Hacker News Reader

Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

> Why would it do that?

We can answer part of that with just a little more reading. What's pid 3844872?

For me, the series of queries against /proc happen from a process that, just a bit earlier, called exec. So it's not really zoom reading "all processes and arguments" but ... `pidof gnome-session`, so I guess zoom is looking for the pid of gnome-session.

To what nefarious purpose zoom intends to put this knowledge of gnome-session's pid, I can't say - I am not running gnome-session so my trail goes cold; but at least for me, for that particular run, zoom itself doesn't actually see the contents of all of those files.

View on HN

^ This is the correct answer.

I installed the Zoom client just to have a look for myself. The syscalls in question emanate from freshly forked processes that immediately execvp() the command `pidof` (on my system it finds it under /usr/bin, so it's the system command, not anything fishy shipped by Zoom). Actually, the command-line argument to the command is, in succession:

gnome-session

gnome-panel

gnome-shell

gnome-session-binary

ksmserver

cinnamon

cinnamon-session

mate-panel

mate-session

xfce-mcs-manage

xfce4-panel

xfce4-session

I suppose Zoom goes through the whole list on my system because it finds none of them. The fact that it stops on parent's system suggests that Zoom stops when it finds one. This hints at a very crude way to determine the desktop environment!

Hmmm... maybe Zoom devs too use Stack Overflow?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3376679/qt-how-to-detect...

God damn it, why do terrible SO suggestions find themselves in every application?

Because there are no "good" suggestions? (or they are harder to find, lack documentation, etc.)

> This hints at a very crude way to determine the desktop environment!

That is a good discovery.

It's probably one of the better ways to detect the running desktop environment as the user might have multiple environments installed and just uses one of them currently, as such looking for installed things doesn't work reliable.

And looking for env variables can be unreliable.

And scanning the dbug might not be that use-full either.

But I'm not sure what they use that for. (Notification daemon selection? But that wouldn't be that reliable either, theaming? I dubt it.)

But I guess even if it's just for telemetry it would be a reasonable thing to do.

I mean, in principle the user might be running multiple X servers with different WMs, but that's probably rare enough. I'm also a bit curious what it's actually used for (but not quite curious enough to dig out ghidra, given the other constraints on my time at the moment...)

> I mean, in principle the user might be running multiple X servers with different WMs, but that's probably rare enough

I actually do that all the time. My main "work environment" is TTY0 with i3wm, but when I make nice videos/screencasts, or use Zoom for presentations I often switch to a clean and neat KDE Plasma session on TTY1.

There was a time when I was playing around with programming/changing small WMs, while following Java based university stuff.

During that time I often had a "IntelliJ" only instance of X running in some TTY1, some other WM or just a raw TTY on TTY2 and a maybe crashing WM I was playing around with on TTY0 ;-)

Fun times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com