Not a good idea to use 9 to 11 digit long IDs with no password requirement by default; they should have used at least 128-bit random ids, i.e. 21 character long base64-encoded strings.
I think "no password" is the bigger issue, because repeated attempts with incorrect passwords can be rate-limited. Zoom should be generating a random 6-digit password for each meeting by default.
There may be use cases for not having any password, but that should be explicitly opt-in and have a warning message to every participant that anyone can join and broadcast in this meeting.
There's never a reason to share the id without the password.
Example: tel://18005551212,,<meeting_id>#
I did once put together a hack that would scrape the meeting ID from the Zoom UI and emit the touchtones from my laptop to dial in.
https://gist.github.com/micahbf/91a295016f4472b47acfe317d714...
I may be out of touch with the average biz-guy, but how many people are realistically calling in manually, over traditional phone-lines these days?
Is it really a significant percentage?
Jim from sales who is dialing in from his company's oddball calendar app over Bluetooth on the infotainment system in his rental car probably can't.
Also if you don't want to install the Zoom client, you can just dial in from your cell phone or desk phone.
The same tends to happen with a few colleagues ... Some anecdote.
There was always:
1. someone who was on the road - a traveling consultant or someone in sales
2. a client or potential who called in because of the same, or because they don't sit at a computer all day and/or don't have a headset for their computer.
3. People in a conference room
4. a client who sucks at computers and dials in because they can't figure out how to install the latest version of CiscoGoToZoomMeetingWebEx.exe in IE8 on their macbook.
I have a high quality desk phone on a land line (admittedly, VOIP from FIOS, but not via my computer) and I will fight tooth and nail to keep it.
All that being said, I'm comfortable typing in an arbitrary length password on my phone. All I ask is that it be formatted to make that easy (groups of 3-4 numbers with spaces).
That's even assuming that anti-DOS protection on the phone line is impossible.
For those working with current or potential customers remotely, you have to use a solution that is convenient or you don't make money.
In this case, relatively short numeric meeting ids allow users to dial in via plain old phone lines. If my meeting guests had to enter a UUID via their phone keypad, they would probably skip the meeting instead.
Like dialing Facebook even if you're not a Facebook user (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693792)?
If you want to join the all-hands meetings of a company I used to work for, you only need to go their website and lookup their primary phone number. That's the Zoom meeting ID.