Srsly, all those neck beards who over simplify the problem with a flippant "don't use zoom", as if everyone has the luxury to skip every job interview and employer meeting that absolutely requires Zoom. I wish I could live in their world where every problem is solved by simply avoiding that problem.
Just use a browser instead of some silly client, problem mostly solved. Use X11 or Wayland or whatever else you want, for God's sake. I don't remember any god ever claiming salvation lies in abandoning the most functional display server on the market so I'll just keep on using X11. If and when Wayland or some other alternative ever becomes as useful as X11 I might hop over but for now Wayland is a solution in search of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
It takes experience to learn why people call it the "bleeding edge". GPU acceleration is often broken in a lot of distros, and it is unkind to new users that have a panic attack dropping into a CLI shell.
LightDM at least works 99% of the time, being Cross-desktop one can select a Wayland session just fine (great when it is working), or fall back to a software compositor Cinnamon Desktop when things bork after an update. =3
Fine words, until the GPU driver goes sideways in Wayland. And... I like running multi-seat headless sessions on my local LAN hosts for several reasons. =3
Zoom isn't just a technical problem. It's literally malware. The list of issues they've knowingly caused and sometimes even refused to fix is endless. They have made it clear they absolutely don't care about security in any way and they've built their entire business around that.
As I work in cyber security there's no way I'll install that shit on my personal PC. Yes I could spin up a VM but I don't want to. I could probably use it over the web but that's it.
So I'd refuse and that company's reply should inform me whether I'd want to work there in the first place. If they insist their security practices will be so lax that I will be just spending my time cleaning up everyone else's mess. In fact any employer using zoom in the first place is a huge red flag.
I currently work for a huge multinational and they have the zoom client blocked through antimalware. Anyone wishing to use it with customers or suppliers must use the web version only.
This is a habit tech people fall into. "Amazon deleted my book" -> well just strip the DRM off it. "My ISP monitors me" -> well just use a VPN instead. "Ads make it hard to use the internet" -> well just use an ad blocker.
Ironically if more tech people just rawdogged the internet I think we would have more progress.
My partial solution is to have the Android Zoom client on an idle tablet. Even though it is my office VOIP phone too, I power it off when I don't have meetings scheduled.
If someone tries to demand screen sharing, I ask one of my coworkers to drive, since they've joined from their laptop already.
I only launch the Linux Zoom client when I absolutely know I'm going to need to host a meeting and demonstrate software running on my end. I feel equally disgusted about Zoom and the corporate EDR agent. I basically feel like the most likely source of compromise of my laptop is these proprietary tools forced on me from above.
The thing that worries me is SSO for work. I wish there was a completely different identity for all the work-related apps and for my payroll/benefits portal. I.e. if they want to endanger my login that manages my work product, fine, but I don't appreciate them endangering my login that manages my own compensation, tax deductions and retirement transfers, and health insurance...
As an engineer I’d be impressed and would put you up to the top of the pile
Sadly I don’t run the company, and as a hiring manager that’s a great way to reduce my shortlist. We can’t have people like myself who ignore corporate policies.
Perhaps things have gotten better over time, but I did this 4 or 5 years ago and it was anything but trivial. I got it working, but it was a huge pain to set up.
The docker image build recipes should be easy to find these days.
Usually it is just local networking appliance rules that cause issues for some users. Likely a great learning experience for the uninitiated. Have a great day =3
If we are doing a survey of self hosted video conferencing services I would like to propose galene. Very easy to set up, I run it on obsd(an unsupported platform) and it just works.
Zoom also works on all browsers. Clearly you had a hot take, people corrected you, and now you're doubling down by suggesting, of all things, a Google product.
Should clipboard access be controlled through the XDG Desktop Portal Clipboard API; such that each app must request clipboard access each time or on startup?
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.
Out of interest why do you still use the app and not just use it in the browser? I feel much more secure having it in the browser sandbox and everything I care about works in the browser.
