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How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

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796 points _Microft | 2 comments | 31 Mar 20 11:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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fermienrico ◴[31 Mar 20 15:26 UTC] No.22738420[source]▶
Also, Zoom's entire engineering team is based in China [1]. China and Chinese companies have no real culture of user centric privacy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707528

Edit: Why downvote me? I am not trying to stir up flame wars. Saying anything against China has become impossible to do on HN. Voices get drowned despite of raising real legitimate concerns about privacy, especially for a tool used by millions all of a sudden during this pandemic. People should be speaking up on HN. I know, I am not supposed to complain about downvotes on HN, I've read the guidelines.

Edit2: Not able to find the source for Tianjin datacenter, I will reply if I can find it. Please take it with a grain of salt.

Edit3: Holyshit, so much attention on my comment. Redacting unsubstantiated claims and adding more sources that can be traced on the wikipedia section of Zoom privacy criticisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications#Crit...

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dang ◴[31 Mar 20 16:36 UTC] No.22739350[source]▶
Please don't break the site guidelines [1] by going on about downvoting. Your comment has been heavily upvoted. Meanwhile complaints like that linger on as off-topic and false, and don't garbage-collect themselves.

You can use HN Search to verify that HN sees plenty of comments "saying anything against China". The topic is extremely flame-prone because people are wont to hurl generalizations at each other, and worse. Nationalistic flamebait and flamewar is a big problem on HN [2] and destructive of the spirit of this site [1]. Individuals have been attacked here for just for expressing their views while being (or being assumed to be) Chinese, and at least one person was hounded off the site altogether. I'm sure you'll agree that that's shocking and not at all the community we want to be. None of us wants it, but it's easy to get it anyway, once such flames get going.

I don't think your comment was nationalistic flamebait, except insofar as it was rather unsubstantive. Unsubstantive comments on inflammatory topics are guaranteed to come across in a flamey way to some segment of the readership, even when that wasn't your intent. Intent doesn't communicate itself, unfortunately, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate [4].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200971

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19404162

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22608635

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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1. fermienrico ◴[31 Mar 20 16:47 UTC] No.22739476[source]▶
Understood, thanks and accept my apologies. I have some feedback - please make exceptions when discussing fact based discussions around privacy when it is not tending towards flame wars, especially related to Chinese influence and erosion of privacy. I can see why this can lead to flame wars but that's where you should step in and moderate. I just read your links to people getting harrased if they are Chinese, that's not cool.
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2. dang ◴[31 Mar 20 16:57 UTC] No.22739597[source]▶
I think my comment addresses this, but perhaps you were replying to an earlier version, or perhaps I wasn't clear enough. What you posted was trending towards flamewar, even though you didn't intend it that way. Telling moderators to "step in and moderate" isn't sufficient to solve this problem. For one thing, we don't come close to seeing all the material that gets posted—there's far too much. We do step in, but we also need users like you to understand the problem a bit differently. If you're going to comment on an inflammatory topic, you need to make sure your comment is substantive, i.e. contains solid information and not just grand claims. And you should be careful to narrow its scope explicitly to what the information supports. Fortunately that should also be enough to make it clear that your intent isn't just to post pejoratives about other people.