Maybe we shouldn’t use Zoom after all
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
They've been under a negative spotlight for a year now because of their poor security - they've had that chance already.
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.
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.
EDIT: A word
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.
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.
Apparently If you tell them no a couple times, they let you join in browser
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.
Zoom isn't on the secure radar at all. They're fighting to not actively compromise your computers security.
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.
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.
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.
The security problems seem fixable if they put their minds to it. Other companies have messed this up but later regained trust.
It isn't 2005 anymore; which is about when their approach to security would fit in.
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.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22751116
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.
How do you figure? Wouldn't any enterprise-focused video conferencing software be considered mission critical?
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.
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.
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.)
Why wouldn't frictionless + more features win over tedious and incapable of screen sharing?
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.
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.
Fortunately OS X released an update to make this impossible for Zoom and anyone else.
This experience was negative enough, that I have been retweeting some articles about Zoom. It seems that the installer isn't the only problem.
So, why? Anything you'd like to disclose? dang ?
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.
Articles about factory worker conditions these days are about Amazon...
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.
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.
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].
The lack of quality control that means a program can't be simply opened cold is baffling.
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.
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.
Honestly I don't care about seeing who's in the meeting beside who's speaking so four is plenty.
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.
You gotta really love pain if you choose the latter one.
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.
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.
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.)
Very well put!
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.
I wonder how much Facebook is paying Zoom to snoop on Zoom's customers.
/s Sorry, I had to call it. I expect the headline next week.