The U.S. video-conferencing company Zoom closed the account of a group of prominent U.S.-based Chinese activists after they held a Zoom event commemorating the 31st anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Axios has learned.
Big or small, Apple or Zoom, everyone bows to China.
Zoom is Chinese owned.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/zoom-china-ties-security
This is Fox news, automatically anti-chinese. Where do you see that they are Chinese owned?
The founder from Chinese origin has only 22 percent of the publicly sold shares and has American citizenship according to Wikipedia??
Fuck off, wu mao. You’re not fooling anyone.
Back off dude… I hate to defend Zoom at all but you are plain wrong that they are a Chinese owned company.
The article doesn’t say anything about Chinese ownership, tidux just made it up. They do point out quite a few issues (at least taking US-centric perspective) but overall Zoom is not significantly worse than alternatives. Any communicator that keeps encryption keys to user contents is just as insecure, regardless of where the keys are held or what, if any, encryption algorithms are used.
Most people agree that Zoom is not a great software – it is a case where being on time, being convenient and free was more important than quality or security.
I’ve been warning against the centralization of services for a long time. One of the most frustrating aspects of where we are at today is that before any of these centralized services existed we actually had P2P videoconferencing and collaboration tools in the 90s. The technological shift away from P2P and federated services towards proprietary ones controlled by corporations was always going to become a one way path to less freedom and control. With centralized services someone else writes the terms and conditions and may terminate your account even without cause, and from there it continues onwards to government oppression and censorship. The irony is that so many people who are completely against government oppression will nevertheless embrace the very tools that take away their own Independence and control. It sucks, but people don’t listen until it’s too late.
I remember the p2p times, but they were quite a mess. There were “meta” chat apps connecting to multiple platforms, and you never knew which service, and even which friend had which features. Yes it was democratic, anyone could come up with an app, but people eventually stopped using them.
There are some reasons:
– Discovery: I can open WhatsApp and quickly start a video chat with a friend on my existing contact lists. For older services (like MSN), I had to figure out their screen name, send an invite, and coordinate our online times. It was also likely they had AOL instead
– Bloat: There were not only too many apps, but the apps themselves were highly bloated. Lots of fancy features, toolbars, always on notification icons, and overall terrible coding did not help
– Money: At the end of the day these companies are there to make money. Even free ones have to pay for services somehow. It is not the “survival of the best” but of the “fittest”, and the new / lean apps with centralized plans were better positioned to bring revenue.
There are still opportunities. For example, the famous “Signal” app is open source with an open protocol. But it all depends on the users’ actions.
sukru,
Brand new day, same old problems. Users today are just as fragmented and separated by networks that don’t talk to one another. It sucks that companies aren’t working together to come up with unifying standards. Open source meta connectivity software like matrix makes the best of what we’ve been given.
https://matrix.org/
With the exception of this last reason, none of your reasons preclude the use of federation & P2P. I agree with you on the financial point. Centralized services won the favor of corporations because they were more profitable. Not only did the lack of corporate support hurt decentralized services, but they actively took steps to close off their users and make integration less viable. For many of us, that means we don’t have much of a choice as to what clients to use. It’s determined by one’s social circle and that’s that. It shouldn’t be this way, but corporations made it this way and it’s very effective for vendor locking 🙁
Idiot admins should have been added to the list. You know, the kind who can’t set an SPF record correctly. It’s 2020 and people still can’t get this right.
Also, spam and the assholes who ruin everything nice we had. Not having an open protocol helps weed out the bad seeds which ruined and killed many of the previous chat systems. It’s easier to police a controlled system where only corporate clients are officially supported.
Couple that with idiots who can’t configure a system correctly, and we end up with the current state of email which we can’t do anything about because it’s critical.
I’m going to assume you meant corps adopting IM systems. Corps have the requirement of needing to have control. An anarchist system like P2P is great for people in their personal lives, but it’s a nightmare for corporate admins who have to make sure they lock people out of whatever systems are in use when a person leaves a company.
Centralized systems also make integration easier. Things like linking everything to LDAP is important in a business. It’s not a big deal for companies with 10 people in one location, but when it’s 100 people who are geographically disperse, it makes a big difference.
