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, there is no central "clipboard" style repository like on Windows, the client that does the "copy" is responsible for the data, the client that wants to "paste" has to talk to it. 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 claims the selection ownership to emulate the Windows style behavior.
If we play devils advocate, it's possible the Zoom client tries to do just that, not trusting whatever desktop environment. 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 browser in disguise? It might be 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.
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.
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.
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.
However, the video quality in the browser is worse, so depending on the use case I might have to use the app (via sandbox).
It's been years since I've had to though.
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)
> 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.
the zoom linux client consistiently locks up my entire computer whenever i copy from the chat. ridiculous.
> 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 :)
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...
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).
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.
You can define connections to home, camera, network etc...
I have not seen the same in flatpak.
.../s
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.
IRC the protocol is pretty good still, specifically with the ircv3 additions. It's the clients that are janky still. I still remember when Slack ran a free IRC bridge for their chats...
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.
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'm not sure if this was behaviour that happened with the software manager on other packages, but was a concern for us.
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. 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).
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.
Just use Firefox, or Chromium if you must.
Zero software to install.
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? How many usability bugs do they still have?
Also reason 35892384242892 to not use proprietary software, especially proprietary software with network access.
Think about the pitch for removing the feature, "So, we're going to make this in the OS, where visually disabled users cannot highlight anything in any application, can't move text between applications, cannot get the window title, cannot get the window tree, cannot have applications automate or know where other applications are, and basically they won't be able to use their computers. But everyting will be super private. Even the human using the computer won't be able to read it." This is what modern linux desktop computer is on waylands thanks to this toxic privacy meme. It literally just doesn't work for me.
Privacy needs the kind you're talking about simply don't exist on desktop computers where the human actually controls everything (as opposed to smartphone model where the user controls very little and applications are hostile and opaque). If you want to break accessibility and functioning of smartphones, fine, go for it. But leave desktop computers alone.
Gone are the days when you could download a software, run it, and trust that the developer isn't transmitting everything on your system back to their servers. Developers have poisoned the well and repeatedly demonstrated that they will run roughshod over the user's system, send telemetry back about everything the user is doing, enroll them in A/B experiments they didn't ask for, and take advantage of every resource, every peripheral and device, and every bit of personal information they can get their hands on.
Unless you are 100% running open source software that you have personally vetted, or that you trust that the package manager / maintainer has sufficiently vetted, you can't copy a password into the clipboard with any kind of confidence that other apps aren't sneaking a peek.
The paste intent doesn't seem antithetical to accessibility. A keyboard combination states intent just as effectively as a voice command, mouse input, or other source.
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.
If you ever use VPNs for privacy or to access protected networks-- Qubes is a big upgrade: You can run multiple VPN network VMs and then pick on an AppQube by AppQube basis which network they use. Then you don't have to worry about malware from your reddit browsing VM (or your Erotic MLP fanfic) going out over your employer's network or your banking going out via some Norwegian anonmization proxy that might spy on your traffic or cause your bank to instantly block your account. You can accomplish this without qubes but in qubes its particularly easy (and easy to get right): Every VM that has network access has it provided by another VM. Configure the networking how you like in that service VM and then pick what uses it.
When I say 'developer' above I don't mean to suggest that Qubes is particularly hard to use-- as I know significantly less technical people who use it without issue. But its 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.
Previously if I followed a link to a sus site and had my browser crash (maybe even the day before a RCE-in-the-wild was announced). I'd have some rationally justified paranoia that my whole computer might be compromised. Now, I can close the app VM (or-- better-- toss the disposable, which I try to use for most browsing) and know that even if they exploited the browser they'd have to have a VM escape of some kind too to do me any lasting damage.
The highest security stuff still ought to be on isolated hardware, of course. But using a multipurpose computer without qubes is unsafe at any speed, worse than driving without a seatbelt.
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.
At this point I probably wouldn’t realize a legitimate Zoom meeting was legitimate.
