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Why the hell does Zoom require root access to begin with? I used to work on a competitor and while it would have made some things easier we never found anything
by jupp0r 4y ago
Why the hell does Zoom require root access to begin with? I used to work on a competitor and while it would have made some things easier we never found anything we wanted to do that was impossible without root permissions.
- tedmiston 4y agoSee previous HN posts about the Zoom installer. It does some unusual stuff that it probably doesn't actually need to be doing.
- jupp0r 4y agoThis says a lot about their engineering culture. There’s no way I’d just casually take on the liability of having root privileges in the software I’m shipping to customers if it can be avoided. Them not caring is a huge red flag imho.
- nikanj 4y agoTheir engineering culture is very much ”does it work”, instead of ”is it Correct”. They have taken the market by storm, because most people care about the former, not the latter
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- teawrecks 4y agoIt's the easiest way to add convenient features without dealing with edge cases. Unfortunately, that also means convenient vulnerabilities.
- ilikepi 4y agoThe Zoom app itself doesn't need admin access. My primary non-admin account on my work Mac has it installed in ~/Applications, and I don't notice any missing functionality. The only annoyance is having to manually extract it out of the downloaded archive when I want to update it. But IIRC, this takes two commands, not including the commands to swap the new app bundle with the old. The downloaded archive is compressed with xar, and I believe that one should be extracted into an empty directory because otherwise it will spray files everywhere. Then the app bundle is in a gzipped cpio file...I think it's at Contents/Payload.