere are fundamentally good, and governments everywhere tend toward illegal and oppressive authoritatianism, given enough time to gather resources, size, and fear.
To be fair, the parent was not comparing those governments from a democracy standpoint, but was comparing their actions. Surely the Chinese government is currently more oppressive to its own population than the USG is, but it is also doubtlessly less oppressive to foreign populations, which may suggests that they differ in circumstances more than in essence and maybe why the parent equated them?
The US is an anti-majoritarian country of the elites that has enough advertising to convince people that they feel free while the elites control every aspect of their lives. While there are levels to this, it would be a huge mistake to regard this place as fundamentally good outside of a few sentences snipped from the declaration of independence.
I think we can consistently predict they’ll go after what’s financially best for them, but they won’t collaborate with nation states in quite this way.
What would a qualify someone to be a Bond villain? I don't have enough experience or knowledge about what qualify your for being a Bond villain, but this guy might be quite high is you account disruption / scale / chaos / get money-power out of it....
The statement also says that Zoom itself is under separate US federal investigations for its dealings with Chinese and other foreign governments, as well as its security and privacy practices more generally.
In the bit about the "now-former employee", it sounds like they admit they banned accounts hosting meetings about Tiananmen Square.
> During the time this individual was employed by Zoom, he took actions resulting in the termination of several meetings in remembrance of Tiananmen Square and meetings involving religious and/or political activities, some of which were hosted by non-China-based users. We terminated the host accounts associated with certain of these meetings.
And about sharing information on dissidents with the government,
> While the complaint alleges that the former employee obtained Zoom account and user IDs associated with the Xinjiang region of China, our investigation shows that this data was anonymized, and at this time we do not have reason to believe that it was shared with the Chinese government.
This is hard to believe given how difficult it is to operate any company in China without very close ties with the CCP.
IIRC, the banning accounts part isn't new info. They were called out for it and I think their reasoning was that at the time they didn't have a way to just block certain regions from a meeting, so they banned the meetings altogether because people from China were joining them, and they wanted to stay on the CCPs good side.
> Jin and his co-conspirators fabricated evidence of TOS violations to provide justification for terminating the meetings, as well as certain participants’ accounts. Jin then tasked a high-ranking employee of Company-1 in the United States to effect the termination of meetings and the suspension and cancellation of user accounts.
Which does sound like corporate policy working through regular channels, but those channels were compromised.
In any case, it appears that the fabricated evidence was intended to suggest to the employee in charge of terminating accounts that the targeted users were violating US law in addition to Chinese law.
What other platforms compete with Zoom with comparable API integrations?
We need features including: OAuth, Meeting scheduling, meeting link generation (without requiring user accounts), managing recordings, meeting status webhooks, etc.
Impressed by your attentiveness. I’m sure prosody is a fantastic product, I don’t mean to drag it through the mud.
What I should expound on is that in the Jitsi server configuration that out of the box they don’t have good documentation for getting room size, participants, total number of rooms etc. I did find the Jitsi community forums where the Jitsi devs tell community members how to enable some prosody plugins. There was an issue for my vanilla configuration where I needed to update Lua and download 5 other lua rocks. Then the mod-muc-size plug-in needs to be modified and the nginx configuration needs to be updated as well. This is my rough memory from a month ago.
So it would be nice if Jitsi had a more out of the box solution for this integration, and I understand prosody is just a piece in the whole production.
I am not sure about some of the requirements, but we’ve had a lot of success with Uberconference. Google Meet is also decent if your are I the Google Workspace ecosystem.
Is this likely to go anywhere? The press release says an arrest warrant was issued, but the person charged isn't in custody. I doubt china is going to send him over, nor is he going to be on a plane headed to the US anytime soon, so nothing's going to happen to him unless he decides to enter the US?
It's newsworthy that PRC is recruiting Chinese citizens in executive positions of American companies to pursue the intelligence interests of the CCP by disenfranchising Americans of their constitutional rights and in willful violation of American law.
Yeah. Some of these people need to be made an example of. China's been using their consumer market allure as an aegis behind which to advance their interests and project censorship abroad.
It's a common tactic to recruit (threaten?) people to disrupt anything the CCP doesn't like in Western countries. Even non-Chinese people can be duped (or paid) into helping.
Even local schools and colleges that agree to setting up Confucius Institutes on school grounds. Indoctrinating students into fight anything it deems to be "anti-China".
