I have avoided weighing in on all the talk about Zoom recently. Mostly because I'm an outsider, my company does not use Zoom.
However I've used Zoom once or twice, for interviews or in one case working with a friend on a pair programming session.
At my company we use teams, slack, skype and discord (yes, really).
Heres the thing though; The first time I used Zoom I was actually petrified (as I usually am) that I have to install /another/ application and figure out compatibility issues, especially because I'm one of those crusty die hard linux users. I panicked so bad that I resorted to using my phone.
(Tip: don't attend interviews with your phone recording from your hand, it looks super unprofessional I'm told)
The second time I had a zoom meeting I just clicked the URL in the meeting request and it worked!
You have to understand, I'm coming from a place where things almost never work. Exchange? nah, maybe 2007, or was it 2003, who knows. Teams? Their linux port not only consumes all available CPU on my laptop (which is not a slouchy laptop) but it doesn't even function correctly with basic stuff. Slack works a treat (as long as I don't do screen sharing) and I suspect that this is largely why it caught on too.
My point is simple here: Proper convenience is hard to get right. On-boarding is a enormous part of why Slack is trouncing other instant messaging efforts (IRC especially).
The security is lackluster but very honestly (and with a heavy heart) I have to say that the majority of people don't care until it affects them.
We don't know how Zoom will respond, but for what it's worth, I like that their product works well on my platform, they deserve massive props for that.
I have to say that I'm a sinner, I read these articles and think, well, I don't actually care that much, but its good other people do and hopefully zoom improves what they are doing, but it's doing a good job and it's easy for everyone who needs to use it. Heck, my mums using it for virtual meetups wither her friends (all hovering in the 70s age group)
Yea, don't be hard on yourself here. This pandemic has taught me a VERY valuable lesson: you can't control or care about everything. You just can't. For your own sanity there are many times when you have to throw your hands up and say "sorry but I just don't have the time or energy to add this to my long list of wtf's". Like you said there are others out there that are dedicating most or all of their time to issues that you can't. Life is a giant distributed system. If you try to take on every issue that comes your way then you're going to burn out, blow up, expire, etc.
> On-boarding is a enormous part of why Slack is trouncing other instant messaging efforts
Slack's separate sign-ins for each space is strange to me. On a new install, I can't log into my account and automatically be connected to every space I'm registered to.
Coincidentally I was invited to Slack for user testing a couple years ago. They asked me to sign into slack and as I was going through that said, "you know what's really annoying? When I do this now I have to sign into each workspace." When I signed in, a list of available workspaces appeared.
Turns out I was a user tester for exactly that feature.
Like my sibling replier, this is not true to me. Every time I join a new workspace I have to sign in on every machine I have. I have to remember the workspace ID, which isn't obvious, and I have to go back into my email to when I was first invited to find what the workspace is. And if not I have to ask them to remember it for me, and they send me an email, and I click a link, and then I get this list of workspaces that I have, and then I can sign in. What's more, I feel like there have been instances where I've signed in on slack, and that auth went to a browser slack instance and not to the slack app.
There are so many clicks involved and it's frustrating and stupid. Why.
> That's no longer true and hasn't been for years.
That's weird. For me, I still need to log into every single Slack workspace separately.
Most of them redirect to app.slack.com, however they have no visibility into each other. So it's several browser tabs kept open and left running in the background on those days.
Whereby[1] gets proper convenience right on the first and Nth installs. It sacrifices some of the power of Zoom (max of ~16 participants, no dynamic backgrounds) to run entirely in a browser. IMO it's a much better solution for video conferencing nontechnical people that don't know how to install software.
Zoom works so well, given a lot of us can't work or learn face to face at the moment, I think we just have to work with Zoom constructively. There are equivalent or better solutions in niches but no general solution that really stacks up. Report security issues. Keep them honest. And don't use it for discussions that are potentially highly sensitive - buyer beware.
I would much rather use an open technology with FOSS software with end to end encryption and all the nice things but I know from experience that no such app is going to be on every platform with all the features and be useable by non-technical people.