Not parent, but the web player used to be a down-graded experience from the native app. If you need Zoom for a professional setting, those functions could be important.
Do not know if this is still true, but at one point, the web player would only let you see one speaker at a time, while the app would show multiple people at once.
I notice the browser version is a little resource intensive. I use it on freebsd and I need to renice the browser to -10 for it to be somewhat stable. (This is an improvement because I remember 6 years ago it didn't work on freebsd.) I ran it on a Mac last week and it spun the fan more than I'd expect.
Last time I looked at their web client, it was indeed doing absurd things (I think it used TCP and web sockets to carry video instead of WebRTC and shipped a WASM video codec that obviously can’t be GPU/hardware accelerated).
Not sure if that’s malice (to nudge people towards using their invasive desktop app) or incompetence.
I recently had to use the browser and was shocked to find there was no option for Gallery View. You were just stuck with one square in the middle that would bounce between different faces. I feel like they have the worst web experience out of all the meeting apps.
I always try to use browser versions of things, but zoom just hasn't worked for me in it for changes. No error messages or anything, just insistence on downloading the app. I assumed they got rid of it but I guess not.
I worked at Zoom during this time. That's not what happened.
Zoom used the same technique Cisco Webex did - they ran a webserver with an open port so that local "links" to a meeting could open on your own machine. It wasn't a backdoor. Apple flagged that as a potential security risk, so Zoom worked with Apple on how to safely remove only the webserver without affecting other functionality. We were happy that Apple worked with us on this.
However, I thought it was very interesting (and strange) that there was almost no reaction from the tech community that Apple had software running on every Mac that allowed them to remove any binary they wished. (Which sure sounds like a backdoor)
Apple did block the app so the 'working with Apple' didn't exactly earn Zoom a lot of trust with them otherwise they wouldn't have done it. They'd have let Zoom fix it in an update. And just make that update mandatory.
'But Cisco did it too!' is just whataboutism. It was shown to be exploited to open scam websites which was a real backdoor and a legitimate security risk, not a potential one.
This is something that should never have happened in the first place. Even releasing something like this in the first place is really showing no concern for the security of customers at all. What it looks like to me is that zoom wanted to conquer the market by ease of use and was willing to sacrifice security to do it. The zoombombing thing was another example.
And yes Apple has an emergency brake for malware outbreaks. And they've only used that one for high profile apps once, for zoom. They didn't do that lightly, especially during the pandemic when people were depending on it.
Really I have no good words for the actions of zoom. And there have been more incidents.
A whataboutism that makes a legitimate point. It isn't reasonable to dismiss something just because a person makes a comparison. It's valid to consider that Apple might have been applying inconsistent standards and unfairly targeting Zoom for some reason.
I doubt they were being unfair but it is a bad practice to dismiss an argument because someone has the temerity to expect consistent standards. The threat of Apple arbitrarily removing apps based on unreliable reasoning is concerning.
> Ps I'm sorry if I sound harsh
Actually, thanks, that did go a long way.
It's not whataboutism, I'm not trying to distract from the point, I'm saying there was _prior art_ in the industry where customers appeared to tolerate this.
There was another PM on the team who felt the same way I did and we basically both wagged our fingers and said "you should have asked people during install", but who cares, it was too late.
Zoom had, I will say, a very... Chinese culture around software security. If you're familiar, Chinese software is often much more interested in just getting the job done in a simple way, and security is... not the job? I've used a lot of Chinese software that just wants full admin everything so no one had to learn about permissions.
Zoom wasn't exactly run that way, but the pool they hired from had a lot of that mentality in it.
I thought Apple's tool was ridiculous though. It's like "oh, some trash blew into our yards from the neighbor's trashcan" so Apple replies "oh, don't worry, I destroyed it with my orbital ion cannon" and the tech community never stops to wonder if maybe it's a little strange that Apple has an orbital ion cannon and maybe we should ask some questions about the ion cannon.