Is it "recruiting"? If so it starts at higher education, "good" students can apply for party membership, which is a prerequisite for lush and comfy gov jobs.
And any org that employs 3+ party members shall set up a party chamber, host party sessions and even appoint a sectary.
This executive very likely is a party member, but that doesn't necessarily make this act party related, more and more Chinese have come to defend the 1989 event(if they know it ofc), as China is now on a peak, what the party did back then is gaining legitimacy and praises.
I won't be surprised if he had done this out of his own volition, and probably most of the people in his position would have done the same.
The HK protests were overwhelmingly disapproved and regared as "abject-lowlife riots", in some way, it reflects the public sentiment toward that 1989 event.
He's probably not going to court or jail personally, but there having an executive with an arrest warrant for espionage-ish charges is meaningful.
Beyond zoom, this is another incident/escalation in an emerging field. Chinese norms for doing business are coming into conflict. Especially for things like comms, media and such... doing business the chinese way is becoming a standoff position vis a vis western norms.
Some wealthy Chinese like to send their children to the US or Europe for University; if he does, he certainly cannot visit them, without the risk of getting arrested.
The US has been doing such things in the past, for example against "cyber" criminals in Russian and other "bullet proof" jurisdictions. Once in a while, they catch somebody who is on vacation in a country that does extradite to the US. It's a long game.
All of this CCP poison inside Zoom must be a huge gift to Microsoft Teams.
Teams has its own bizarre self-inflicted limitations. For example a limit of only 9 people on screen at once whose positions constantly and randomly change. Having used all of them if you have decent sized screens e.g. 28" or better and are presenting to a group or 20-30 people and want to be able to gauge feedback from faces as you would do in a real meeting or classroom, Zoom just offers a much, much better experience for the presenter, who is probably also the meeting organiser. And it's not just aesthetic, if you are on all day Zoom is actually much less fatiguing than Teams.
Where Teams wins is if you are using it for corporate chat anyway (because you have O365 anyway) and just want to make the occasional 1:1 call.
Thanks for the tip, I'll check for a new version, but I am running the Microsoft Autoupdater and as of earlier this week, it was still doing the 9-people-only thing and randomly shuffling around.
From what I remember, when remote working during the pandemic first started due to lockdowns, Zoom blew up because it was quite literally one click and you're in a call.
The initial installer would do some funky stuff in the ground I believe to bypass a lot of the usual install friction. Once it was discovered, Zoom's installation process became a little bit slower.
Next, calls were being "broken into" because there was no security so they changed the default behaviour to generate a password randomly. As a user, this meant having to go through the normal install process and then enter all this stuff in so it seemingly went from near-instant (10 seconds top from no install to in a call) through to perhaps like 5 minutes once you fiddle with macOS's permission model (that was bypassed I presume) and all that.
Personally, I hate it nowadays and it's banned on our company devices anyway but I think for plenty of users, they bought into it when it was frictionless and have no reason to change.
I think there was an element of shadow IT going on like marketing people for example using it for calls without necessarily getting sign off or oversight from IT teams, given it was "free". That's purely anecdotal mind you.
I can tell you that. At least when we tried it out in early 2020, Google meet was unable to display other participants to the person who shared his screen. Maybe that has changed by now (or we didn't figure out how to do it) but it was the decisive factor for us then.
Imagine talking to your own slides for 2 hours without any visual feedback from the audience...
Ah yeah, one feature Zoom had was the multi-person grid view which Meet has nowadays but before, Meet would only show primarily the presented content or one speaker at a time
> funky stuff in the ground to bypass a lot of the usual install friction. Once it was discovered, Zoom's installation process became a little bit slower.
Why couldn't they keep it even after it was discovered?
I mean, they could have but it was in the press due to the installer operating as root to bypass the regular protections so it was damaging from a PR perspective
> Zoom uses the API to execute a bash script called runwithroot which is unpacked by the installer in a user-writable temporary directory. This means that any local application, including malware, could monitor the Zoom installation process, rewrite this script on the fly and add malicious code to it. This would allow it to take full control of the system.
I tried all the familiar offers at the beginning of the pandemic. Zoom was the only one at the time that offered a smooth connection regardless of the other person's internet speed for decently sized groups.