It was kind of always that way. It was less burdensome when desktops were our primary communications devices, but it’s onerous in the age of the smartphone.
Re: money.
Yes, but in a twisted way: users being assets. I’m sure 20 years down the line we will be laughing that someone might have considered non-paying users an asset rather than liability. But here we are – the value of the worlds biggest companies is defined in 90-100% by how many users they have rather than by income or a prospect of it.
In this climate it is not a surprise the companies don’t want to “share” their users. Getting more users than others is literally the only reason they provide these services.
Open-source effects don’t work here, either. Network effects are extremely strong (much stronger than for example MS Windows/Office) and there is no software commoditization over time because zero marginal cost to the users and a significant cost of infrastructure. In fact, I see an opposite trend – a federated system (email) is becoming monopolized by Google.
The only thing I can think of that may work is focusing on privacy and security – these two features are incompatible with the above business model, so if enough people care about privacy that may be enough to bootstrap a federated design.
ndrw,
I agree with everything you said. Regarding future designs, I doubt federated services will have a future outside the areas where they already exist and have strong momentum (email/telephone).
Realistically if it weren’t for federation all of the smaller service providers would have to close up shop since they wouldn’t have the reach needed to make the service useful. “I can’t call or email the people I need to, this service is useless. I’ll switch to the service that everyone else is on.” The huge corporations, and especially google, are the clear winners without federation. Small service providers may fill a niche, but the large providers have all the power to vendor lock the masses into their exclusive services. I don’t see any scenario under which they would voluntarily give that up to allow users to gain autonomy via federated networks. It especially doesn’t help that the masses don’t want to pay for things like privacy, it’s impossible to compete with “free”.
Legislation is the traditional way this has been achieved. The AT&T breakup and the 1997 telecom act inparticular, but people are morons. They’ve been brainwashed to think “the free market will fix it”, when in fact it absolutely will not. The game is too crooked for that to happen.
Flatland_Spider,
We don’t actually have a free market. I know it is probably “no true Scotsman”, but that is the harsh reality.
In the US, communications are pretty much local monopolies. Each neighborhood is owned by a large company, and little ones are prevented from entering. Local government efforts are thwarted by state legislature.
US had clear separation between content providers, networks, and cable operators. i.e.: Comcast was not allowed to own any channels, or NBC could not own TV shows. All had to be independent.
The same was true for supermarkets for example. Food companies, distributors, and the markets had to be separate. Now Walmart, Costso, and even Amazon has their own brands, distributed by their own network on their own stores. If you make a dietary supplement, CVS can legally place their brand next to it, advertising the price difference.
I have veered too much off topic. But we probably need to teach new generations on the history of the corporate cultures.
The problem is the technical ability required to run these systems and the money to host them. I have the ability and money to run these for myself, but I have better things to do then run servers when I’m not getting paid for it.
To make your idea a reality, outbound Internet speeds to be greatly enhanced, and ISPs need to be nationalized, at least at the state level, for one. Building all of the services into a home gateway is the way to do this for the average person. They don’t have to think about it; they plug it in and go. Home gateways are already trending the direction of home servers.
Of course this would require a certified gateway image and regular updates, or we end up with fleets of botnets ruining everyone’s fun. Anyone not running an approved image or equipment able to run an approved image get booted off the Internet. Let’s centralize that too. Everyone gets a state issued gateway, and it gets replaced when it phased out.
Next, centralize authentication. Everyone gets a state issued ID to access the Internet. It’s great. IPv6 everywhere and everyone gets their own domain. Root LDAP servers with Kerberos, SAML, and OAuth2! Mmmm… Kerberos and IPv6 everywhere. 🙂
Are you seeing the problems here? This is pretty much how it works running corporate IT networks, but people would scream bloody murder if this was applied to their personal life.
Funnily, Signal is whole heartedly anti-federation. I can’t find the article, but Moxie has stated unequivocally Signal will not add federation.
Meanwhile, the Matrix (https://matrix.org/) team is working on the problem of a decentralized encrypted chat system to good results. Matrix servers don’t natively support video calls, but a Jitsi server can be added to get those features.
Cloud computing….. It’s just a mainframe made of commodity hardware. We are moving our desktops back to thin clients (aka Chromebooks, etc).