There is a lot of negative media being generated at the moment and while I can see the problems and I am sure the people reporting them are all genuine in their motivations I don't trust the media not to be pushing an agenda when one company is doing so well out of this and their competitors are struggling. Skype had Zoom's space, and many of the same security and other problems and they were bought and mismanaged into irrelevance. Whatever Zoom is doing, they are still doing it better than most of their competition.
I think we need to give Zoom a bit of space to make things right. They are suddenly under a huge spotlight. People are so divisive and ready to attack. Save your energy for battling bigger problems like staying alive and keeping an income.
> I think we need to give Zoom a bit of space to make things right. They are suddenly under a huge spotlight. People are so divisive and ready to attack. Save your energy for battling bigger problems like staying alive and keeping an income.
They've been under a negative spotlight for a year now because of their poor security - they've had that chance already.
Install Jitsi on your own vps (prefably hosted in your city) and your set.
A vps wiht 2 cores and 2 gb works really well at our company and costs close to nothing. Took maybe 4 hours to set up their docker-compose setup, it even does letsencrypt automatically.
Reliability goes a long way and Zoom is very reliable, especially considering the recent spike of users.
I value privacy, but I think the jury is still out on this company. They need time to react to the public scolding they're enduring as of late. Hopefully things change for the better and they take security more seriously after this.
Had a meeting tonight with over 50 participants. Screen sharing. Not a single hitch or problem.
In the past tried multiple times with Hangouts (dies after you get more than 4 on board), jitsi meet (not good with bad connections), Slack (good luck with video), Hipchat (video doesn't work for more than 3 participants) and Skype (connection drops). On one of my previous gigs, we ditched everything and took Mumble + google docs for showcase.
Before Zoom, Skype was good enough, until they messed it up. My presumption is that all of these tools are developed in perfect environment: ideal network, minimal latency, close peers, single OS. As soon as you start to drift from those presumptions, complete breakdown happens.
Hangouts data point(s): I was just on a conference call a few hours ago with 90+ participants on Hangouts. We've done these numbers routinely at work and we've never had a problem with it.
I dislike and don't trust videoconferencing apps that can't run in the browser, and Zoom goes the extra mile by requiring you to use their sketchy package installer. I'm really enjoying the scrutiny they're getting right now. They should just run in the browser without requiring installation.
In the real world you cannot have everything. Fast, cheap, reliable, scalable, secure, easy to use, os agnostic. Pick several or be disappointed about the theoretical perfect company that should exist and provide all.
Zoom is pretty much it, isn't it? (unless you require cheap == free)
It did have some security issues, but they patched them eventually.
It is not resistant to government/owner monitoring (and this is a separate thing from "secure"), but even if they did add true E2E, they'd still be a proprietary software often running on proprietary OS.
I had a call with Google themselves. There were 3-4 on each side. Not only was the UI so confusing that everyone kept making mistakes, the quality was terrible.
Quality aside, I was just blown away by how terrible the UI design was, especially after using Zoom for months.
I, too, want to give Zoom time to respond to this shitstorm of issues. Hopefully it will be like the FB SDK, and they'll handle it.
I use meet for multiple hours a day, haven't ever had issues with the video dropping, but the tiling thing really does bother me for any meetings that aren't 1:1s. It's crazy when I am in a meeting with 50+ people and can only see the faces of a few. I don't know why they can't fix this.
Seriously. They made a great product that just works in a space where most competitors (BlueJeans, Google Hangouts, Skype, FaceTime) just have crazy drawbacks. Give them a chance to make things right ffs.
This would be a legitimate argument if their pervasive shadiness and deployment of dark patterns were an accident, or an error. It's not. They have already done things "right" in their view, and it is reflected consistently in their actions.
If they make any corrections now, it will be on a PR basis in response to perceived customer upset, not because they are sorry or wish to respect users or privacy. They've been actively and plainly lying throughout this thing.
You can't even use Zoom without agreeing (via their abusive TOS) give up your civil rights.
> Reliability goes a long way and Zoom is very reliable, especially considering the recent spike of users.
