Zoom executive charged with disrupting meetings commemorating Tiananmen Square

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/china-based-executive-us-telecommunications-company-charged-disrupting-video-meetings

by imraj96 • 6 years ago

685 219 6 years ago

peteretep4• 6 years ago

Jesus, if true this has gotta be a mortal wound to Zoom

I highly doubt the behavior of a single rogue employee will present any significant difficulty to Zoom, to say nothing of being a mortal wound.

derision• 6 years ago

An executive is not quite a "single rogue employee"

jariel4• 6 years ago

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]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/china-business...

pstrateman4• 6 years ago

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

[2] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...

[3] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-zoom-plans-to-bette...

[4] https://technode.com/2020/04/13/is-zoom-crazy-to-count-on-ch...

jtdev3• 6 years ago

This isn’t some “rogue employee” incident; This is like the 5th time Zoom has been caught doing the CCPs bidding... on American soil.

peteretep4• 6 years ago

Bullshit, the headline is the CCP can and do make calls about the content of your legal Zoom calls.

elliekelly• 6 years ago

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.

xxpor• 6 years ago

Wiretapping probably requires zoom to be a public utility. CFAA I don't know enough about.

vyrotek• 6 years ago

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.

https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/api-reference/zoom-api

brian_herman• 6 years ago

https://jitsi.org/ Opensource version of zoom

https://meet.google.com/ Google Meet(recording is with the enterprise version) integrates with google calendar

https://www.gotomeeting.com/

https://www.skype.com/en/free-conference-call/

https://www.bluejeans.com/

ignoramous• 6 years ago

Nit: Jitsi's open source alternative* to Zoom

Amazon Chime: https://chime.aws

Kosmi: https://kosmi.io

Jami: https://jami.net

Screen: https://screen.so

Signal: https://signal.org

Whereby: https://whereby.com

Airtime: https://airtime.com

Microsoft Teams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-team...

Rally: https://rally.video

jeroenhd• 6 years ago

To add to this:

https://kopano.com/products/meet/

A subscription or self-hosted, e2e encrypted video call tool

Hnrobert42• 6 years ago

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.

mey• 6 years ago

Microsoft Teams might have you covered, including potentially your API needs. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/choose-online-meeting...

jtdev3• 6 years ago

Google Meet

athenot• 6 years ago

Webex API is here: https://developer.webex.com/docs/platform-introduction

selflesssieve2• 6 years ago

Jitsi- use it, love it, host my own instance. Only downside is the api’s are a bit cumbersome using prosody.

https://github.com/jitsi

MattJ100• 6 years ago

Prosody dev here, feedback welcome :)

You can email us any time at developers@prosody.im and community venues are listed here: https://prosody.im/discuss

randomsearch• 6 years ago

We just need a performant alternative.

I pay for Zoom and if anyone can point me to a native app alternative that actually works reasonably well (Teams does not) I will happily switch.

Everything that runs in the browser is pretty awful.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

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.

pishpash• 6 years ago

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.

smt88• 6 years ago

The DOJ does not share the agenda of the administration.

Do you think the US should not have an administration that is highly motivated to root out CCP operatives?

peteretep4• 6 years ago

This is an allegation

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

jcytong2• 6 years ago

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]

[1]https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-... [2]https://twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193 [3]https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...

throwaway5543222• 6 years ago

If I changed companies every time a fired employee did something shady, then there wouldn’t be many companies I can choose from.

Besides, Zoom works really well, and if I propose a change, then I have to own that change and any future problems become my problem.

Unless you are the boss, it’s easier to maintain the status quo.

jariel4• 6 years ago

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.

spoonjim5• 6 years ago

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.

jariel4• 6 years ago

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.

fma• 6 years ago

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.

vatueil3• 6 years ago

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.

allarm• 6 years ago

FB uses BlueJeans as per my knowledge.

rixed• 6 years 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.

jariel4• 6 years ago

An industry standard is not needed for any single entity to do it well.

gruez• 6 years ago

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?

cwwc5• 6 years ago

True - unless he visits a country (like Huawei’s CFO did in Canada) where he is snagged at request of the US

hef198982• 6 years ago

Which itself is kind of troubling. ut than again, international arrest warrants have been abused for decades.

viraptor2• 6 years ago

I guess it ensures he isn't on that plane in the future. Or on a plane to cooperating countries. (Which for an executive may be a serious problem)

ipnon7• 6 years ago

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.

Waterluvian• 6 years ago

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.

dghughes• 6 years ago

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".

