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  • Hacker News
  • Qubes OS saved me, once again. On it, Zoom only has the access to an empty VM and no access to the clipboard.
  • Just not using that piece of trash that is zoom would work very well too in this case
  • What's it like using Qubes? How much friction? I wish I could use some Nix-flavored variant of the sandboxing.
  • Jitsi is an excellent free and open source alternative.
  • For most normal meetings, this is the way to go. However, meetings that have hundreds to thousands of participants (corporate all-hands, investor earnings calls, etc), I just don't think it scales well enough.
  • Jitsi doesn't integrate with meeting rooms and calendars to my knowledge?

    With Zoom we can have a setup where I just hit "join meeting" on a tablet in the meeting room and it'll join the meeting and pretty much just work.

  • with Wayland it's generally not any safer.

    if you use Wayland's security context to prohibit privileged protocols such as arbitrary clipboard access then an application will either not be able to grab clipboard content until you focus on it or the attempt will be noticeable as it spawns a short lived window in an attempt to grab focus.

  • Apps generally need not get clipboard contents unless focused on right? Like this should be the default in my view and kinda disappointed it isn't for Wayland.
  • I miss ordinary conference calling being the norm. I like having a desktop IP phone.
    by ocd
  • I also miss proper chat systems over proprietary ones. Slack offers very little utility over IRC.
  • It’s a real shame that essentially all modern communication other than email runs over proprietary protocols.
    by lxgr
  • Feeling good about using Zoom, when necessary, in a tab in ChromeOS. Zoom is "Not allowed to see your clipboard" in Chrome preferences.
  • Zoom is malware, has always been.
  • Par for the course when running a proprietary application. If doing that on Linux, can you imagine what it and others do under Windows ?

    As people running Linux should know, you cannot trust proprietary applications.

  • I would rather have a nice popup on first attempt "this application is monitoring your clipboard, allow?", ideally with that process completely suspended while that prompt is up.

    This should be behind a toggle driven by intent, rather than something allowed by default. Default stance on trust should be "don't". Open source has nothing to do with it, when a typo while installing with a package manager means you might accidentally install something else (a common attack vector).

  • I wish most Linux distributions had something like a standardized permission manager in which you enable the single policies apps are running with, similarly to what happens in Android (that has some Linux stuff under the hood).

    How hard would it be to have something like this? And I can’t even imagine the difficulty of gathering together the whole community around this standard...

  • It'd be easy, just build it into systemd.

    .../s

  • > similarly to what happens in Android

    Do you wish to give this app access to _all_ your {files, photos, phone calls, messages} ? /s

    What do we need permissions for, then ? Let MS-DOS come back.

  • It looks like you are searching for Qubes OS.
  • Quite hard because on Linux there is no concept of "apps". There is a (very flimsy) separation between processes, but the strongest actual security boundaries are between kernel and user space as well as between users. Namespaces are explicitly not acknowledged as such, which limits the security guarantees that containers can provide.

    Snaps and Flatpak are steps towards that goal, but there are many issues surrounding these technologies, and many apps require sweeping permissions to work well since they were not initially designed to be limited in that way.

  • > How hard would it be to have something like this?

    Very. Both because of the technical issues others in this thread mentioned, and because Android and iOS had the unutterably massive advantages of starting from zero pre-existing software and having a single controlling authority.

    The controlling authority allowed them to avoid problems related to consensus or people working on other priorities. Starting from zero allowed them to not worry about existing software (the closest thing to a controlling authority that Linux has cares a lot about backwards compatibility).

  • Unrelated to Zoom, but

    > I noticed it because I make heavy use of a "one-shot paste" tool which fulfills a single paste request and then terminates. Handy for filling in lots of fields of a web form – queue up pastes of several different things, then go to each form field in turn and just hit paste, bam bam bam.

    This sounds very useful. Is the tool available anywhere? xclip -loops doesn't seem to do the trick, or maybe it just doesn't work that way on Wayland.

  • Turns out, Wayland has wl-copy:

    https://man.archlinux.org/man/wl-copy.1

    (i was also interested :)

  • Just run these things in your browser. Despite the dark design patterns that try to trick you into installing their desktop client, the web-based versions are fine.
  • not if you have to host meetings! the web versions are feature incomplete and don't support something as simple as screensharing with your camera overlayed in a corner (essential for recorded meetings).

    the zoom linux client consistiently locks up my entire computer whenever i copy from the chat. ridiculous.

  • Not the first time Zoom abuses privilege.

    A few years back, there was something about gaining root on MacOS via Zoom due to shady execution on their end.

    They've lost my trust since then, and I'll only run it sandboxed: https://gist.github.com/cielavenir/02f322e322a2a3555dbf2b38f...

    I always ask (1) why does an app require installation and (2) why would it require root?

    There are valid answers for both, but realistically, all a videoconferencing app should need (apart from audio and video and maybe screen sharing) is to store a config file.

    There's no legitimate use for it accessing privileged or private paths.

  • Wow thanks for the link. I have zoom on my personal laptop which isnt ideal. I always wanted to run it sandboxed
  • Old platform limitations do not remove an application’s duty to minimize collection and offer clear controls
  • I only use their Web client, given that there is hardly any use for it other than some Webminars that insist in using Zoom.