53 points
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Q: When you think about the big vision — which still my mind is blown that this is your big vision, — of “I’m going to send a digital twin into a meeting, and it’s going to make decisions on my behalf that everyone trusts, that everyone agrees on, and everyone acts upon,” the privacy risk there is even higher. The security surface there becomes even more ripe for attack. If you can hack into my Zoom and get my digital twin to go do stuff on my behalf, woah, that’s a big problem. How do you think about managing that over time as you build toward that vision?

A: That’s a good question. So, I think again, back to privacy and security, I think of two things. First of all, it’s how to make sure somebody else will not hack into your meeting. This is Eric; it’s not somebody else. Another thing: during the call, make sure your conversation is very secure. Literally just last week, we announced the industry’s first post-quantum encryption. That’s the first one, and at the same time, look at deepfake technology — we’re also working on that as well to make sure that deepfakes will not create problems down the road. It is not like today’s two-factor authentication. It’s more than that, right? And because deepfake technology is real, now with AI, this is something we’re also working on — how to improve that experience as well.

Spoken like a true person who has not given one iota of thought to this issue and doesn’t know what most of the words he’s saying mean

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22 points
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“the industry’s first post-quantum encryption.” What the hell is post-quantum encryption?

According to NIST this is something to be developed, not something Zoom has ‘all of a sudden created’ in the time between that question being asked, and the time the question was answered. SMH.

If you are curious, you can read up on it: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography

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10 points

I thought we already had post quantum encryption, or at least that’s what some articles I read claimed

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8 points

Please elaborate. I’m def not up on the cutting edge of encryption. And I’d like to know more.

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7 points
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(I realize other comments downthread have already addressed some of this, no slight to others intended)

so, PQC is definitely not snakeoil, and it’s actually seen uptake in a lot of things over recent years (just off the top of my head: openssh 9.0 in 2022, evolving work in implementations in TLS ciphers, etc (and as much as I fucking dislike cloudflare, they are actively funding a lot of forward-looking cryptographic work - thus being one to link to)). but as with all things cryptography, it’s a moving and changing field

the industry’s first post-quantum encryption

I suspect in this statement, “the industry” is load-bearing and inspecific, and resolves as “the industry of things that do what zoom do”. it is a highly vague statement though, and I 🤨 at it being used as it was where it was

(e: I did look up their actual announcement about this; “UCaaS” kill me)

I’m reticent to make any further specific claims/statements re the rest of PQC, since while it is one of my areas of interest and in which I keep relatively informed, I’m also not a cryptographer by trade and consider my knowledge at best armchair-competent. pretty damn interesting field though, if you have any interest in math or cryptography it’s well worth diving into it sometime :)

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16 points

Spoken like a chatbot you mean. (raises suspicious eyebrow at Definitely-Human Notabot, CEO)

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10 points

‘it isn’t somebody else, it is me!’ spoken like somebody who read too much mind upload science fiction.

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6 points

Reminds me of a sci-fi book series I read in high school. The premise was that a run down Earth had discovered predecessors that left some kind of central gateway to different places, and desperate or adventurous people went through in hope of surviving and finding artefacts that could make them rich.

Anyhow, in the later books technology to upload your mind had been found and used to be able to make decisions and deals without having to attend everything. Problem was that digital you pretty quickly gains experiences meat you never had, meaning it starts to diverge. Some weirdos let the diverge happen, but most people just wipe the digital you regularly and upload a new you. Of course the digital you may beg to continue to exist, making the whole procedure rather awkward. Pretty grim.

I think the predecessors in the end were hiding in black holes because of ancient evil or something. If someone else remembers the books.

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6 points

That sounds like Frederick Pohl’s Gateway series, of which I’ve only read the first. Very 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_(novel)

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4 points

Yes the idea is pretty common in mind upload style science fiction, sometimes they can merge different variants, of you have less copies for example ‘beta’ ‘gamma’ etc level copies with less capabilities. (with ‘alpha’ copies being 100% copies (often having multiple alpha level yous running around is also illegal, see doublesleeving in Altered Carbon).

Don’t think science fiction really deals with the problems of these copies making deals with others and then having to report back what happend, which might cost as much time, or more time for the real you to get up to speed.

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5 points

Flexo, shoot Flexo!

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4 points

“What if you get hacked?”

“Simply don’t get hacked.”

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47 points

lmao, Zoom is cooked. Their CEO has no idea how LLMs work or why they aren’t fit for purpose, but he’s 100% certain someone else will somehow solve this problem:

So is the AI model hallucination problem down there in the stack, or are you investing in making sure that the rate of hallucinations goes down?

I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed.

But I guess my question is by who? Is it by you, or is it somewhere down the stack?

It’s someone down the stack.

Okay.

I think either from the chip level or from the LLM itself.

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34 points

Haha at the chip level? What’s he smoking?

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27 points
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What’s he smoking?

Whatever he’s smoking, it’s strength rating is at least: “make it seem like a good idea to call employees back from remote work despite remote work facilitation being the one thing we sell”.

So that’s gotta be some strong stuff.

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19 points

the important thing about Zoom is that it was the lucky winner of the pandemic. Could have been Google Meet, could have been any of their other competitors, but somehow everyone just converged on Zoom.

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19 points

Lol I like how they put the author’s note at the beginning of the article, “this was a very special interview” as if it’s special because of the unique insights instead of special because it sounds coked up.

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13 points

I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed.

Wasn’t this an unsolvable problem?

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20 points
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it’s unsolvable because it’s literally how LLMs work lol.

though to be fair i would indeed love for them to solve the LLMs-outputting-text problem.

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2 points

Yeah. We need another program to control the LLM tbh.

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47 points

I believe that LLM can represent me anytime.

Talk about having the most replaceable job.

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24 points
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he admits it dot webp

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38 points

Start using AI from the top…REPLACE the CEO of zoom with an AI, if it works…then it can be implemented downwards.

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29 points

it’s pretty clear this has already happened. The Singularity Is Here And It’s Dumb As Shit.

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9 points

what if the push to replace workers with chatbots was initiated by chatbot CEOs

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25 points

FYI Jitsi Meet is an open source video conferencing app. It works similarly to Zoom, and is free. One can even host an instance on one’s own system.

“About Jitsi: Video Conferencing Software. Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows you to easily build and deploy secure video conferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting.”

https://jitsi.org/

https://meet.jit.si/

Personal Note: In 2020 I took my classed online, having chosen to use Zoom, tho’ Jitsi was on the list. Last September when Zoom changed their terms of service to include using our videos to train AI, I decided to switch to Jitsi. My operation is pretty small, and the $160/year I spent on Zoom was an expense I no longer needed.

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9 points

I’m a fan of jitsi. That said, like a lot of open source I think it lags in features and bug fixes. Joining from Linux I have a lot of issues with my webcam not being recognized or my audio being very low for other participants, while I don’t have those issues with the remedial Linux version of their app that Zoom put out.

I still use jitsi, I just don’t feel I can rely on it for mission critical applications, unlike say, VLC.

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