TheNerd,
I see you responded to me, but I’m confused what point this is in response to?
You’re right, “cloud computing” is just a new marketing term for old tech.
Centralization is an engineering problem created by group video chats, screensharing, and whiteboards, if I’m understanding the problem correctly. The horsepower to multiplex multiple video streams together is not trivial, and keeping everyone in sync is tough. Add in crappy networks with limited outbound, and it makes more sense to send data to a server to distribute to the participants.
Which ones were federated? XMPP, or Jabber at the time, is the only one I can think of which had federation. Everything else was already a walled garden.
Flatland_Spider,
To be honest, this type of project would be right up my alley, but I’m afraid that I don’t have a sustainable business model. I’d be broke and homeless if I gave it away for free 🙁 If I wanted to try and sell it, realistically buyers want centralized services to own & monetize. Anyways we’ve already talked about this elsewhere 🙂
I’d go as far back as the days of IRC and usenet with BBSes and ISPs often setting up their own servers and joining the various networks. You’ve obviously got things like DNS, but even that stands to be replaced with DOH, a centralized alternative.
There used to be a big incentive to build federated networks when providers were more numerous and evenly matched. Being able to communicate and chat to your friends and family across different bulletin board systems was awesome! No single provider could achieve the breadth and connectivity of a federated network alone. Today the picture’s quite different, the big fish are much much bigger. Multinational corporations have zero interested in building networks with others anymore. Just look at their user counts, they’re the kings of the world and don’t give a damn about anyone else. Small operators aren’t remotely threatening to them. A new federated network without their cooperation would be crushed by their power & popularity, it’s just too skewed. 🙁
My prediction is that if we don’t get regulatory intervention, we will see today’s multinational corporations turn into multi-trillion dollar corporations that will own everything and control all assets. It will be like the end of a monopoly board game where nothing anyone else does matters at all. We need to talk about something else, I think I’ve filled my pessimism quota…
True, IRC has been federated from the start, and I remember Usenet.
Specifically, IM systems being federated. I don’t remember ICQ, AIM, or Yahoo! Messanger being federated. Also, my career didn’t start until 2000, so I’m not aware of how remote teams worked in the 80s and 90s in regards to IM and video conferences.
Business customers certainly have an interest in being able to use the same tools to communicate with external teams as they would communicate with internal teams. Guests and shared workspaces are two features that have been popping up lately in the productivity space.
Matrix is getting a lot of traction, and they have lots of bridges to other IM systems. 🙂 There is hope.
Things ebb and flow, and think we’re on a flow with open IM systems.
I can tell you all the pain points of the current systems after dealing with them for the past couple of months. Some related to the pandemic and mostly not related at all.
Video related stuff has been popping up like mushrooms lately, so there’s a market for it. Plus some other ideas that could differentiate.
Anyway, this would be a fun discussion off of public boards. Reach out to jollyrogue at dangertoaster dot com or Telegram. I can use whatever, but I don’t know how we could securely exchange info.
Flatland_Spider,
I’ve got loads of ideas too. I merely wish that I had more money to be independently wealthy and not have to work for others. I’m tired of implementing other people’s ideas rather than my own.
(I had a big rant here, but I deleted it, haha)
Yeah there should be a way to exchange contact details securely, I requested that ages ago, I’d add it if I were a web dev here, oh well.
Not sure what you have in mind, but I’ll send an email. 🙂
It’s baffling that corporations in the eve of 2020 still fall in some of the most basic traps of vendor lock-in and centralized products where there’s viable open standards alternatives.
Even worse, they are easy prey in the hands of companies controlled top down by vicious ultra nationalist dictatorship. Not only they don’t bother to put a core business functionality in hands of a single company, they also don’t bother to whom this company answer to.
The growth of Zoom is unexplainable by logic alone. Stupidity is what explain it.
CapEnt,
I agree. Part of the explanation is that users are naive and uninformed, but the other part is the network effect. You end up friends/family/job that peer pressure you into using these proprietary services. They’re programmed to just use facebook messager, zoom, facetime, etc and have zero interest in changing for your benefit. A big reason P2P and federated services have fallen by the wayside is simply because companies stopped investing in technologies that gives users autonomy. They learned that privatized services are more profitable, even when they’re not universal and fail to interoperate.