Also their creepy hacks that open their so or the installer were universally panned on HN (for good reason) but it was the only way I could talk to my more senior members of my family without being on a forty minute phone call walking them through every step of the other companies' offerings
I've seen product updates from LINE touting their improvements and I assume the Skype team got yelled at for blowing it so bad at the beginning but there's just no inertia for anyone to bother with something else until after the pandemics over. I've stopped looking. The company seems shady but I'll take a product that works to be able to actually talk to friends and family in the short term.
Zoom takes care of customers with very heterogenous device/network conditions, which makes it reliable solution:
(1) Zoom works even in pretty bad network environment, and provides phone call fallback out of box; (2) Zoom provides a variety of clients optimized for many platform and devices.
If there are 10 people in a meeting, even 1 people facing technical issues can affect other 9 people, which is very different from typical software that can just ignore 10% customers without losing 90% customers.
Because it works really well (at least from my experience and others I've heard). It has a solid (and really useful) feature set, and I generally have lower latency and less CPU usage than any other video conferencing system I've tried.
In our team at our university we evaluated all of the common products in March and Zoom offered the best features, reliability, and ease of use.
What other software allows a large number of people to meet, has good audio and image quality even when many people are connected, has easy switching between fullscreen, windowed mode and screen sharing, allows you to re-arrange the participant videos on screen, allows you to share documents by drag & drop, allows you to raise a hand in the participant list, is easy to install and works on all platforms, allows connecting via an ID/link and an optional password, allows the presenter to see all participants while sharing the screen, allows the host to mute participants, has good auto-feedback suppression, and allows the host to transfer host authority to any other user and to optionally control who is entering?
All of these features are essential for us. Is there something else that has all these features?
The one thing I never got, was how video beat conf calls. I mean, yeah, I do get it on one hand. On the other hand, so, I am so used to conf calls, with their own pitfalls, that I never saw the added value of needing more bandwidth to see bad images of the other people in the call.
The aggressive sales team focused on a video calling product; all of the other major solutions are afterthoughts owned by companies focusing on other products.
Oh, and that "Brady Bunch" view that Google quickly copied, after refusing to update Google Meet for years before that.
One of these companies builds critical infrastructure. The other sells a software service with many equivalent replacements with which it can be swapped out at a moment's notice.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
This seems more hauntingly true than ever, and with the internet and people's social lives and communication tied to products from 'everywhere', seemingly injustice anywhere seems to be inching closer and closer to home.
This sounds noble but it leads to the idea that one country can impose its vision of justice globally. The CCP could then argue that is just what it itself is doing.
A better argument is that this guy allegedly committed crimes that took place on US soil.
The most BA conspiracy would be if the CCP thought about releasing a virus and said to themselves “hey, what will everyone need in a pandemic? Videoconference!” They funded Zoom, then released the virus and boom - they suddenly have access to every company and academic discussion out there.
If I plotting things, that’s how I’d do it at least. But alas reality isn’t a Bond film.
Why would you fund a “tech” company when you could corner the market on PPE? According to my local news a company told the federal government the US lack N95 manufacturing.
And in some cases you don't even need to corner the market - just abuse your adversaries' psychology. For example, Canada, was sending tons of PPE to China in February. [1]
This turned out to be an awful decision and Canada was caught in a terrible shortage weeks later. China gladly sold PPE to Canada though.
PPE is just PPE. Zoom is tech which will continue to be more established even when we don't strictly require it. It gives the possibility of silently monitoring corporate/government calls for years. And some stock market gains as a cherry on top.
Not even the United States federal government has a list of all the crimes under federal law. There's a funny Twitter account that was tweeting a new federal crime every day for a while.
In case you'd like to know how to research your question when you see a government announcement on a criminal case:
1. Scroll the bottom of the page. If it's the website of the government agency that brought the case, they'll almost always link to a "complaint", which is almost always a PDF.
2. In a criminal complaint, each crime charged is usually called a "count". Search the PDF to find the "count" that matches up with the crime you're interested in. In this case, the means-of-identification charge is count two.
3. Look for a "citation", a reference to a section or other numbered subdivision of a law within that count, in the part that spells out which law they're being charged under. Here: "Title 18, United States Code, Section 1028(a)(7) and 1028(f)".
4. Go to the official website of the government that law comes from. In this case, it's the US federal government. Their info portal is https://www.govinfo.gov/.
5. Search for the citation and find the law and its text. The portal will usually provide some notes after the text of the law about which bills introduced or changed that particular subdivision, and when. Sometimes they'll even provide commentary or citations to cases decided under it. I'll leave that part to you if you're interested.