Asked people what during install? From my perspective this should have never been designed this way. I understand if you're a PM, but those engineers should've known better, Chinese or not.
As for the ion cannon (signed and notarized apps) people do talk about this and question it. Apple's infamous walled garden. Europe is trying to fix this with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the USA is trying to fix this with the right to repair.
But you have to admit, in this instance with Zoom, it was used for a just purpose. Apple protected end-users against bad code from Zoom, which from your post, seemed complacent.
> that there was almost no reaction from the tech community that Apple had software running on every Mac that allowed them to remove any binary they wished. (Which sure sounds like a backdoor)
Because that’s a documented feature (malware protection).
As a user, I really like it, and in this case I’m fully aligned with their classification of Zoom’s behavior as a nuisance. A lot of malware developers justify their behavior as “just doing what their users want/need”.
> A few years back, there was something about gaining root on MacOS via Zoom due to shady execution on their end.
> There's no legitimate use for it accessing privileged or private paths.
Well, that was the whole premise that made Zoom popular in the first place! It was a true one click install which made onboarding frictionless for non-technical users
Security wise, it's insane but user experience wise, it was unbeatable and is what solidified their position. It's ironic nowadays that all of those tricks have been stripped away, making it just as painful as any other platform to install on a fresh machine.
Unfortunately making software easy to install also makes it easier for Malware to be installed. It's a classic dilemma that is only fixable by making the user think twice about running stuff from the internet: Unix requires making the file executable, Windows at some point started tagging downloaded files with an "untrusted" attribute.
On Linux/X11 even when you run a program sandboxed or as a different user if you use a master Xserver the sandboxed program still can listen and modify all your input/output including keyboard/mouse events and window content of every application.
How so? If you can break out of a sandbox then by definition it is not a sandbox.
There are ways to force sandbox jail. For instance, giving processes only a partial view of the computer system. GoboLinux did this years ago via ViewFS (https://linuxphilia.blogspot.com/2009/07/gobolinux-is-linux-... search for ViewFS). There are many other similar solutions, some probably better.
Not really - it's not sufficiently fine-grained and, besides, you need it to connect to X to display anything.
There were various attempts to improve this situation in the early 2010s, typically using Xnest or Xephyr in conjunction with other sandboxing techniques. I believe Qubes OS followed that approach but it was awkward, limited, had major performance problems, and yet never managed to fully prevent circumvention.
The fact is that the X model was never designed with these threats in mind.
I think the only possibility that comes to mind is creating an ebpf module that sandboxes all filesystem calls and trampolines all ld_open calls.
But then you would have to provide massive amounts of patched/"safe" variants of all kinds of shared libraries which is unfeasible.
But I mean in the xorg use case it would be possible to just provide your own library that fakes the expected returns and sends fake data to the sandboxed applications.
I did a similar thing with barrier (though using LD_PRELOAD, see [1]) on my debian system to force a different behavior.
Source: Am kind of experimenting with ebpf a lot for that use case. C ABIs and SO files are a mess though. A real messy mess.
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.
Sure, in a way SIP is bigger than ever with NGNs, and there’s SIP use beyond that too, but actual interoperable SIP (as in, I can dial sip:name@example.com) is effectively not a thing anymore.
There is no such thing as an "X11 clipboard" that something can be written to. As the poster goes on to allude, X11 has a concept of a "selection" (a primary and a secondary one).
It goes roughly like this: when you select a text in a window, the X client tells the X server "I have the selection now", when you paste in another window, the client behind the other window asks "who has the selection" and requests the selection contents from the other client, the data is then forwarded through the server. The client that claimed ownership has to properly handle some associated requests/events for the whole thing to work.
