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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand you.

Being from Romania, in all the companies I worked on, we had the need to communicate online by voice and video (mostly with Americans and among ourselves), plus I tended to work in companies with a remote culture. The last time somebody needed to dial into a call I was in was ... 10 years ago. Given we have nearly unlimited 4G data plans for cheap and smartphones, being on the go isn't a problem either.

Since when is this ability to dial-in such a hard requirement?

> "For >99.9% of people this is fine."

99.9% of people don't understand what end-to-end encryption is and why it is needed, because they think their calls are secure, when in fact they aren't. It is actually our responsibility to make end-to-end encryption mainstream and to educate people.

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Often I’ve seen that the one person calling in the most senior person in the meeting, or anyone involved in sales. Someone who is traveling around to meet in person a lot. Often they are calling from the road or an airport. The mobile phone connection is more reliable than mobile data in these scenarios.

This feels like the equivalent of sending tweets by sms or dialing by tapping tones. People use it mostly because it’s supported, they’d use different workarounds otherwise.

Then it’s cool when it works and allows niche uses, but you can’t expect the feature to be there forever and can’t keep optimizing a service for these use cases.

> 99.9% of people don't understand what end-to-end encryption is and why it is needed, because they think their calls are secure, when in fact they aren't. It is actually our responsibility to make end-to-end encryption mainstream and to educate people.

I'm an academic and a long-time Hacker News reader. It seems that the tech community has collectively decided that all internet communication -- of whatever sort -- should be secure, all the time.

My first thought, is an outsider, is that this is unnecessarily anal-retentive. But upon reflection, I'm very grateful for this. The more anal-retentive that developers have to be, the less I have to be. If HN is so up in arms about this, it's a very good sign for Internet security overall.

What is it that you'd educate me about? That someone could have snooped in on my departmental meeting? Before Covid-19, these meetings were held in in an open room, in an unlocked building where people walk in and out all day. Anyone with the desire to snoop would have had no difficulty.

From what I understand, enough pressure is being placed on Zoom that they are cleaning up their act. From where I sit as an outsider, the system seems to mostly be working. I'm not angry at Zoom, but I'm very happy that others are.

I think the argument would be that you could secure those meetings if your management felt it was necessary. Many large companies have badge readers, cameras, and the like at various places in their buildings. If they need to hold a secure meeting, they can hold it in a secure area.

With Zoom, there's no such thing as a secure area. Your company is basically forced to hold meetings in a wiretapped room.

If you have an office where random people can walk in off the street and out again unfettered, that's probably an even greater vulnerability to your company than anything Zoom is doing.

It's like having a car company and saying, "I don't know why anybody would want seatbelts in their car, our cars explode when hit at over 5mph."

>If you have an office where random people can walk in off the street and out again unfettered, that's probably an even greater vulnerability to your company than anything Zoom is doing.

This is my point, in reverse.

I work in a university. Thousands of students come each day, to attend class, to show up to professors' office hours, to attend special events. Having physical security in the building would be a huge pain, extremely impractical. I have never heard anyone call for it.

Are there problems? Yes, but they are either minor or very rare. For example, sales reps for publishers will walk in and go to professors' offices door to door. A nuisance to be sure, but not that common.

Occasionally there are more serious problems. For example, in 1978, a Stanford professor was murdered by a disgruntled former grad student [1]. If this sort of thing was even remotely common, I expect you'd see some building security. But it's not.

In the analog world, on average people are just not all that concerned about security. I'm not terribly convinced that they should be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Streleski

Universities are kind of a special case, I wouldn't generalize on them.

>Since when is this ability to dial-in such a hard requirement?

Any time you have groups at two companies calling each other it's going to be a decently common requirement. Each company has X people in a conference room. Those X people need to all be able to talk and hear. Thus you use the room's audio equipment which is basically an expensive telephone to dial in.

It was a surprise for me as well, but people in the US dial into meetings using their phone all the time. I don't understand it either.

It's like pagers, fax, checks and chip-less credit cards - Americans take a long time to abandon their legacy tech.

I dial in to calls all the time. Frequently when driving / on public transport. Phone system is much more reliable.

Largely depends on business and culture (also Romania has abnormally good internet).

Where I work nobody calls in and everyone uses webcams for VTC (software company, skews younger), but at my girlfriend's company a lot of people call in and nobody uses webcams.

Here in the US, we don't generally have unlimited data, but have unlimited phone minutes.

Also, cell audio is much more reliable than cell data.

I call into meetings with my phone all the time. Especially when the meeting is an emergency, and I'm not home (obviously not applicable now).

It's a lot easier to pull out a phone and dial a number than to find my laptop, set up the hotspot, fire up the videoconference software, and then worry about running out of hotspot data in the middle of the call.

> Since when is this ability to dial-in such a hard requirement?

The main reason I see people use dial-in, is when their audio or meeting client is not working, for whatever reason. The phone is a nice backup in those cases, and it (almost) always works.

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