Share your screen on Zoom with ultrasound | Hacker News Reader

Share your screen on Zoom with ultrasound

support.zoom.us

78 pointsmahnac53 comments

They've had this feature for sometime and it is pretty cool. :)

About a year ago there was an ask HN about conference room systems. I had just recently gone through the process of selecting and went with zoom. The "airplay" feature was one of the reasons why.

Here are my notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19455428

Edit to add one note: They recently (last six months or so) added a feature to allow you to share multiple screens at once. We've setup most of our conference rooms with two screens so it's really cool when two people in a room can wirelessly share their screens and you're able to see both at once.

Wow, thank you for the tip with owllabs.com -- that device sounds amazing (while being damned expensive...). Why do you still use another microphones when you have a 800$ webcam (with integrated microphones) in the room?

We only have a couple of rooms where we have the Owl plus another microphone, and those are rooms that are a little bigger than what is suggested for the owl so having the wireless mics help.

The owl pro seems to have been an improvement there. We only have one pro right now, but the speaker is much louder and mic a bit better.

Build your own with: https://github.com/quiet/quiet

Reminds me of https://chirp.io/technology/

Cisco have had this feature on their video conferencing stuff for about a decade.

Maybe they had it, but I'd say whenever I had to use a Cisco web/video conferencing product (or , to be fair, most other web conferencing products), I always felt I was battling someone trying to get everyone connected. With Zoom my experience really was a "it just works" kind of experience.

Exactly! Same with GoToMeeting -- it litters your downloads with files every time you want to have a call. Zoom eliminated that friction, and that's why people are talking about Zoom w/r to this and not Cisco.

Although this is ultrasound it's still audible to me - I'd guesstimate it around 22-23 kHz. It's in that range where you almost feel it rather than hearing it, like the whine off some CRTs. I'm sure I'm a rare case, even most of the other people my age (early 20s) don't hear it unless they're right up against the speaker, but it sure is annoying for me.

while it's technically possible to hear above 20 kHz, outside of a laboratory it's far more likely that you're hearing intermodulation distortion, or simply background noise: at least on Linux, the audio output can be disabled completely when not in use. therefore, there is background noise only when the audio output is activated.

I'm not sure I get what your saying.

Are you asserting that GP is confused about what they are hearing, or are you saying that the ultrasound is creating some kind of unpleasant interference that is being perceived instead?

I've been able to hear in unusually high ranges my whole life into my mid-30s. Office, home, urban environments... distance measuring equipment, devices intended to repel birds and mosquitoes... things that are loud but "too high to hear" that wind up for me being "yes, that is indeed very loud and very high".

Being relatively young and having a childhood history of asthma could get them hearing a little higher than 20 khZ as well, so it's not out of the question that they are hearing the sound itself.

But the most likely thing is that they are hearing some sort of undertone or artifact created in the process of the signal generation.

Why asthma?

CRTs are 15.6 khz. Nowhere near 20kHz

So does that mean that software will always have mic on?

Maybe, but there's no reason for it to send any audio anywhere while it's parsing ultrasound, so not a privacy problem.

Until software is compromised or simply has a bug that stream audio somewhere.

In which case it could have just turned on the microphone itself?

Software that already is listening has more vectors of attack to put it simply. I'm not a fan of features that compromise privacy and security for the sake of convenience.

That's really nonsensical. Nothing about using an audio input makes code more vulnerable. The interface is always there if the hardware is.

If software that continuously listens to the microphone is normal this makes it harder to keep track of apps that should not do that.

The presentation implies that you have to click the "share screen" button before your computer will try to detect the ultrasound signal.

Zoom is integrated into our Outlook calendars (and pretty well, I might add), so I assumed the Share Screen function looked at my calendar, saw which room I was scheduled to be in, and shared my desktop to the corresponding screen.

I suppose doing it with ultrasound is a little simpler, and avoids problems if we have to duck into a different room due to a schedule conflict.

Zoom is associated with malware in my mind. Is it the same app/service that was infamous on here for a while?

You’re probably thinking of a security vulnerability in their Mac client due to a poor design choice that they were negligent in fixing expediently.

Still, I don’t think this classifies the app as malware—the behavior was not added with malicious intent.

https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...

That definitely counts as malware. Intent is irrelevant. Same with Google's Keystone and Dropbox storing admin passwords.