The key point is, the client that does the "copy" is responsible for the data, the client that wants to "paste" has to talk to it, there is no central "clipboard" style repository like on Windows. If I try to copy/paste and quit the source program before the paste, the data is gone. That's why modern desktop environments usually come with a dedicated daemon that immediately reacts to selection ownership changes, grabs the data for itself and then grabs the selection to emulate the Windows style behavior.
If we play devils advocate, I suppose the Zoom client tries to do just that, not trusting whatever desktop environment you are running. I don't use this software, so I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd guess that the "Zoom Desktop Client" is just another Electron dumpster fire and it's actually Chromium or whatever underneath that does this?
It's not chromium. But what's happening here is that even if you don't click paste, zoom is actively listening to clipboard events and consuming pastes.
Tbh, if they aren't harvesting clipbakrds data which is a weird thing to do and is unlikely, this doesn't really mean much. Anyways any X client can read.
I suspect it's something like: a bug report that said that I copied the link but when I opened zoom and pasted it it didn't it work. I.e, they probably closed the source application and thus the selection owner is gone, and the selection is gone too. This fixes that. I would test that maybe. See if paste after source app close works. Then again, if you use a ownership changing clipboard manager this shudnt be a problem.
> 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.
I have a few scripts that interact with wl-copy. Like one that just cats all the files in a directory and pipes it into wl-copy so I can paste it somewhere else. Something like that would've been immensly useful when I was still on windows, but that would've been too much a bother to set up.
I dumped it after realizing Xen does its damndest in preventing you from hiding VM attributes from Guest OSes.
Proxmox uses KVM, and is easy to configure a VM to make the guest think it's on bare metal.
In the proprietary software space, a LOT of things run badly or refuse to run, or license stupidity with a guest OS. So for me, spoofing bare metal is an essential part of running ilk like Windows and proprietary apps. And also, school remote testing garbage.
Depends on how you use your computer. If you're mostly a developer/analysis terminal jockey with some browsing-- Qubes is a tremendous upgrade even if you don't care at all about the security properties:
The normal qube model of template OS vms + ephemeral app overlays makes it a cinch to troubleshoot complex issues because you can scribble all over the VM (e.g. go ahead, monkey patch your system LIBC if you want!) and all those changes will be gone when you restart the VM. Once you do find a solution you like, you can apply it cleanly and intentionally to the template. If all you were doing was a one-off, then no need to go make it permanent. Not sure if the latest Fedora upgrade is going to break stuff you care about? Install and switch to it one appvm at a time. Something breaks, file a bug and switch that one back until its fixed.
I've had friends screwing around with AI agents get their systems really screwed up because running the agent in a VM was work and requires maintenance. .. in qubes its just the natural way to run it, a few clicks and you're good to go. And the maintenance overhead of running in a VM is mostly non-existent.
When I say 'developer' above I don't mean it's because Qubes is particularly hard to use-- as I know significantly less technical people who use it without issue. But it's non-security/privacy advantages are most significant if you're doing experimentation with the computer's configuration.
However if you're doing stuff that is Video heavy-- particularly gaming, and to a lesser extent CAD, video editing, etc. Qubes really brutally hurts video performance. It can be somewhat offset by running on higher end hardware (and then getting performance of a few year older system). Even just watching youtube videos is obvious impacted.
Similarly, it dents battery life. This is addressable via additional batteries given that now laptops are usbc powered and 100wh external batteries are readily available. But this is something of a lifestyle question.
Even before the AI-apocalypse I considered qubes to be non-negotiable on laptops-- there are just far far far too many browser RCE vulnerabilities to consider anything less for any computer that isn't a total security write-off.
You make a very compelling argument. I've been thinking of at least trying it out before, but have been leaning towards it more and more over the years. A couple of questions though, if I could bother you with them?
How is remoting performance e.g. via VNC/RDP or particularly via Moonlight+Sunshine (intended for gaming and such)?