Sad but true. Also, most of the tech industry knows this. That's why they ( especially startups ) forgo security for growth. Perversely, one of the signs you've succeeded as a startup is people complain about security. It means that your product has grown so much that it reached those who are concerned about security. It means your product is no longer for hobbyists but a tool for serious business/government/etc use.
I'm optimistic. Overall they got basic technology and market fit right in a very competitive market. They have had security issues but don't seem anywhere near the worst offender. That honor probably goes to Windows OS releases of yore.
The security problems seem fixable if they put their minds to it. Other companies have messed this up but later regained trust.
I used zoom today and the experience from a tech viewpoint is horrifying...
It messed up my PulseAudio settings so bad I could not get my bluetooth headphone working until I started the app again. It really sent shivers down my spine. What the hell is this app doing to my arch installation?
Then it started going in and out of fullscreen. It launched itself back and forth from my workspace. The goddamn app was all over the place.
Not to mention the processing spikes. My CPU which under heavy compiling never goes above 80, was around 90 degrees. At one point I was actually considering opening wireshark to see if it was receiving jobs and cryptomining on my computer.
I am not paranoid, but I am neved using this piece of garbage again in my main installation. It has to be treated like a piece of malicious software that is doing god knows what to your installation. It must be run in a virtual machine, with a NAT separation from the rest of your network, with control over CPU resources and with total isolation from the rest of your config.
It really did NOT behave well.
EDIT: I guess the worst part is that I am kinda expected to use this thing. People in management just decided they were going to use zoom without consulting the tech department. And I can see the appeal. It works for one. It empowers the speaker, detects really well turn taking, and just gives a good general sense of control. But from a tech standpoint is really terrifying. Click detection? Device control hijacking (pulseaudio)? Not respecting aspect and desktop placement? Those are outrageous and I can't see people outside IT understanding these concerns.
To be fair, everyone using Ubuntu saw no problems. But Ubuntu is known to have somewhat deep system customisation. You can't expect someone using Ubuntu to respect the KISS principle. However, this no way justifies how bad it behaved under Arch. You don't see other major application doing the same kind of mess in someone's system.
EDIT: I usually frown upon such comments, but in this case I think I might do that. I have a windows installation for games, I will just use it to run Zoom. If we come to think of it, it IS already running Windows, so Zoom isn't the worse thing running there...
I've seen about 10 different articles against Zoom during the past 3 days. I really don't enjoy using Zoom, but the volume and frequency of criticism is odd. Has anyone figured out where it's coming from?
Zoom has gone from being a boring piece of enterprise software to being central in lots of engineers lives and unfortunately they were in the "grow quickly and apologise later" section of their development cycle when they suddenly were big and were apologizing.
They prioritzed ease of use on the engineering side, and corporate sales on the business side. They never planned ot be mission critical, but don't think for a second that ever stopped any of their sales team.
The backlash is well deserved, entirely inevitable, and incredibly unlikely to make any difference.
Is video really that important? Sure it has benefit of being a bit more cozy, but in reality phone is sufficient to discuss work. Screenshare is much more important, especially for knowledge workers.
With the exception of the involvement of a webcam, you can't do screenshare without being able to do video. Even if we assume video is irrelevant and screenshare is everything, you wind up in the same technological position.
Videoconferencing is used for a lot of things that don't involve reviewing a document or pair-programming. Many people find video quite helpful for such situations.
The problem with phone calls isn't the lack of video, but the lack of a "click here to join the meeting" interface.
Group meetings are much less hassle through Skype, or Teams, or Zoom, or whatever computer-based option you choose, than waiting for everyone to drag out their phones, dial the right number, type in the right meeting code.
> The problem with phone calls isn't the lack of video, but the lack of a "click here to join the meeting" interface.
If "dial this number to join the conference call" is too hard for modern professionals, what the hell is happening to our society? (I do not believe it's actually too hard for them. I think it's incredibly patronizing to suppose that dialing a phone number might be too hard for otherwise capable members of the general public.)
Friction isn't a binary, and nothing is truly frictionless. Zoom requires you to install an application, while conference calls only require you to have a phone. I would say the former is more friction, particularly since this particular application is one I'd not like to install on any of my personal devices.