No, people are lazy and these propietary services made things easier for them. For example.
Jabber: you have to install one of your multiple clients, register to one of the servers. Your contacts have to do the same and tell your their jabber address.
Whatsapp: you install the app in your phone and don´t have to do anything: you only need to know your contact´s phone number.
jgfenix,
I don’t buy that, It has nothing to do with laziness or easiness. Lazy people can and did use federated & P2P systems before centralized services were big. Had technology continued to evolve down that path we would have been fine, the real reason for their decline is that corporations stopped investing in them preferring centralized services for business reasons.
Except it’s not difficult due to P2P/federation. When all your friends & family are on it, it’s natural. It’s become difficult because corporations have avoided open standards and encouraged their users become vested in their proprietary services instead. 🙁
That’s a prime example of what I’m talking about, it could have been developed into an open P2P & federated standard. It’s not an example of centralized services being superior, it’s an example of centralized services being more profitable for the developers building them.
As an aside, I have serious gripes with whatsapp as they don’t allow the use of phone numbers that aren’t associated with an IOS/android phone. One time I was asked to use whatsapp to accommodate an outsourcing team, they promised it ran on the desktop, which I managed to install, but whatsapp refused to accept my real phone number. I would have needed to transfer the phone number to an android phone first. I told them look guys, I always go the extra mile to accommodate others but this is just ridiculous, whatsapp’s discriminatory practices make it too damned difficult to use, you’re going to use a different service.
“Except it’s not difficult due to P2P/federation. When all your friends & family are on it, it’s natural. It’s become difficult because corporations have avoided open standards and encouraged their users become vested in their proprietary services instead. ”
Tell that to my grandpa. There are people that even explaining WhatsApp to them is difficult. I would like to use open services and standards or at least something better like Telegram but convincing my contacts is impossible.
jgfenix,
You should give your grandpa more credit, he was probably dialing up bulletin boards, browsing newgroups, and joining IRC channels long before you had your facebooks and whatapps 🙂
Seriously though, I know how futile it is convincing people to switch networks. I fare no better than you at that. That’s actually kind of the point I was getting at. It’s natural to gravitate to the networks that one’s friends and family are using because one’s friends and family are using it over any of the technical details. Those details are just a non-consideration for most people. All they’re thinking is “oh I can talk to my friends and family on here, this is what I’ll use”.
Open standards alternatives often are also open source products and CIO’s feel that they will have too much responsibility and are afraid of it.
But in real life most good open source products have excellent product support that will help you.
For example Matrix is a perfect and better replacement for Zoom and you have choice between self-hosted solution, free service and paid service (and integrations to other similar services). And by nature it is end-to-end encrypted, so no-one would be able to wiretap you.
CIOs don’t care about open standards, and they don’t care about FOSS. They care about their budgets, SLAs, support contracts, and shifting responsibility to vendors. CIOs are on the business side of things.
When you buy a support contract from a company or buy the enterprise version. <– Missing piece of the sentence.
Open source products have best effort supports, and hopefully the one person who has the knowledge and interest in your problem logs in and notices the help request.
Flatland_Spider,
Many open source products do actually provide commercial support. It’s a common business model. Look at redhat for instance, they release software as FOSS and sell support contracts. I also agree with jemmjemm that some FOSS products have truly excellent support even without a support contract.
Some of the worst support I’ve had was from google. Even as a paying customer they couldn’t care less about you. Conversely I’d rate the commercial support from microsoft as much better. The quality of support really comes down to individual company priorities far more than commercial verses FOSS.
So true. Some companies really care about customer success with their products.
“Many companies will provide commercial support for open source projects and products” is a more accurate description.
This is an area which is tricky to navigate. I’m wary of projects which are strongly affiliated with a company or attached to a company. Sooner or later the project with spawn a “business” version which will have many closed source features it’s popular and the suits need a new source of revenue.
This has not been my experience. FOSS support is spotty in my experience. Now, this may be because I’m in deep water and outside the norm, I’m not as good of a writer as I think I am, or I’m an idiot. Either way, the best way to ensure questions get answered is to buy a support contract with an SLA.