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

When are non-governmental parties bound by the bill of rights?

balola2• 6 years ago

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.

dalbasal• 6 years ago

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.

99_00• 6 years ago

Any country with an extradition treaty with the US is obligated to arrest him on behalf of the US if he is in their jurisdiction.

perlgeek• 6 years ago

It does limit options.

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.

rosywoozlechan• 6 years ago

There's even an FBI wanted poster for this executive:

https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/counterintelligence/xinjiang-jin/...

sathoro• 6 years ago

Not a good look

joachim4• 6 years ago

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....

astura• 6 years ago

Where did they get these pictures? They look like mugshots but he's not in custody.

mikeyouse• 6 years ago

Potentially passport photos? He was in the US after all.

Darkphibre• 6 years ago

Passport, maybe? You have to present a photo that's extremely similar for facial detection algorithms to train identifying you in the future.

darkhorn• 6 years ago

Turkey takes photos of everyone who enters or leaves the country. May be it is practiced in USA too.

nix23• 6 years ago

Where did they get these pictures?

Intercepted Zoom meeting ;)

nonfamous2• 6 years ago

You have to submit photos for US many visa applications. Perhaps he had a US Visa (eg L1) at some point.

ipnon7• 6 years ago

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.”

pstrateman4• 6 years ago

Zoom is materially a Chinese company.

CEO is Chinese, staff are mostly Chinese.

cwwc5• 6 years ago

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...)

ipnon7• 6 years ago

CEO is an American citizen[0], Zoom is headquartered in San Jose[1] and listed on NASDAQ.[2]

[0] https://blog.zoom.us/navigating-a-new-chapter-for-zoom/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications

[2] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/zm

kemitchell2• 6 years ago

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.

ipnon7• 6 years ago

I edited my comment to make it clear these are allegations.

dehrmann2• 6 years ago

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.

generalizations• 6 years ago

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.

sneak2• 6 years ago

Forget the charge - we should strive to presume the innocence of anyone charged with anything.

Bringing charges is not evidence.

DarthGhandi• 6 years ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

https://legaldictionary.net/dismissed-with-prejudice/

ComodoHacker• 6 years ago

Framing was a mean, the goal was to disrupt meetings.

Complaint-bombing has become a popular technique to silence opinions on public platforms.

dehrmann2• 6 years ago

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.

robswc• 6 years ago

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.

detaro• 6 years ago

also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25471274

spoonjim5• 6 years ago

All of this CCP poison inside Zoom must be a huge gift to Microsoft Teams.

ipnon7• 6 years ago

The popularity of apps like Zoom and TikTok suggests that American national security is an afterthought for consumers.

spoonjim5• 6 years ago

National security cannot be delegated to individual action. It's basically the first and foremost purpose of government.

goatinaboat3• 6 years ago

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.

xaqfox• 6 years ago

I don't know how new it is, but Teams has a lecture-hall view option that displays more than 9 people.

nonfamous2• 6 years ago

Teams now supports 49 people onscreen.

cwwc5• 6 years ago

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.

wil421• 6 years ago

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.

cwwc5• 6 years ago

Good point

tenpies• 6 years ago

Why not both?

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.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2020/02/canada-...

viraptor2• 6 years ago

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.

neartheplain• 6 years ago

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.

cwwc5• 6 years ago

Apropos. And welcome to China for the past few years.

marketgod• 6 years ago

LOL ignore all this crap. The government courts are using Zoom. Just buy their stock.

hiidrew• 6 years ago

Seems like an early Christmas gift to Microsoft Teams

derwiki• 6 years ago

I want to think that.. but at the time I’m posting this, ZM is up after hours.

jtdev3• 6 years ago

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.

gonehome2• 6 years ago

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).

https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html

paganel• 6 years ago

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.

vineyardmike5• 6 years ago

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?

balola2• 6 years ago

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.”

runawaybottle2• 6 years ago

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.

selimthegrim• 6 years ago

Really? Given Goebbels' Freudian slip here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech) and the Wannsee conference?

runawaybottle2• 6 years ago

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):

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/1/eaau729...

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.

jcytong2• 6 years ago

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.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/hongkong-security/former-hon...

[2]https://hongkongfp.com/2020/12/07/hsbc-re-freezes-accounts-b...

topspin• 6 years ago

What are the chances...

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.

random56342• 6 years ago

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.

Jitasa - I don't see background replace on this?

jrochkind12• 6 years ago

The issue isn't "user mindshare", it's technical quality, as you say. Nothing I have tried either matches zoom.

kettro• 6 years ago

(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.

octoberfranklin3• 6 years ago

We need background replacement or blur.