Zoom usage has skyrocketed in the past few weeks among quarantined users. Plenty of them are sick of hearing about the virus itself. Covering Zoom is a way for news outlets to reach that audience.
As it happens, there are plenty of bad things to say about Zoom, which has hit headlines multiple times in the past year for security problems and various other dick moves.
The macOS version of Zoom installs or installed an unannounced web server on macOS that runs even when Zoom isn't running, and could perform remotely controlled actions on the macOS host.
I'm a simple man. When my OS vendor has to push an update to remove a misbehaving program from my computer, I consider it malware, and will never install it again.
The societal importance of zoom has massively increased as it has suddenly become a fundamental part of the modern economy over the past month or so. This means it undergoes more scrutiny.
Well, for one datapoint, I had never heard about Zoom before, but had to use it for the first time a week ago. I was appalled of the macOS installer, that behaved like a malware. (No user consent taken before installing, plus why even have an installer where an .app would suffice)
This experience was negative enough, that I have been retweeting some articles about Zoom. It seems that the installer isn't the only problem.
Your other comment describing this as a hit piece is dead. So this is second attempt to discredit those making a solid argument with evidence. Again you take zero issue with all the points raised and just try to add noise and muddy things.
The press always goes after the top dog. The articles about factory worker conditions are always about Apple, not Acer, even though Acer's are almost surely worse (due to no press scrutiny).
Zoom is the top dog in videoconferencing right now, and videoconferencing has grown by a factor of ~1 million in importance over the last three weeks.
Zoom has also pulled a lot of shady crap under the hood, so regardless of their 'top dog' status, they are getting called to the carpet to explain and remedy their bs.
Articles about factory worker conditions these days are about Amazon...
Zoom has about 130,000 subdomains. Cisco, established 20 years earlier and operating in the same space and many more, has 45,000.
About 40-50k of Zoom's subdomains are customers. Company.Zoom.Us.
About 5k of the subdomains reference MMR. Likely this means "Meet Me Rooms" which are seen in data centers.
About 200 contain the word tracking, 300 the word face, and 400 the word elasticsearch. Something like 700 contain the word vip. Maybe 1000 gitlab. They really like gitlab! These are not customers again and the whole structure is impressive and strictly followed.
IPA is the most used term after zoom of course. I think it is a reference to "international phonetic alphabet" for the China based engineers. Anita is used around 4K times. Likely this references the CFO since 2018.
Most interestingly, every US state and every Chinese province has about 10-20 subdomains carved out for it.
So xj-restricted.acv.ipa.zoom.us refers to "Xinjiang".
And xz-influxdata.amp.ipa.zoom.us refers to "Tibet".
Finally as a last example "va-accounts.asset2.ipa.zoom.us" refers to Virginia one would assume. All the other states are there. Didn't check other countries though.
Have never worked at like an MPLS company but overall fascistic fastidiously well designed naming schema that they had the discipline to adhere to. These can get out of hand so fast at companies so again cool.
What do they use all of these subdomains for? While it’s interesting that they have so many I’m not sure I’m understanding their purpose beyond the obvious customer subdomains.
Maybe I'm weird, but I find video conferencing really jarring -- id rather just have the audio. The thing to me is that since the camera is offset from the screen, you never make eye contact with the person you're talking to, you both look like you're looking at something else when you're looking at each other. That, and seeing a reflection of every face I make on screen makes me really self conscious. "Do I always look that bored?" It's so easy to get stuck in your own head watching yourself talk. It just feels like its in a jarring uncanny valley. Id rather just use the phone.
I try to look directly at the camera when speaking rather than the image of the other person. Or if you position the laptop camera far enough away it matters less.
Even on HN, plenty of people have differing priorities, and it can vary depending on the context. For me, my work meetings and family meetings aren't sensitive, so encryption isn't a big deal. For my family in particular, the fact that even grandma can click a single link and be looking at her entire family in a matter of seconds is a huge win. We tried WebEx. We tried Teams. Then I suggested we try Zoom, and it was an instant hit. Would I like for Zoom to address the issues? You bet. Will I give up the audio quality and brady bunch-style screen for the whole family to gather around? Not a chance!