Don’t get me wrong. I really support FOSS and open standards. I recommend/purchase/use whenever possible, and truly believe decentralized/federated systems are best. However, I have to balance priorities, maintenance, cost, fitness of purpose, etc. for the day job, and people would rather have a life then be a FOSS hero.
Flatland_Spider,
I understand that. Often when open source business models are touted, I think they neglect to say just how tough it is for small developers to make a living at it. Some companies may use it as a loss leader.
I’m not questioning your experience, but I am questioning your assumption that you can’t get support contracts with FOSS. Many open source projects used by enterprises also provide enterprise support packages:
Obviously I mentioned redhat, but there are many others…
http://www.oracle.com/linux/support.html
http://www.ibm.com/services/technology-support/open-source?
The company behind asterisk, open source call management software offers enterprise support:
http://www.sangoma.com/asterisk/support/
The company behind wireshark, offers enterprise support:
http://www.riverbed.com/support/advanced-support.html
The magento ecommerce platform has enterprise support
magento.com/
In other words, enterprise support is not exclusive to the domain of proprietary software.
I get that you can’t always be a “FOSS hero”, that’s fine. Some open source projects offer no support, I agree with that too. However I am pushing back on the notion that enterprise support is strictly exclusive to proprietary software. Many FOSS products targeting enterprise use cases are available with enterprise level support.
Granted, many users will find it prohibitively expensive, especially smaller businesses, but that’s beside the point: enterprise service levels are not exclusive to proprietary software.
It’s tough. The best model is to sell a downtream stable version, and let the FOSS project be the upstream dev environment. They way Fedora works for RedHat. It’s not guaranteed to be stable, and it has a short release cycle.
Otherwise, if they have any ideas about selling it, I recommend they make it proprietary from that start.
I think they use it as an experiment. If people bite, it gets productized. FOSS is the worm on the hook, and we are the fish.
We’re in agreement. 🙂 I’m saying the best way to ensure questions get answered is to buy a support contract. 🙂 Go with OSS products which offer support contracts as much as possible.
I’ve supported all sorts of OSS systems. Some with support contracts, and some without support contracts. I’ve even worked for a OSS based company which sold support contracts. 🙂
I’m saying posting to a mailing list, opening a ticket, forum, or whatever only works if someone is gracious enough take an interest in your problem and has some knowledge in the area. The notion that the community will be there to help when a problem arises isn’t true.
(Especially when you’re in deep water. If StackOverflow can solve the problem, you’re still in the kiddie pool.)
That comment was a callback to my assertion that true FOSS, community driven, is not the innovative environment it once was, and companies/proprietary software/SaaS is more innovative these days. People want to get a paycheck and go home. We’re heading back to the freeware/shareware days. The FOSS idealists have left.
Not really. It’s about outsourcing functions which aren’t core to the business. Spending $40,000 per year for a SaaS product to get access to their expertise and SLAs is cheaper then maintaining the staff and infrastructure necessary to support business operations. At a certain level, it makes sense to outsource non-core functions, and buying a product is essentially outsourcing.
As someone who has made these decisions and who is a FOSS fan, it’s not cut and dry. The algebra is more complex then it seems.
The open standards and FOSS isn’t where the innovation is happening. Anyone who could drive innovation gets VC funding and starts a company. Open standards and FOSS are lagging well behind proprietary software. Mainly in the user facing application space. The server space is full of stuff, but most are encumbered by being tied to a company or proprietary product.
The golden age of FOSS, where it really was a volunteer community effort to build better software, is coming to an end, and we’re going back to the ice ages where we pay for everything. This time we’ll rent or buy access to a product rather then own, as much as we owned anything back in the 90s.
There are a few pockets of niche projects, but any FOSS which is popular is attached to a company, or will soon be attached to a company. The capitalists co-opted FOSS and won.
That’s a long way to say right-wing capitalist. 🙂 I feel you. I don’t like supporting people or companies with regressive politics either.
Capitalism only cares about money. For instance, product A is cheaper then product B, but product A is made with child labor in some third world country. Product A wins because it’s cheaper.
Zoom was better then the alternatives by a wide margin when it launched. WebEx and GoToMeeting were expensive, and not that great. This last push was good marketing timing.
