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Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

Another day, another Zoom issue.

I've resolved to not using Zoom - when it was suggested at work I just posted links to the issues (mostly gotten from HN actually) so we decided against it.

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What are y'all using now?

Because you think of the millions of streams going on, Zoom will snoop on yours? I mean as a security issue it isn’t black or white, you are always having some detrimental issue trade off and by chance. Use face time, have janky video cut offs etc lose productivity, man hours. That’s a trade off. Use zoom, Zoom may broad cast your video to your competitors and you lose money, what is more likely though?

Security through obscurity is a fantasy, and a dangerous one. You start thinking your screen door matters to the bear sauntering by, smelling what you're cooking, and coming in for a snack.

Sure. However I don't think he's promoting security through obscurity so much as figuring out his threat model and risk acceptance. For most businesses and end users who love Zoom, everything else they've tried has failed to do the thing acceptably. Like, they probably are more secure in so far as not enough people can successfully use them, so doing no video conferencing is more secure than doing some video conferencing.

And to be honest, most business stuff is by unencrypted e-mail, so I don't see how a TLS encrypted Video Chat increases their exposure.

Finally, the chance of someone, even zoom, recording and analyzing all the video conferences ever to somehow get important info from a video conference seems pretty low anyway. Unless you're worried about the NSA, and even then, it seems like they'd have a way into WebEx etc also, so even on risk.

At this point, it seems reasonable to go by what works for people. And Zoom works.

tl;dr of your comment is "I don't care about privacy, if the product works".

But privacy is not about those privileged enough to where privacy doesn't matter.

I don't care that you don't care. Privacy matters.

Well, they became the popular go to solution because the other popular solutions suck. Now they are also in the focus of privacy interested media and therefore end up becoming stories.

The Intercept didn't care about Zoom a few months ago and wouldn't have without Corona.

> The Intercept didn't care about Zoom a few months ago and wouldn't have without Corona.

The 2019 Zoom vulnerability[1] was a much bigger deal and did get picked up by the media. Zoom already had a terrible reputation before COVID-19.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298

Yeah, it was picked up because it was a much bigger deal.

Now the issues are a smaller deal but are still being picked up.

Most people I work with haven't even heard about Zoom until those last months when they've been forced to use a teleconference for the first time in their lifes. They also probably didn't even hear about the issue last year too.

I'm still not convinced this coverage is in any way related to Zoom's current popularity or COVID-19, I just think a company that keeps fucking up is a better story than a one-off.

Most of the articles over here in Germany don't even mention the last fuck up and the news about the company are now beyond the tech media.

You may not be convinced even after you attributed to my argument but it won't change anything about the facts.

Edit: since I can't post in god knows how long due to the wonderful stfu tech here on hn here are sources for german media:

https://www.google.ch/search?q=zoom&complete=0&source=lnms&t...

It's all over and I find it very curious that you've not been able to find anything in Danish media even though it looks the same for the english speaking outlets.

> the news about the company are now beyond the tech media.

I searched around a little and neither this nor the recent Facebook story have been covered by Danish non-tech media at this time.

EDIT: The story is still new, it might get coverage later this week.

Zoom has been doing shady shit forever. Last year it was for installing a web server on localhost to save a click then dragging their feet on a fix when told how stupid that is.

They may have been doing that forever but that doesn't change anything about my argument.

They just were not as popular as they are these days which makes them much more newsworthy and which is why we're seeing constant new articles about them now about issues that have been there for a long time but which were not newsworthy a few months ago.

Edit: no, I'm not defending them. I just explain why they are all over the news these days.

Not sure what your point is... are you defending Zoom's behavior here?

I must say that Google Meet has been a smooth experience at work, but if I had to go with a privacy-focused solution, that'd be Jitsi and not Zoom.

My best example is a friend who needed a video conference fast and needed an alternative to WebEx which stopped recognizing his video feed from one day to another (I couldn't find a solution for that too). Jitsi doesn't work for more then two. We tried to set up teams. Took too long (I tried it again a week later, people had issues with the invites, some got audio error messages even though it worked with zoom... we gave up). So I went for zoom. EVERYBODY (old people, first time video conferencing) was able to install it and it just worked flawlessly. Even I was surprised.

This is what people need these days and this is why Zoom is so popular.

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