The big "problem," if one can call it that, is that Zoom seems to work seamlessly, simply, and reliably, while no one else does.
This is a scenario where one product really works, particularly for non-technical users, and the others don't appear to.
The big feature is "it works." Whoever is behind it appears to understand "death before inconvenience." http://paulgraham.com/road.html. Much open source software never achieves widespread adoption because it is technically impressive but inconvenient or poorly designed to users.
My company went 100% remote recently for obvious reasons. Quite a few people are trying to advocate for the company buying a company wide license. The de facto standard is currently Google Hangouts Meet (my company uses G Suite so it comes included).
A lot of people whine about Hangouts Meet, but honestly I find it completely adequate (but not much more). Zoom is marginally more user friendly, but I don't think it's meaningfully better. Certainly not enough to spend $15/user/month [0] while G Suite, in its entirety is $12/user/month [1].
We use BlueJeans at work, and for my part time master's program. It doesn't have virtual backgrounds like Zoom, but it is very reliable and easy to use.
We ditched BlueJeans for zoom at work and it’s so much better. With BlueJeans the video stutters more, audio quality is worse and the video doesn’t work about 1/3 of the time until I reboot my machine. On top of that BlueJeans drains my battery like crazy. Zoom just works so much better for me.
Despite numerous installs, I can't actually directly open BlueJeans. If I open it from the start menu it hangs. If I open a direct link, it works (usually) and takes me right to the meeting, then I can end the meeting and use the program as normal.
The lack of quality control that means a program can't be simply opened cold is baffling.
We used to use BlueJeans where I worked, and the UX was awful compared to zoom. Just bog standard baffling stuff you expect from a video conferencing app, which Zoom finally got away from.
The people behind Zoom have no obligations to you (not you, OP, the general 'you') at all.
They built the product with the Facebook SDK wired up to report your activity back to Zuckerberg. They told you about it in the T&Cs which you agreed to. They built the product, as they rightly point out, for a different, constrained market where Zoom gatecrashing wasn't considered - not the whole world in a pandemic crisis, where people will always try to exploit platforms for exposure and profit.
If you don't like Zoom or what they are doing, don't use it. They owe you nothing. Acting like Zoom have some kind of social responsibility to you because it's suddenly the most convenient tool when you're stuck at home is ridiculous.
> Then there’s Zoombombing, where trolls take advantage of open or unprotected meetings and poor default settings to take over screen-sharing and broadcast porn or other explicit material. The FBI this week warned users to adjust their settings to avoid trolls hijacking video calls.
I haven't really been following what is going on with Zoom. I have been vaguely aware of quite a few security issues.
However today I was linked youtube live stream from a friend on discord of some guy trolling random school classes while by pretending to be some sort of African Warlord. While his act was quite initially amusing and tbh harmless, it certainly didn't leave a positive impression of the software in my mind.
I use it to do my day job. My company blesses its use so these security issues are a side show to get sorted out by Zoom. I need to pay my bills and put food on the table.
We use it, it's fine. Although it gets some hate with the executives because we can't have more than four people on screen at any one time. I think they lament they can't have a panopticon of everybody at once? There's a blog post from Microsoft with a nebulous commitment to increase it to nine.
Honestly I don't care about seeing who's in the meeting beside who's speaking so four is plenty.
I really, really liked Sococo (https://www.sococo.com/), which I used at my previous job. The feeling of presence was so key, and not needing to fire up a room and share a link, but instead, just grab a coworker or knock on a door, was so nice.
Wish I saw people talking about this one :-)
I use Zoom at my current job, and it's fine (except that I can never find the mute and share buttons when I need them), but not magical.
I ran into a sequence of really odd behaviors with a Teams meeting this week.
Step 1: click on the "join this meeting" button in Exchange (incorrectly said Skype with my first draft)
Step 2: realize when Teams launches that it has inexplicably taken me to a days-old meeting with a different group
Step 3: see a Teams notification that another co-worker has started the correct meeting
Step 4: click on that notification, hear it ring, and a woman picks up the phone
Step 5: discover that my co-worker had fat-fingered the callback number (he wanted to use his phone for audio), so Teams dialed a complete stranger for me as well as him instead of connecting me to the meeting.