Zoom is still a good product. I’ve tested many options in the last few months, and it is still really good. It also supports Linux. The video is excellent, and it doesn’t tax my laptop when sharing my screen and a webcam. Their disregard for security is concerning, and I’ve recommended people use something else if possible. However, people need to get work done, and it works well.
8×8 VC/Jitsi is my go to product. It’s open source and works decently well. It’s made strides in the last few months, but it still needs work. The desktop app hogs resources and really stresses my laptop when screensharing with a webcam. The base features are there though.
Anyway, you would not believe how primitive video still is in 2020. We’ve made so little progress in 10 years, and the remote everything world is still a long way off. We have the bare minimum covered.
Flatland_Spider,
It really depends. It would be very expensive if you needed IT staff to tend to a single system full time, but that is not usually the case. Most individual IT systems only need to be tended to periodically now and then. It isn’t nearly enough work for a full time job, which is consequently why IT staff tend to wear many hats. However this is where the staffing trouble arises. Management starts to add long arbitrary skills to requirements for new recruits, which can exclude even the IT experts, nevermind that it might not even be that difficult to learn. Yet they don’t want to train new employees, and that’s the appeal of SAAS for management.
To a DIYer, a lot of these services can be objectively overpriced for the value they offer. Heck sometimes the free open source solutions work even better than the commercial offerings, but management don’t think like a DIYer, and most employees aren’t DIYers either. This is just one of those disconnects between IT staff and management. That’s the way it goes.
It’s pretty good, but on two or three occasions it failed for us and was unreliable and we had to abandon the meeting. Also a lot of people had problems getting it running ironically having to use the telephone to diagnose issues: “the meeting code isn’t working”, “are you sure, type this code exactly”, “it still doesn’t work”, “ok we’re emailing everyone a new meeting code, leave this one and try that one”, etc. I’m sure they’re working to address these growing pains. But would be nice if we were embracing decentralized services instead such that we’re not dependent on centralized service providers who can disconnect users at their whim.
That’s not true. That attitude is how people end up running prod systems which haven’t been supported in a decade. A good ops person has lots of projects on their plate. They’re prepping for the next round of updates by testing them in the test environment. Checking the monitoring system to see what needs attention or can be downsized. Speccing the new system by creating tests. Checking the docs, checking the backups and disaster recovery procedures.
It’s not necessarily the system as much as it’s the knowledge required to maintain and improve the system. Technology is a vast area with lots of little subdomains which we can’t all specialize in.
There are lots of variables that go into it. It’s not so cut and dry.
For instance, I worked for a consulting firm which like self-hosted stuff because they could charge clients for their use, and the systems would depreciate. 🙂 The margins of that line item would go up over time, and I, happily, got to implement all sorts of things. 🙂
A technology company I worked for, was transitioning off of home grown stuff which was taking too much time to support in favor of lots of Atlassian things. The companies I worked with in that position, were outsourcing stuff because their home grown stuff couldn’t be supported anymore, and/or they were buying access to our expertise as a way to augment their staff.
It’s all about strategic decisions, and in many companies, IT is something that enables other people to make more money. Technology companies are just one fish in the economic pond, and technology is usually an ancillary fish helping the other fish.
I will admit the biggest factor is sourcing talent and pay. It’s easier to hire someone who knows nothing and works for peanuts then it is to hire experience people who demand high salaries. There are lots of warm bodies out there to fill a chair.
Another problem is that people overbuild systems. Why does a rarely updated internal website need kubernetes and a CI pipeline? It doesn’t. Someone wanted to put kubernetes and CI pipeline on their resume.
I’ve only had good experiences in the 4 years I’ve been using it, and it supports Linux, which is important and rare. 🙂
Flatland_Spider,
Ah but it is true. For example, running an exchange server is complicated and requires expertise, but does it require you to work on it 8 hours a day 5 days a week 52 weeks a year? God no. Most likely it’s just a small part of the sysadmin’s job.
Sure it becomes a full time job when you add everything together: business software, telephony, keeping webservers up and running, backups, managing upgrades, etc. In small companies one or two people wear all these hats.
