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Comment by captaincole | Hacker News Reader

While zoom has faced many privacy concerns in the last few weeks, it is incredible how reliable the service has been given the massive spike in demand.

Most services would have buckled (examples abound like robinhoods recent outage) and part of their stack would have not been able to handle the load.

On top of that they are in new customer segments that I bet they didn’t see as their user base. I know more than a few elementary school teachers who are now hosting zoom classes with 15+ 5 year olds on a call.

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> I know more than a few elementary school teachers who are now hosting zoom classes with 15+ 5 year olds on a call.

Given the ease of setup of Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL which displayed email and other information about participants, this is one reason Zoom is rightly being scrutinized and criticized for poor security.

> Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL

Was there any rational for them doing this?

First thing that comes to my mind is: a friendly URL in a email body that doesn't get clipped or mangled in such away that it can't be easily opened.

Ease of use, probably.

Now every private room is by default secured with a password, I think.

Zoom has clearly focused on UX above all else. This explains both their popularity and the security issues that have recently been uncovered.

> Was there any rational for them doing this?

Conference ids are numbers for easier dial-in?

> While zoom has faced many privacy concerns...I bet they didn’t see as their user base. I know more than a few elementary school teachers

They better get on those security concerns quickly if they want to retain these new customer segments:

"New York City bans Zoom in schools, citing security concerns" https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/05/zoom-new-york-city-schools...

"Instead, the city’s Dept. of Education is transitioning schools to Microsoft Teams, which the spokesperson said has the “same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place.”"

They already changed default values which were the main vector of attack.

I would be really interested in a tech writeup on how they managed infrastructure. They run a lot of very bandwidth and presumably CPU intensive servers that they quickly had to scale out massively. There are some older articles that they use Equinix for infrastructure (probably colocation?) but adding that much capacity in a short amount of time is really impressive.

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