6. For extra background, try searching for the name of the bill that introduced the law on Wikipedia, or even on Google. You can often get a sense of what was going on at the time, who proposed the bill and how the vote for it panned out, and so on.
"Whoever, in a circumstance described in subsection (c) of this section ... knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit, or to aid or abet, or in connection with, any unlawful activity that constitutes a violation of Federal law, or that constitutes a felony under any applicable State or local law ... shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section."
(18 USC 1028(a)(7))
"the term “means of identification” means any name or number that may be used, alone or in conjunction with any other information, to identify a specific individual, including any—
(A)name, social security number, date of birth, official State or government issued driver’s license or identification number, alien registration number, government passport number, employer or taxpayer identification number;
(B)unique biometric data, such as fingerprint, voice print, retina or iris image, or other unique physical representation;
(C)unique electronic identification number, address, or routing code; or
(D)telecommunication identifying information or access device (as defined in section 1029(e));"
Is there anyone close to competitive in terms of user mindshare? We are on zoom. I'd love to get off.
Google Meet? - others on gsuite domains blocked from joining, rules around having accounts etc? We need background replacement or blur. I tried before and couldn't really make it a success (and so confusing with hangouts, chat, talk, duo, allo etc). Background replacement not as good as zoom.
Uberconference - audio latency is worse - we've dialed down our use for conference calls.
(I'm a Google SWE, though in firmware) I've had good experiences with Meet, both internally and externally. At least internally/gsuite, the background blur is really quite good. The public/free version doesn't itself have either background replacements, though.
I guess this is why folks can't catch up to zoom, which somehow has TOTALLY gotten what people want. They even support admin deployed virtual backdrops.
Our intern (who I'm sure is in a shared / crappy space) has a zoom background from their college they drop in - looks clean / professional and they can participate.
I snapped a shut from my zoom camera at the office, and use it as the background if I'm at home (with bed behind me not always made up, boxes from our move still stacked up). It's practically indistinguishable - I got rid of my green screen because the auto replace is that good on zoom.
I bill at $100/hr+. Maybe low by silicon valley standards, but people have expectations in my non tech field.
It's a privacy and professionalism issue. Sales folks and others who need to maintain a businesslike facade are uncomfortable meeting potential customers in their makeshift home offices, disarrayed by homeschooled kids and other pandemic chaos.
Huh... is it really so hard to set up your desk so your back is to a blank wall? Or put one of those accordion-folding partitions (which look like cubicle walls) behind you?
I dunno, I'm sure background blur is a cute trick, but given how easy the low-tech alternatives are I'm surprised it would rise to the level of "must-have" feature.
The litmus test, IMHO, should be if any other American competitors of Zoom - viz. Google Meet, FaceTime, Teams, fb Messenger rooms etc. - are getting charged for similar activities? If not, then it may be worth questioning if Zoom is really as “American” or “non-Chinese” as it claims to be!
>Part of Jin’s duties included providing information to the PRC government about Company-1’s users and meetings, and in some cases he provided information – such as Internet Protocol addresses, names and email addresses – of users located outside of the PRC. Jin was also responsible for proactively monitoring Company-1’s video communications platform for what the PRC government considers to be “illegal” meetings to discuss political and religious subjects unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PRC government.
So if I am readings this right, PRC authorities are using Zoom employees to monitor the activity of Zoom users both inside and outside the PRC.
More like the case of the Zoom employees are members of the Communism Party and decided to interfere to raise their profiles in the party. The alternative would be not taking action and be considered "enabling" the Tienanmen Square memorial to take place and obviously face punishment.
I’ve never even heard of either of the things they’ve charged. I wonder why they went with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and conspiracy to transfer means of identification rather than with CFAA or wiretapping charges.
The executive fabricated illegal user activity on Zoom, to include distribution of child pornography, falsely attributed to opponents of China’s Communist Party:
>Jin’s co-conspirators created fake email accounts and Company-1 accounts in the names of others, including PRC political dissidents, to fabricate evidence that the hosts of and participants in the meetings to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre were supporting terrorist organizations, inciting violence or distributing child pornography.
Imagine if it had been you. Imagine if you logged into a Tiananmen Square Massacre commemoration from your couch in Sunnyvale, and days or weeks later, American police knocked down your door and arrested you in front of your family for distribution of child pornography. Imagine going to trial against a prosecutor armed with “authentic” Zoom logs of your criminal activity.
The potential for this type of attack does not only exist within Zoom.