That poor woman must have been so terribly confused.
I'm not defending their recent transgressions, but Zoom works exceptionally, is intuitive, and I don't see these issues slowing them down much. I'd hope they make things right, or as right as they can, but the HN/Tech blog reaction seems disproportionate to the actual news. It's starting to feel weird.
What worried me the most is the “zoom.us” in the name installer file. As if they went the extra length making sure you are comfortable it’s a US company. In fact it is, so why even making a point of that?
Lazyweb question here as I've only marginally followed this issue - are most of the reported security problems (obviously bar the lack of end-end encryption) obviated by using the web app?
There seems to be a tons of critics on Zoom in the privacy and data privacy domain recently, wondering whether it will indeed have meaningful impact on the usage rate on the product itself.
Whoever is orchestrating this hitjob against zoom, is doing a bad job of it.
Most people are going to ignore articles like this. After a certain amount of stories, outrage fatigue sets in and people start to see it as a hit piece and dismiss it, no matter how bad it really is.
I don't think it's a hit job. It's a side effect of the covid crisis, which is itself an instance of the 'major ongoing story' dynamic on internet forums: black hole story attracting all mass. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22751116.
In fact, the wave of objections ('why is X taking over HN') is a manifestation of the same dynamic; it's just the second-order version of it. When those get repeated enough, we'll start to hear 'why are complaints about X taking over HN taking over HN'. At that point the dynamic probably does a meltdown into something else.
(I'm not making fun of you or anyone. All these responses are genuine and make sense on an individual level. But the larger patterns are also predictable.)
No one forced Zoom to do any of the shady things they're doing. The idea of it being a "hitjob" feels silly given all of the article's claims have evidence.
It's simply what you get for going in the spotlight.
That being said, I do feel the tech industry gets more than it's fair share of criticism. Maybe it's just we've become complacent with the ways that other industries abuse their customers.
Whoa, dismissing an entire community's POV and concern as manufactured outrage without making any logical case yourself... is a hit job. If you feel like zoom privacy concerns are overblown you need to explain, not just blow it off.
Zoom should be considered malware, as it was written with malicious intent, or with sufficiently advanced incompetence as to be indistinguishable from malice.
Are 4 letter brand names making our kids stupid? Before Zoom, products had longer names like WebEx, Hangouts and GoToMeeting. Longer names challenge our children to learn how to spell longer, more complex words, even if they are completely made up. “I fear for the children, and therefore recommend that parents and teachers keep their children from using Zoom.” - Doctor quote from some chiropractor
/s Sorry, I had to call it. I expect the headline next week.
However I've used Zoom once or twice, for interviews or in one case working with a friend on a pair programming session.
At my company we use teams, slack, skype and discord (yes, really).
Heres the thing though; The first time I used Zoom I was actually petrified (as I usually am) that I have to install /another/ application and figure out compatibility issues, especially because I'm one of those crusty die hard linux users. I panicked so bad that I resorted to using my phone.
(Tip: don't attend interviews with your phone recording from your hand, it looks super unprofessional I'm told)
The second time I had a zoom meeting I just clicked the URL in the meeting request and it worked!
You have to understand, I'm coming from a place where things almost never work. Exchange? nah, maybe 2007, or was it 2003, who knows. Teams? Their linux port not only consumes all available CPU on my laptop (which is not a slouchy laptop) but it doesn't even function correctly with basic stuff. Slack works a treat (as long as I don't do screen sharing) and I suspect that this is largely why it caught on too.
My point is simple here: Proper convenience is hard to get right. On-boarding is a enormous part of why Slack is trouncing other instant messaging efforts (IRC especially).
The security is lackluster but very honestly (and with a heavy heart) I have to say that the majority of people don't care until it affects them.
We don't know how Zoom will respond, but for what it's worth, I like that their product works well on my platform, they deserve massive props for that.