You just need the dns, account and password.
This is a very different story from e.g. email – even though most people I communicate with use either Gmail or some hosted Outlook service, I don't have to on my side (with some limitations around deliverability etc. lately).
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.
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.
Because of this heritage Android uses user accounts instead of namespaces a.k.a. containers (a much newer and less mature concept) to isolate apps from each other.
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.
Not sure if that’s malice (to nudge people towards using their invasive desktop app) or incompetence.
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.
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
I've used RDP w/ remmina and found the performance somewhat poor but usable-- I think it does too much video writes, so it's more like playing a video I expect Moonlight+Sunshine would be equal or worse. Xpra seems to work better than RDP for me. I didn't try to optimize the RDP since I tried xpra and it was better. (I use it to control remote GUI amateur radio software like WSJTX)
There are workarounds I didn't mention for video performance, e.g. handing direct hardware access to a GPU to a specific VM. But this obviously has security consequences and I don't have much experience with it.
Qubes itself is very thin. The most popular template vms (that you actually run apps in) are Fedora and Debian. The qubes system vms run on Fedora. So I think on the VM OSes themselves there is no maintenance concern-- so for example, you're not dependent on the qubes project for packaging software generally. (Though you do use qubes produced templates of the OS installs-- as they have some configuration to handle the overlay filesystems, clipboard, file transfer, networking, etc).
There is also work that people are doing to make NixOS a first class app vm image and even people working on being able to use it for dom0.
The qubes maintained stuff is dom0 and the glue that handles stuff like copying between VMs, wiring up networking to VMs, etc. Most of it is python. I've found relatively little need to mess with that stuff. Its configured via text files that are processed via (mostly) python scripts. Beyond the active developers there is a user community that has a lot of experience doing fancy stuff with the infrastructure, like adding support for ephemeral VMs that exist only in ram (for anti-forensics). I think that speaks positively to the maintainability of the system.
Ultimately because qubes is a system of VMs based on commodity OS migrating OUT shouldn't be fundamentally hard.
FWIW, I migrated in to qubes (from Fedora) by making an app VM for my existing laptop, copying the home into it. Then initially running everything in that one VM. It's not a good way to use Qubes, but it had me full on it in a couple hours with no loss of capability. From there it was easy to start moving things into other VMs until I no longer used the original.
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
The serious point in my quip is that I've been a driver for over 30 years and yet to have a seatbelt protect me. I've been hit with computer attacks that qubes has limited. Might be kinda tricky to kill me from compromising my computer, at least today. Who knows about the computer.
It also passes obvious "Xen emulated drive", and similar for all hardware interfaces.
Passes CPUID.
Can't stop any of this with Qubes/Xen. But is trivial with Proxmox/KVM.
Honestly, I wish there was a Qubes/KVM variant. It would fix every complaint, and enable running potentially malicious software (MS windows) and lie to it regarding hardware interfaces.
Relayed Issue: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7051
'But Cisco did it too!' is just whataboutism. It was shown to be exploited (IIRC 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.
I was involved in mitigating these screwups in my work, what we did was flag zoom as malware ourselves so it automatically got removed from every company machine. And block it from being installed by the user. This block is still in place.
Ps I'm sorry if I sound harsh but zoom has caused several security worries at work and we don't even use it.
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.
But my point is that this should never have made it into an enterprise level product, even if someone else did it.
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.
Nah, that's very on brand with Apple. The Apple ecosystem is well-known to be a walled garden where they rule and are very stringent about separation to the outside and being in control. People who use Apple products know what they are getting into.
Because that’s a documented feature (malware protection).
As a user, I generally 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”.
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.
Ironically if more tech people just rawdogged the internet I think we would have more progress.
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!
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 corpo HR/recruiter types you met that will gladly bypass company policy and switch to the tools demanded by the candidate?
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.
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
first time for everything
https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...
This.
Develop sufficient leverage to be able to show basic respect the right way to do things - and yourself.
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?
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