The real issue is how such a fundamentally important thing - video communications - isn't rock solid and a commodity by now such that any of FAANG, Verizon/AT&T and a host of others don't provide it as easy as anything else.
Imagine if you thought CCP were reading your emails? Would your company/school/government use that service? I don't think so.
Having supply chain problems for ASICS is one thing.
But 'video conferencing' ... my gosh we should be embarrassed as an industry that this wasn't nailed down a decade ago.
At this stage "nailing it down" means creating a good protocol that can be standardised upon.
This is what the tech world cannot do any longer since it became driven by market forces. Market is not the right process for building good standards, the closest it can grow is monopoles.
Committees are admittedly not the panacea either.
Unfortunately we can't go back to the scale of the small tribe where it's easier for the good solutions to meet consensus.
First of all, video conferencing is one of the most challenging software products to deliver, at the latencies that people expect and the price they're typically willing to pay. It's not a CRUD app.
Second, F, A, A, G, and M do provide rock solid video conferencing. Apple being the most rock solid of all of them, but limited to Apple devices.
> video conferencing is one of the most challenging software products to deliver
The smartest software engineers are in FAAGM, or so I've been told?
> Second, F, A, A, G, and M do provide rock solid video conferencing.
If they have solid products, then how did a no name company beat them?
FWIW I'll have to disagree with you on 'solid products'. My wife runs a learning center that went virtual. I evaluated very product that came up on Google search. It was a tight choice between Zoom and Skype, but chose Skype because I felt a big name would have better service. Microsoft kept locking our accounts and doing other shenanigans. Bit the bullet, paid for Zoom and no problems.
A no name company beat them because they provide video conferencing to support their other businesses (except M). Apple hands out free FaceTime to move Apple devices, they don’t care about the video conferencing market itself.
Also, the Microsoft competitor isn’t Skype, it’s Teams.
If there were great alternatives by the big players, then Zoom would not 'be a thing' and would not have taken off during the pandemic.
Why would teachers etc. be turning to Zoom if Hangouts etc. was at their fingertips and worked well.
We moved to Zoom before the pandemic because Skype (Microsoft) was unreliable to the point of useless whereas Zoom was solid.
People use Zoom because it's better, and there's really no excuse for Hangouts, Skype etc. to be of inferior quality. Those companies have the best Engineers and all the money in the world. It's a lack of product focus.
Most of the "FAANG" companies do already have video conferencing apps. Netflix being the notable exception, but they're only included in the group for the sake of an edgy acronym anyway.
What are the chances these orders to co-opt people in China to do this is coming straight from the top of the CCP?
There is a school of thought that provides a lot of analysis and evidence that the acceleration of the Holocaust was a bottom-up phenomenon (not a master plan made by Hitler years before). Hitler might have laid out details to exile the Jews, but there was no evidence he gave a direct order to begin full scale extermination via extermination camps (different from forced labor camps).
The evidence suggests the underlying Nazi ideologies gave ample flexibility to middle management Nazis to begin competing and escalating into a full blown Holocaust.
With that said, I wonder if the top CCP leaders gave the order ‘get a Zoom executive to troll the Tiananmen Square meetings’, or ‘Specifically do X and X to the Uighurs’. It could very well be possible that there is no directive, just a general ideology that is now being executed in creative ways, completely independent of leadership (but ultimately co-signed by leadership as it fits the ideology).
Once the Nazi sub leadership began their mass shootings of the Jews, they couldn’t stop. They found out it was too much to do at scale, so they escalated to gas chambers.
CCP sub leadership may not be able to stop what they have started.
This seems to be the pattern. Obviously, when managing a country of 1.4 billion people, it is a major challenge to get every single directive in a precise and timely manner. Many of these directives need to be carried out by regular citizens and professionals so a lot of interpretation is left to the lower level leaders.
By only giving a high level ideology/direction, the top leaders give themselves room to manuver when things go sideways and can shift blame onto the lower level leaders' execution.
The system also seem to over penalize under-execution rather than over-execution.
Many examples can be found clearly demonstrated in Hong Kong as the integration with mainland China get sped up by the National Security Law. The recent freezing of exiled HK lawmaker Ted Hui's bank accounts along with his parents and family members accounts which was making global headlines and causing attention.[1]
It seems like the move was part of the high level "exterminate HK pro-democracy figures" but after the headlines, Ted Hui's bank accounts were unfrozen for a while which subsequently allowed him to move some of his funds. Shortly afterwards they were re-frozen [2]. Some believed that the execution went too far as to undermine the global trust in HK which would cost more to the regime so it had to retract to mitigate the damage.