And how programmable is the configuration of Qubes? I like the idea of NixOS for example, but given how comparatively little activity there is in the actual nix rather than the packages, and across so few developers, I worry what would happen if someone got hit by a bus or something. But I still like programmatically configuring computers over manual monkey patches, because I have the memory of a gold fish. :p
> But using a multipurpose computer without qubes is unsafe at any speed, worse than driving without a seatbelt.
Could you elaborate on the odds of death and permanent disability occurring through use of unsecured general purpose computers? Because if not using qubes has the same risk profile as not wearing seatbelts I might feel like taking some measures
Thankfully iOS rolled out a permissions prompt for this. Pretty illuminating just how often other apps read the clipboard, e.g. Google Maps reading my clipboard every time I tapped on the text field to search for a destination.
Linux generally presumes that you run trusted software, not some proprietary program that is approximately malware. If you want a "sandbox" run that program as a separate unprivileged user or use bubblewrap.
> Linux generally presumes that you run trusted software, not some proprietary program that is approximately malware.
But this statement basically says: "Linux has no good permission controls for running software". The assumption is flawed. Trusting software is not a true/false thing.
Yes, you can use sandboxing tools, but how many people use them properly?
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.
The "clipboard" as it is implemented in many (most?) operating systems today, only exists because it's a legacy idea that hasn't died. If it were freshly invented today, it would never get past even the most lenient privacy review.
Think about the pitch for the feature: "So, we're going to make this in the OS, where the user can highlight anything in any application, invoke a command, and then that thing (which could be a sensitive password, private personal information, or the codes to a nuclear weapon) will instantly become available for all applications on the system to read and do anything with. Uhh... NO THANKS!
Ideally, if an application wants to read from the clipboard, it should explicitly ask the user for permission, or the user should have to specify the exact app he's copy/pasting to. This reduces the clipboard's ease of use, but at least makes it NOT a truck sized privacy hole.
I think the solution is to really give the user control over when something is pasted and into which application. So if you press ctrl-V, it shouldn't pass that on to an application that then gets to poll the clipboard, instead the OS or window manager should send the contents of the clipboard to the application the moment ctrl-V is hit.
And that is useless if you have meetings with people that "have standardized" on Zoom, and that hold some sort of leverage over you, like clients/customers.
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.
That's "rude" but allowed; that capability is one of the reasons Wayland was developed (though their solution removed some capabilities people wanted with the result that the compositors now replicate the original flaw).
I remember a friend installing Zoom on a Linux computer through their software manager. Later, they removed it and found that when they visited the page in the software manager for Zoom, it automatically tried to install Zoom without interaction from them (ie, my friend did not click Install, but viewed the page and a password prompt for installing the package appeared).
I'm not sure if this was behaviour that happened with the software manager on other packages, but was a concern for us.
University of California has licensed zoom accounts with privacy agreements. I install it in Linux. Now I will check if I can replicate this behavior. I am not sure if it is a violation of their agreement or not if they do, but I don't like it.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 8.7 ms ] threadJust use Firefox, or Chromium if you must.
https://jitsi.org/downloads/
Linux is multi-process, _multi-user_ since forever.
No need to leave a password manager, online banking, andwhatnot accessible in the background during an interview.
And yeah: stop. using. X11. For God's sake!
LightDM at least works 99% of the time, being Cross-desktop one can select a Wayland session just fine (great when it is working), or fall back to a software compositor Cinnamon Desktop when things bork after an update. =3
Fine words, until the GPU driver goes sideways in Wayland. And... I like running multi-seat headless sessions on my local LAN hosts for several reasons. =3
However software just shouldn't be trash. No need to blame the display layer for this.
Why should I stop using software that is superior to the alternatives?
As I work in cyber security there's no way I'll install that shit on my personal PC. Yes I could spin up a VM but I don't want to. I could probably use it over the web but that's it.
So I'd refuse and that company's reply should inform me whether I'd want to work there in the first place. If they insist their security practices will be so lax that I will be just spending my time cleaning up everyone else's mess. In fact any employer using zoom in the first place is a huge red flag.