This was my point to you 🙂 Enterprise support might be more cost effective in some cases but sometimes it isn’t, especially if it’s a smaller part of a bigger job and you’re employees have good DIY skills, the support can cost more than it’s worth. Having skills in-house can have it’s own benefits too and be more flexible in terms of what they can do & customize whereas enterprise support may be ridged. It’s always about pros & cons!
It’s fine if you have a different opinion about it, but at the end of the day the fact is that a lot of business choose not to go with enterprise level support because they don’t need it. Hordes of companies run centos servers rather than redhat for this very reason “we’ll take the software, we don’t need the enterprise support”.
Yeah, consolation has been rampant. In my field nearly all of the customized software & frameworks got replaced with open source ones. Ironically there seems to be very little correlation between adoption and quality, haha. I took so much pride in the performance of my websites, I hated replacing them with frameworks like wordpress that perform worse due to stupid DBA designs. And as a result of poor performance need to be run with front page caching, and as a result of that a lot of the pages are served up stale (even here on osnews)…Oh well, if you can’t beam ’em, join ’em.
I’ve only used it this year. Once the URL wouldn’t work for half the people, and I tried it myself on a second computer and sure enough it didn’t work for me either. It said the meeting id was unrecognized even though I could read it directly off the zoom session on the other screen. I’m inclined to think it was a server side problem. Can zoom suffer from split network conditions? I’ve seen seen it work fine many times too. My wife uses it a lot, some of the people are regularly bumped off throughout the call, but since it’s always the same people I kind of assume it’s a problem with their bandwidth.
Actually it just occurred to me that this could be a symptom of a split brain condition on the server too. I don’t know enough about how it works to say whether this is a possibility, it’s too much of a black box and I don’t feel like spending my time diagnosing people’s zoom issues for free, but I am quite curious about these things, haha.
Is it to early to be grateful to the current US presidency for stopping the TPP and for putting a stop to Huawei’s (state-funded) growth?
* too early (need sleep)
I believe that’s less about the current president and more of a general wakeup call inside American government, and indeed, the entirety of Western World and further beyond, about hideous Chinese government real nature.
Nah, regular US politicians swore and still swear by the TPP, about how it’s going to bring “mutual prosperity” etc etc, and they would never had the balls to touch Huawei, lest any future campaign contributions were put at risk.
The issue with Huawei is it became too successful in too many key technological areas too fast. There is no other company with such portfolio. This threatens the position of the USA as a place where future technological directions and standards are decided. No one really cares about security – content is encrypted and there are easier ways of sabotaging the communication infrastructure. But under WTO rules, security and public safety are exempted from regulations, so states are free to discriminate on these grounds. Something, by the way, China was doing for a long time on a very large scale – a side effect of their firewall is that Chinese IT companies enjoy no competition from the outside.
This is not to diminish Chinese government’s faults – they are a nasty bunch, especially to the Chinese. But the whole USHuawei story is much more about the US than it is about China.
Tom, and western folks here, have you’ve been to China?
I have also every reasons to criticize China, for the SCS agression, for their illegal businesses in my country, but that’s about it.
Why is it that everything China does is evil? Do you western guys, promote your nonsense democracy to us the same way you are trying miserably to middle east?
AER,
Stereotype much?
You have a serious case of us-vs-them mentality. The truth is that a lot of people here are critical of a lot of things, including our own western governments and if you weren’t aware I’ll tell you now that the middle east is also a divisive topic here in the US, Trump is keen to stir racial and ethnic divisions to set people against each other. This administration, much more so than usual, is pushing personally motivated agendas that do not necessarily represent the public’s wants or thoughts.
Where are you from?
Because they aren’t the cheap, exploitable labor market they used to be, and they don’t acknowledge the primacy of Europeans. It’s the same thing since the opium wars.
People have commented about how he’s getting caught up in geopolitical propaganda, from all sorts of angles, but that’s his little neoliberal crusade.
We (the Western powers) don’t really promote democracy as much as we promote authoritarian dictators who pledge loyalty to Western powers and let us pillage the country because capitalism demands slaves. If we promoted democracy, the US wouldn’t organize a coup every time a left leaning leader is elected in a South American country.
Makes a change as mostly , bug or small, the world bows to America but that’ll change over the next generation or so. Not entirely sure if it’ll be better or worse.