This type of farce seems to happen more often as HK transition into a police state masquerading as a rule of law society.
So, the acceleration of the Holocaust occurred earlier around 1940-1941 when they were in Poland. By 1943, they had already done close to half the total killings (the number 6 million we agree on).
Check out the numbers in 1942 (this is just from one death camp, in 1941 they were doing the mass shootings pre-gas chambers):
By the time they were done, I guess they said ‘Yeah, this is the plan’.
Goebbels also has a history of instigating and letting things ‘play out’, Kristallnacht being the prime example. Even so, this wouldn’t be the guy up top that would deliver a clear plan on extermination. Similarly, they found no proof that even Hitler delivered clear plans on extermination (his end goal was exile initially). You pretty much have to find the shitbags in the sub leadership in Poland that took it to a new level (Himmler). So, yeah, I wouldn’t call it a Freudian slip if it happened in 1943, it was just shitbags latching on to a plan that was well into motion by then (not absolving anyone here on any level, Hitler/Goebbels set fertile ground for things to escalate organically). If anything, the death camps were planned to be closed (and were closed by 1944 by Nazis themselves) and erased from history to cover up.
Anyway, back to the point. I think China said ‘we need to do something about Muslim extremist, and anti nationalists’, and how that gets carried out is up to a lot of imagination, whether it be re-education camps, Hong Kong crackdown, or Zoom bombing. This is a country that will also work very hard to cover up all this bullshit when it’s all said and done.
I’m aware that this sounds like over-fitting, but I can’t help it, the pattern just fits in my eyes.
A what point does the effort necessary to compute these odds become an exercise in apology and where does the need to exonerate CCP leaders come from? We do not hesitate to attribute the fall of every sparrow to Trump's incitement of his racist supporters, yet somehow we mustn't permit the attribution of the crimes of CCP's many minions rise to any meaningful height in the party.
I’m shocked that Zoom is still operating in the United States... it’s obvious after the countless incidents that Zoom is a tool of the CCP. Americans should boycott Zoom.
As alleged, the defendant was an active agent of the CCP and PRC intelligence[a] working inside an American company to deny the rights of freedom of speech and religion to residents of America.[b] The PRC is willfully breaking American law to disenfranchise Americans of their constitutional rights.
[a] “The allegations in the complaint lay bare the Faustian bargain that the PRC government demands of U.S. technology companies doing business within the PRC’s borders, and the insider threat that those companies face from their own employees in the PRC,” said Acting United States Attorney Seth D. DuCharme. “As alleged, Jin worked closely with the PRC government and members of PRC intelligence services to help the PRC government silence the political and religious speech of users of the platform of a U.S. technology company. Jin willingly committed crimes, and sought to mislead others at the company, to help PRC authorities censor and punish U.S. users’ core political speech merely for exercising their rights to free expression."
[b] "As this complaint alleges, that freedom was directly infringed upon by the pernicious activities of Communist China’s Intelligence Services, in support of a regime that neither reflects nor upholds our democratic values,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Americans should understand that the Chinese Government will not hesitate to exploit companies operating in China to further their international agenda, including repression of free speech.”
Those are the allegations, or at least quotes from the press release announcing the charges. But nothing has been proved yet. Jin's innocent until proven otherwise, though they may yet prove otherwise.
I don't mean to pick on you. As someone who works in legal---albeit not in criminal law---citing a complaint as fact, when it's essentially one side's declaration of what they intend to prove, does bother me.
Interestingly, the number of CCP members employed is way over the baseline quota demanded by Beijing (where usually companies like Jet.com and alibaba will struggle to retain and meet this quota, Zoom has never seemed to has this issue...)
If you think someone born in China who hires Chinese people in China to do all the engineering work isn't still Chinese then you haven't been paying much attention to how the CCP operates.
Clearly Zoom is on paper American but functions as a party organ of the CCP. That should make you curious about what other companies, or individuals working at companies, might be analogous.
They are not clearly a party organ. Ask a random person on the street if Zoom is a party organ of the CCP. They will tell you, "no, I'm pretty sure it's an American company, right?" I agree with you that this is a considerable problem. Zoom is practically a Chinese company in American clothing.