I currently work for a huge multinational and they have the zoom client blocked through antimalware. Anyone wishing to use it with customers or suppliers must use the web version only.
This.
Develop sufficient leverage to be able to show basic respect the right way to do things - and yourself.
Ironically if more tech people just rawdogged the internet I think we would have more progress.
If someone tries to demand screen sharing, I ask one of my coworkers to drive, since they've joined from their laptop already.
I only launch the Linux Zoom client when I absolutely know I'm going to need to host a meeting and demonstrate software running on my end. I feel equally disgusted about Zoom and the corporate EDR agent. I basically feel like the most likely source of compromise of my laptop is these proprietary tools forced on me from above.
The thing that worries me is SSO for work. I wish there was a completely different identity for all the work-related apps and for my payroll/benefits portal. I.e. if they want to endanger my login that manages my work product, fine, but I don't appreciate them endangering my login that manages my own compensation, tax deductions and retirement transfers, and health insurance...
How many HR/recruiter types you met that bypass company policy and switch to tools the candidates suggest?
Sadly I don’t run the company, and as a hiring manager that’s a great way to reduce my shortlist. We can’t have people like myself who ignore corporate policies.
first time for everything
Usually it is just local networking appliance rules that cause issues for some users. Likely a great learning experience for the uninitiated. Have a great day =3
https://galene.org/
Zero software to install.
"Clipboard - XDG Desktop Portal" https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...
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.
Do not know if this is still true, but at one point, the web player would only let you see one speaker at a time, while the app would show multiple people at once.
Not sure if that’s malice (to nudge people towards using their invasive desktop app) or incompetence.
It wasn't really root as much as an open backdoor on a TCP port as far as I recall.
Zoom used the same technique Cisco Webex did - they ran a webserver with an open port so that local "links" to a meeting could open on your own machine. It wasn't a backdoor. Apple flagged that as a potential security risk, so Zoom worked with Apple on how to safely remove only the webserver without affecting other functionality. We were happy that Apple worked with us on this.
However, I thought it was very interesting (and strange) that there was almost no reaction from the tech community that Apple had software running on every Mac that allowed them to remove any binary they wished. (Which sure sounds like a backdoor)
'But Cisco did it too!' is just whataboutism. It was shown to be exploited to open scam websites which was a real backdoor and a legitimate security risk, not a potential one.
This is something that should never have happened in the first place. Even releasing something like this in the first place is really showing no concern for the security of customers at all. What it looks like to me is that zoom wanted to conquer the market by ease of use and was willing to sacrifice security to do it. The zoombombing thing was another example.
And yes Apple has an emergency brake for malware outbreaks. And they've only used that one for high profile apps once, for zoom. They didn't do that lightly, especially during the pandemic when people were depending on it.
Really I have no good words for the actions of zoom. And there have been more incidents.
A whataboutism that makes a legitimate point. It isn't reasonable to dismiss something just because a person makes a comparison. It's valid to consider that Apple might have been applying inconsistent standards and unfairly targeting Zoom for some reason.
I doubt they were being unfair but it is a bad practice to dismiss an argument because someone has the temerity to expect consistent standards. The threat of Apple arbitrarily removing apps based on unreliable reasoning is concerning.
It's not whataboutism, I'm not trying to distract from the point, I'm saying there was _prior art_ in the industry where customers appeared to tolerate this.
There was another PM on the team who felt the same way I did and we basically both wagged our fingers and said "you should have asked people during install", but who cares, it was too late.
Zoom had, I will say, a very... Chinese culture around software security. If you're familiar, Chinese software is often much more interested in just getting the job done in a simple way, and security is... not the job? I've used a lot of Chinese software that just wants full admin everything so no one had to learn about permissions.
Zoom wasn't exactly run that way, but the pool they hired from had a lot of that mentality in it.
