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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Wait, your point is that Zoom is evil because the founder is Chinese?

Yeah what the fuck, that was some weird casual racism you don't expect to see on HN.

no, its not racism. Almost all independent American company is banned in China. Thats racism. Google, FB..etc..etc.

Chinese is also a nationality and that does have relevance if the person has ties to Beijing and the CCP. If the founder were Russian and had ties to Moscow would we be complaining about “casual racism?” It’s racist to suggest racism when a Chinese is involved when similar accusations wouldn’t have been made if the situation were Russian.

Because of its inevitable ties and implicit subservience to the CCP.

The only "relevant" information found in the quote in the GP comment is the nationality of the CEO. How does one jump from the CEO's nationality to inevitable ties and implicit subservience to CCP?

Didn't Zoom block a US based activist on the request of the Chinese government? I'm not arguing that there is complete subservience to the CCP but this censorship seems like a line was crossed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/technology/zoom-china-tia...

Edit: Let me also state that I'm not entirely sure what OP's argument was, considering the comment was deleted. I'm merely stating that there seems to be some cooperation with the CCP and Zoom.

I'm aware of Zoom's track record, and it could certainly be scrutinized, criticized, or even boycotted.

What we have here is going from "CEO was born and raised in China" to "No wonder why they have to play party with CCP" and "inevitable ties and implicit subservience to the CCP". I can't see the logical connection in the absence of other information. Don't you see a problem with assuming someone's motives purely from their country of origin?

ignoring the quote for a second we know a few things about this CEO and zoom.

1. zoom's application is sending data to Chinese servers separate from the application functionality servers.

2. the CEO is from china, I'm going to assume he has relatives in china.

3. we know CCP is a completely fucked up government with an absolutely horrible history of civil rights violations, genocide, etc.

I wouldn't put it past CCP to be pressuring the CEO by threatening relatives who live in china. this wouldn't be unheard of for CCP.

add the the unnecessary data transfer to chinese servers makes it look really bad.

its a fairly reasonable conclusion to draw that the CEO is compromised if all the above holds true.

more extreme conclusions could just as easily be drawn from that same data that he is literally a foreign agent for china.

I find myself agreeing with most of your points. I mainly took issue with taking a shortcut from "being born and raised in China" to being a hostile Chinese agent (and we don't even know if the CEO has relatives in China that can be leveraged anyway).

Very true.

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