> They are not clearly a party organ. Ask a random person on the street if Zoom is a party organ of the CCP. They will tell you, "no, I'm pretty sure it's an American company, right?
Is your point is that something can't be clear if ignorant people are ignorant of it? That's inane. 'Clear' does not mean 'common knowledge.'
I think it's unlikely to be an isolated incident, 20 years from now we'll be reading stories about the CCP listening to every zoom call in the world for years. (Just the same as the CIA did with Crypto AG[1])
They were routing all calls such that the CCP could listen to them. [2]
They lied about calls being End-To-End encrypted. [3]
Zoom was founded by a Chinese national and all of their development is done in China. [4]
I'm willing to bet that the events described here will not be a mortal blow to Zoom, whether the event is isolated or only semi-isolated. To make it concrete, their market cap will still be above $10B on Jan 1 2022. I'll put up to $20 on it, to a non-religious charity of your choice. If you want to take the other side of that bet let me know.
The question I'm most interested in is the one where the individual at the top of the thread suggested this would be a mortal blow to Zoom. It won't. Nit picking about exactly how isolated this is does not change how few of Zoom's customers are or will ever be affected.
If it's a single executive, and the executive is a rogue, then it is exactly a single rogue employee.
Also, although it's beside the point from the perspective of whether what I said is true, I read the complaint. It's not clear if this guy was an executive executive, or an account "executive" (i.e. a low-level administrator). I'm inclined to believe the latter based on the actions he is alleged to have taken.
> Prosecutors said the China-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, worked as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence services, sharing user information and terminating video calls at the Chinese government’s request.
This role does not sound like an "executive" in the sense I think of it. It sounds like an individual contributor role, and not one that sets company policy either.
People answering the phone in call centers often have the official job title "Customer Service Executive" in companies (just search google for jobs). Just saying.
It's highly doubtful that this are just the actions of a single rogue actor.
The CCP requires that all eventually companies have CCP members embedded in the company as an instrument of control.
Irrespective of the Zoom executives disposition/views - they're going to be under immense pressure for a host of related things.
"The party’s efforts to place itself inside private companies have been, according to its own figures, very successful. One recent survey by the Central Organisation Department, the party’s personnel body, found that 68% of China’s private companies had party bodies by 2016, and 70% of foreign enterprises. Although these figures sound high, they don’t match the targets the party has set for itself. In Xi’s old stamping ground of Zhejiang, for example, officials set a target in August 2018 to have cells inside 95% of private businesses. There was a need, the survey said, to retain the revolutionary spirit inside the companies as their ownership was handed on to the next generation." [1]
I will speak with other leaders at my company to move us away from Zoom for conferencing. If you're a leader how can you read this and not only tolerate it, but pay for it? This is it.
I moved away early this year due to its poor track record on security:
2019 - Report of the Zoom app's malware like behaviour-using a hidden web server to enable Zoom much more capabilities than simply launching a zoom call like re-installing the Zoom software[1]
2020-Tricking its users during installation pretending the OS is requiring password[2]
In general, playing fast and loose with its users' data-sending a conference en(de)cryption key between two users in Canada/US to an ip address in Beijing.[3]
What is "it"? This is an allegation. Under an administration with a highly motivated agenda. Could be true, or could be completely fabricated/exaggerated like all the national security allegations this administration has thrown about.
I feel dismissing a case that the DOJ is briefing for and that the FBI has added the perpetrator to Most Wanted for as “an allegation” is true in a strict legal sense, but the burden of proof for a commercial decision has been unequivocally reached here
If you want to learn how the CCP works, watch the NTD/Epoch Times channels on Youtube. The CCP has had an undeclared war against the US since the 1950's, starting with Mao.
A short summary of CCP "elite capture" is:
- Mitch McConnell's wife is high-level CCP royalty
- the CCP spy Fang Fang "dated" several US politicians
- Hunter Biden is thoroughly compromised by the CCP
- it appears the CCP owns Dominion, the voting machine used in 29 states.
- the Thousand Talents program has signed up over 7,000 foreign professors and researchers. They agree to license patents to China, and not to criticize the CCP.
Bullshit. China bashing is a bipartisan vote winner. Two weeks ago a law that brought Chinese firms that want to be listed in the US under US accounting jurisdiction passed the senate 100-0
Requiring companies to be listed in the US to follow US accounting is hardly "china bashing" even if both parties agree that the Chinese government is net-bad
Ah. So it's not quite disrupting meetings, it's framing people as pedophiles an terrorists.