I thought Apple's tool was ridiculous though. It's like "oh, some trash blew into our yards from the neighbor's trashcan" so Apple replies "oh, don't worry, I destroyed it with my orbital ion cannon" and the tech community never stops to wonder if maybe it's a little strange that Apple has an orbital ion cannon and maybe we should ask some questions about the ion cannon.
As for the ion cannon (signed and notarized apps) people do talk about this and question it. Apple's infamous walled garden. Europe is trying to fix this with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the USA is trying to fix this with the right to repair.
But you have to admit, in this instance with Zoom, it was used for a just purpose. Apple protected end-users against bad code from Zoom, which from your post, seemed complacent.
Because that’s a documented feature (malware protection).
As a user, I really like it, and in this case I’m fully aligned with their classification of Zoom’s behavior as a nuisance. A lot of malware developers justify their behavior as “just doing what their users want/need”.
> There's no legitimate use for it accessing privileged or private paths.
Well, that was the whole premise that made Zoom popular in the first place! It was a true one click install which made onboarding frictionless for non-technical users
Security wise, it's insane but user experience wise, it was unbeatable and is what solidified their position. It's ironic nowadays that all of those tricks have been stripped away, making it just as painful as any other platform to install on a fresh machine.
On Linux/X11 even when you run a program sandboxed or as a different user if you use a master Xserver the sandboxed program still can listen and modify all your input/output including keyboard/mouse events and window content of every application.
There are ways to force sandbox jail. For instance, giving processes only a partial view of the computer system. GoboLinux did this years ago via ViewFS (https://linuxphilia.blogspot.com/2009/07/gobolinux-is-linux-... search for ViewFS). There are many other similar solutions, some probably better.
There were various attempts to improve this situation in the early 2010s, typically using Xnest or Xephyr in conjunction with other sandboxing techniques. I believe Qubes OS followed that approach but it was awkward, limited, had major performance problems, and yet never managed to fully prevent circumvention.
The fact is that the X model was never designed with these threats in mind.
But then you would have to provide massive amounts of patched/"safe" variants of all kinds of shared libraries which is unfeasible.
But I mean in the xorg use case it would be possible to just provide your own library that fakes the expected returns and sends fake data to the sandboxed applications.
I did a similar thing with barrier (though using LD_PRELOAD, see [1]) on my debian system to force a different behavior.
Source: Am kind of experimenting with ebpf a lot for that use case. C ABIs and SO files are a mess though. A real messy mess.
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/barrier-disable-dpms
As people running Linux should know, you cannot trust proprietary applications.
This should be behind a toggle driven by intent, rather than something allowed by default.
It goes roughly like this: when you select a text in a window, the X client tells the X server "I have the selection now", when you paste in another window, the client behind the other window asks "who has the selection" and requests the selection contents from the other client, the data is then forwarded through the server. The client that claimed ownership has to properly handle some associated requests/events for the whole thing to work.
The key point is, the client that does the "copy" is responsible for the data, the client that wants to "paste" has to talk to it, there is no central "clipboard" style repository like on Windows. If I try to copy/paste and quit the source program before the paste, the data is gone. That's why modern desktop environments usually come with a dedicated daemon that immediately reacts to selection ownership changes, grabs the data for itself and then grabs the selection to emulate the Windows style behavior.
If we play devils advocate, I suppose the Zoom client tries to do just that, not trusting whatever desktop environment you are running. I don't use this software, so I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd guess that the "Zoom Desktop Client" is just another Electron dumpster fire and it's actually Chromium or whatever underneath that does this?
Tbh, if they aren't harvesting clipbakrds data which is a weird thing to do and is unlikely, this doesn't really mean much. Anyways any X client can read.