Why?

ezrast• 6 years ago

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.

random56342• 6 years ago

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.

_cs2017_2• 6 years ago

How is it that Zoom became so popular despite numerous large tech firms offering competing products?

rtx5• 6 years ago

It all new, Zoom actually is one of the pioneers.

dash22• 6 years ago

What was new?

nradov• 6 years ago

WebEx (acquired by Cisco) had all of the core functionality before Zoom.

Larrikin• 6 years ago

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.

ksml• 6 years ago

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.

izgzhen• 6 years ago

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.

spondyl3• 6 years ago

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.

tkinom• 6 years ago

Wonder how it beat Google hangout/meet - That can be run all browsers without any install with one click also.

_cs2017_2• 6 years ago

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?

jonathanstrange2• 6 years ago

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?

hef198982• 6 years ago

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.

duxup2• 6 years ago

“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.

It's not 'well some other place' anymore...

dash22• 6 years ago

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.

duxup2• 6 years ago

If someone uses it or doesn't use it to justify anything doesn't change that it is true.

jrochkind12• 6 years ago

"unlawful conspiracy to transfer a means of identification."

I don't think I've ever heard that phrase before. It's a federal crime? What does it mean?

kemitchell2• 6 years ago

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.

tyingq• 6 years ago

It's from this US Federal law around identity theft:

18 U.S. Code § 1028 - Fraud and related activity in connection with identification documents, authentication features, and information

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028 See subsections 7 and 8.

tony101• 6 years ago

"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));"

(18 USC 1028(d)(7))

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028

Criminal complaint with details: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1347146/downl...

samcheng2• 6 years ago

We already knew Zoom was ethically-challenged from the auto-install shenanigans, though, right?

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/09/zoom-vulnerabilities/

cherylskylar• 6 years ago

Unclear how Zoom evades the public eye while other companies like Huawei get so much flack for efforts that are in favor of/support the CCP.

mrtesthah• 6 years ago

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.

rtx5• 6 years ago

It takes time for the narrative to build.

vineyardmike5• 6 years ago

Zoom is partial an American company, and WAY smaller.

camdenlock2• 6 years ago

Are these sorts of investigations and revelations going to disappear now that the Democratic Party has been elected to power?

octoberfranklin3• 6 years ago

It's not a left vs right thing. If Mitch McConnell were Attorney General he would drop the case too.

Basically most of our politicians (on both sides) have sold out to China and a very few haven't.

camdenlock2• 6 years ago

Well that sounds terrifying. Got any sources?

peteretep4• 6 years ago

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

https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/03/congress-wants...

hyperrail• 6 years ago

Here's Zoom's own public statement on the matter: https://blog.zoom.us/our-perspective-on-the-doj-complaint/

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.

unityByFreedom4• 6 years ago

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.

dx87• 6 years ago

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.

vineyardmike5• 6 years ago

We have also placed other employees on administrative leave pending the completion of our investigation.

How has no one mentioned that zoom also seems to think there may be other employees involved?

yogue• 6 years ago

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!

archibaldJ4• 6 years ago

I’m working on a ZOOM-alternative for online events and gatherings that uses twilio: https://lo.fish

It is built on eilixir & will be open-sourced soon. (The next step I’m looking to make it E2E.)

There are also existing ZOOM-alternatives like https://gather.town

archibaldJ4• 6 years ago

I’m also writing an introductory programming book on making your own video-conferncing app with React + Elixir (Targeting Gen Z mostly)

I’m looking for publishers at the moment. Will appreciate any tips on that. I can be reached at a at castella.art. Thanks!

treepunch• 6 years ago

post an invite-only service
leave no information on how to get an invite

archibaldJ4• 6 years ago

my apologies it's still in private beta (& I'm a bit occupied with my full-time at the moment)

you can follow lo.fish's twitter page if you're interested! The free-trial give-away starts in jan

https://twitter.com/l0f1sh

sebmellen• 6 years ago

Are you using the React-95 library for this?

archibaldJ4• 6 years ago

yup there is a link to it & its creator at the about page

rognjen• 6 years ago

Any time news like this comes out about a company effectively run by the CCP I'm utterly and completely shocked! Shocked I tell you! \s

i_am_proteus• 6 years ago

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.

pirisek453• 6 years ago

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.

staz• 6 years ago

Remember that Zoom falsify claimed to have E2E encryption that would have prevented it's employee to snoop in on such conversation...

Zoom executive charged with disrupting meetings commemorating Tiananmen Square

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