If you have higher access to my system than you led me to believe, you are malware.

So Google is associated w/ malware in your mind? And Dropbox? You seemed to be saying Zoom is primarily associated w/ malware for you. If so, you feel the same as the other two brands/companies?

If I uninstall Chrome, will it reinstall itself by keeping a daemon running?

Apparently Keystone did/does something like that.

How is it not malware that after you uninstall software that there is a backdoor that will allow them to reinstall it?

Zoom is great. It did have a bad news cycle because they had installed a url handler that let folks initiate meetings with video sharing just by getting them to click a link. That news cycle got that behavior removed and now there's a confirmation screen before you go into a meeting after clicking a link.

Zoom has been pretty consistently terrific for us. I'm at a distributed company so we live in it and it's very reliable and makes it easy to see the faces of _everyone_ on the call with you.

Wasn't there another unrelated MacOS issue where their client was un-uninstallable? It would perpetually install itself. I may be mixing them up with someone else. That might be what the parent was talking about, though, since that's particularly malware-esque.

Why yes, yes there was.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/11/apple_removes_zooms...

This is the same issue. The component in question was responsible for the URL handling, and it was also responsible for reinstalling the Zoom client app if it was not present when a link was clicked.

Yep, same Zoom.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/11/apple_removes_zooms...

I had the same mental association and my first thought looking at this feature was: "What sort of misguided, insecure feature did they come up with this time?"

I'm not saying this feature is misguided because I know very little about it, but I am echoing that this too was my first impression however founded or unfounded it may be.

I realize that a company like this is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to balancing growth and convenience and security, but it's very important to understand that when you lose trust by features that seem to be impetuously designed, people are going to start look at new features with suspicion.

It might be in Zoom's best interest to put out a write-up that targets IT people and explains the technology a little more in depth for forums like this one. Automagic demos are nice, but we also want to know how the security and other use cases were considered. Gain our trust, and we'll be bigger cheer leaders than your average users.

Yes. It was deliberate and not a bug, the only problem in the company's mind was that they got caught. They have features they wish to deliver, and will exploit any weakness in your system to do so.

I love zoom, but I don’t get why this is special. I can share my screen already today after I am log into the zoom room. So they made it easier by skipping the login part?

The ultrasonic sound bit is what is cool here.

You can share your screen and then everyone else in the physical room needs to start typing a bunch of characters in to connect to the right zoom room. Which you probably email or slack to them or try to figure out how to connect to the TV. This skips that whole mess and lets them connect automatically.

Highly recommend enabling this feature to give cross platform Airplay-like functionality to your Mac and Windows clients.

Crazy, I thought I deleted Zoom months ago but somehow I already have this update. What great news!

This sounds alarming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22351190

(Zoom resisting uninstalls)

Is it already the 1st of April?

> Share your screen on Zoom with ultrasound

So this is misleading?

It just uses ultrasonic to connect? So is just sending a very small amount of data?

It uses the fact ultrasound can't break through walls to define a space?

You could do exactly the same with Bluetooth or Wireless but you might pickup next door?

And dropbox just lets you sync files to a remote server.

I still don't know why DropBox is a thing. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

I think you just answered your own question - that sounds quite painful for me to maintain and I'd rather pay Dropbox for the time they save me. + all the added benefits of features they can build with a dedicated organization improving this workflow.

Parent is making a joke.

See the top reply on the Dropbox launch thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> And dropbox just lets you sync files to a remote server.

Whats the point?

Zoom does NOT allow you to share a screen using ultrasonic. This is a lie.

It sends a code like ZOOM-453FHREF then you use this to connect to a server and share a screen using the internet I guess.

There is simply not the bandwidth using this technology on current common hardware to share screens.

I don't understand what you are you claiming, Dropbox doesn't sync files with a server? It at a base level it does that. That's not a lie.

Sending such a small code can be done many ways, as they mention visually to human eyes.

What is interesting is these two methods, ultrasonic and light can't penetrate walls.

What they are doing is defining spaces using technology that can't penetrate walls, this is why it's interesting.

You are debating the semantics of the title. Perhaps “Initiate you zoom screen share with ultrasound” would be a more suitable title, but it doesn’t quite have that same ring to it.

Install Zoom on my computer?

I’ll take a hard pass.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-defends-use-of-local-web-...

Yet another thing to kill with Chlorine Trifluoride. Large quantities.

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