I suspect it's something like: a bug report that said that I copied the link but when I opened zoom and pasted it it didn't it work. I.e, they probably closed the source application and thus the selection owner is gone, and the selection is gone too. This fixes that. I would test that maybe. See if paste after source app close works. Then again, if you use a ownership changing clipboard manager this shudnt be a problem.
> 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.
https://man.archlinux.org/man/wl-copy.1
(i was also interested :)
Proxmox uses KVM, and is easy to configure a VM to make the guest think it's on bare metal.
In the proprietary software space, a LOT of things run badly or refuse to run, or license stupidity with a guest OS. So for me, spoofing bare metal is an essential part of running ilk like Windows and proprietary apps. And also, school remote testing garbage.
The normal qube model of template OS vms + ephemeral app overlays makes it a cinch to troubleshoot complex issues because you can scribble all over the VM (e.g. go ahead, monkey patch your system LIBC if you want!) and all those changes will be gone when you restart the VM. Once you do find a solution you like, you can apply it cleanly and intentionally to the template. If all you were doing was a one-off, then no need to go make it permanent. Not sure if the latest Fedora upgrade is going to break stuff you care about? Install and switch to it one appvm at a time. Something breaks, file a bug and switch that one back until its fixed.
I've had friends screwing around with AI agents get their systems really screwed up because running the agent in a VM was work and requires maintenance. .. in qubes its just the natural way to run it, a few clicks and you're good to go. And the maintenance overhead of running in a VM is mostly non-existent.
When I say 'developer' above I don't mean it's because Qubes is particularly hard to use-- as I know significantly less technical people who use it without issue. But it's non-security/privacy advantages are most significant if you're doing experimentation with the computer's configuration.
However if you're doing stuff that is Video heavy-- particularly gaming, and to a lesser extent CAD, video editing, etc. Qubes really brutally hurts video performance. It can be somewhat offset by running on higher end hardware (and then getting performance of a few year older system). Even just watching youtube videos is obvious impacted.
Similarly, it dents battery life. This is addressable via additional batteries given that now laptops are usbc powered and 100wh external batteries are readily available. But this is something of a lifestyle question.
Even before the AI-apocalypse I considered qubes to be non-negotiable on laptops-- there are just far far far too many browser RCE vulnerabilities to consider anything less for any computer that isn't a total security write-off.
How is remoting performance e.g. via VNC/RDP or particularly via Moonlight+Sunshine (intended for gaming and such)?
And how programmable is the configuration of Qubes? I like the idea of NixOS for example, but given how comparatively little activity there is in the actual nix rather than the packages, and across so few developers, I worry what would happen if someone got hit by a bus or something. But I still like programmatically configuring computers over manual monkey patches, because I have the memory of a gold fish. :p
Could you elaborate on the odds of death and permanent disability occurring through use of unsecured general purpose computers? Because if not using qubes has the same risk profile as not wearing seatbelts I might feel like taking some measures
At this point I probably wouldn’t realize a legitimate Zoom meeting was legitimate.
Hell, our phones have had a better permission system for years.
But this statement basically says: "Linux has no good permission controls for running software". The assumption is flawed. Trusting software is not a true/false thing.
Yes, you can use sandboxing tools, but how many people use them properly?
Also reason 35892384242892 to not use proprietary software, especially proprietary software with network access.
Think about the pitch for the feature: "So, we're going to make this in the OS, where the user can highlight anything in any application, invoke a command, and then that thing (which could be a sensitive password, private personal information, or the codes to a nuclear weapon) will instantly become available for all applications on the system to read and do anything with. Uhh... NO THANKS!
Ideally, if an application wants to read from the clipboard, it should explicitly ask the user for permission, or the user should have to specify the exact app he's copy/pasting to. This reduces the clipboard's ease of use, but at least makes it NOT a truck sized privacy hole.
If they moan say it's Zoom but the corporate version.
Self-hosting my own Jitsi and it's faultless and the way to go.
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.
I'm not sure if this was behaviour that happened with the software manager on other packages, but was a concern for us.