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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Honestly this feels bizarrely knee-jerk and media-driven to me.

First of all, Zoom has been used in education for a long time. The quote about switching to Teams because it's FERPA-compliant is disingenuous -- Zoom says they are too. [1]

Second, Zoom has been receiving tons of scrutiny recently while e.g. Microsoft Teams hasn't received any. (Nor has Google Meet.)

I'm really not sure how I feel about this. It's been hard enough already on teachers to adopt remote learning, now they're expected to switch platforms after a couple of weeks, presumably mostly because of sensationalistic media reports of "Zoombombing" which a teacher can trivially prevent?

[1] https://zoom.us/docs/doc/FERPA%20Guide.pdf

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Microsoft and Google both spend a lot on security to ensure due diligence. Of course there still can and will be issues.

But, the situation with Zoom is vastly different. It's obvious by now that Zoom took shortcuts and even worse, actively circumvents security features of the OS and actively leverages insecure encryption (e.g ECB mode). There have been plenty of other issues also and more to come as CitizenLab has already pointed out.

So, objectively speaking its okay and I wouldn't blame anyone for seeking alternative solutions.

> Zoom says they are too.

But, to be fair, Zoom has already been shown to be lying about e2e encryption. Fool me once...

You fool me you can't get fooled again.

To be fair, they were already caught installing malware.

How many free passes are we going to give these jagoffs?

This is part knee-jerk, part well-deserved. Zoom isn't great for privacy (and apparently not security either, with its false e2e claims). But MS Teams isn't much better.

But honestly, setting up a zoom meeting with a public link is just asking for trouble

This isn't about zoombombing, this is about their very odd and suspiciously terrible security practices and repeated abuse of user trust. Zoom should be ditched immediately by everyone.

The problem is that while Zoom is ok at best, and really pretty terrible for classroom (two kids + my fitness bootcamp are all virtual now), the user experience for everything else is really even worse. So in a time when we really need video chat, viable alternatives are scarce.

iOS, Android, Linux, Democrats, Republicans, Zoom???

There is a lot of angry emotional fanboi-ism around Zoom that is very very odd to see in support of a video conferencing app. Whoever is downvoting comments like this, I'd love to hear your POV.

I feel like recent concerns over zoom are actually quite reasonable. I've never been a zoom hater, my company adopted it with my blessing and we continue to use it although we are now having reasonable, IMO, misgivings and considering alternatives.

Zoom is easy to use which is super important for kids doing remote schooling, it's security flaws are minor in the schooling context (and worst can be mitigated by having teachers admin the calls).

To be fair, if naked men are zoombombing your class of schoolchildren? I mean, not a lot of teachers out there are equipped to deal with that. They fumble around looking for how to remove a participant. Some panic and try to kill the whole session for the entire class. Some call the cops while yelling at the man to leave. Some freeze up and don't know what to do.

Maybe MS Teams is worse? But MS will, at least, make sure to keep the pedophiles and racists at bay.

It's incredibly straightforward to prevent zoombombing, you simply set a password on your room. I would be surprised if Zoom hadn't made this the default by Monday.

Prior to the age of 'zoombombing', frictionless entry to every meeting was a nice feature, and meeting IDs are difficult enough to guess (11 digit number) that entry of uninvited guests basically never happened.

Now that everyone has so much spare time, the worst elements of society are using it to try to harass children. I guess the tragedy of the commons kicks into full swing and we must have passwords going forward.

Fine, but what's the number of times that a naked man zoombombs your class before you tell your school and they switch to Teams? These are schools we're talking about. That number is exactly one. Because I can guarantee you the kids are gonna tell their parents what they saw, and the parents are gonna light into the principal.

Slow video? A few random disconnects? These are the kinds of issues that result in second chances. Random men showing up naked in your classfull of kids, or random racists coming in your class to call the black kid an n-word? Yeah, I'm fair certain that results in a, "Thanks, but no thanks. We'll find something else."

Fair argument, I just think it's rather 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater', getting rid of a tool that teachers are familiar with, works well and can handle 200MM customers because of an easily changed setting, which is already present in the software.

I know your argument is the correct one, but it's frustrating to see Zoom caught up in a furore of media-driven controversy.

> works well and can handle 200MM customers

That’s the the point though: Zoom doesn’t “work well” if you include basic security as a required part of “working.”

Zoom using ECB mode for encryption, and transmitting keys to China says everything. They just don’t care about security at all.

Everyone in the banking industry I work with has blocked or banned Zoom for longer than COVID-19 has been around. Microsoft Teams seems to be the new Default choice, if only because everyone is using office365 already and anything is better than WebEx.

I also think, it doesn't work well for conferencing... Last/First time we used it, the annotation tool just stopped updating, colleague was drawing and I was: "I don't see anything" (and then everyone: yeah me too). Also I'm wondering, why it send the "foreign" screen in fusll res (WQHD), but at a measly 4 fps with crappy compression...

After this my personal impression is that it is just an obtrusive piece od adware, which happens to behave like a rootkit in some parts...

Yea, super concerned about China watching my kids math call.

Yawn.

“Everyone in the banking industry has blocked Zoom” was my qualifier.

The U.K. even held a cabinet meeting over Zoom.

There’s a lot more than schoolwork taking place on Zoom unfortunately.

I’m on Zoom a gajillion times over 5 years and I’ve not once experienced a zoombomb. I have experienced Google Hangouts bombs.

The incidence is of course going way up, but it really is overblown on the quantity. The biggest issue are those that post links on twitter or some place public (same issue for Hangouts).

And let's also be clear that the incidence rate is going up because 1) the popularity of Zoom and 2) because there's a lot of people home going stir crazy.

Saying Zoom has a bombing issue feels like saying Linux doesn't get viruses.

How often do zoom bombs occur. Once every million calls?

I believe zoom defaulted to passwords in the past, and a lot of companies just updated their settings to turn it off. Not sure what the state is now since we switched to Teams.

> It's incredibly straightforward to prevent zoombombing, you simply set a password on your room

The password is the same for everyone. Are you seriously saying that kids won't share the link/password online themselves as pranks? This reduces the risk from "anyone can join" to "anyone with password can join". The waiting rooms helped at least, but the passwords reduce, not stop, zoombombing.

Isn't that a problem with any video conferencing service then, if the credentials to enter are shared by participants?

Google meet used with gsuite will by default prevent anyone from outside the company domain to join the meeting (unless explicitly invited) for example. I've joined some webinars where the password was per-user, (so you can kick/ban that one user) but can't remember the service.

But yes, that was my point - shared passwords don't prevent conference-bombing on any service.

So will Zoom, on a corporate account.

> I would be surprised if Zoom hadn't made this the default by Monday.

Zoom already announced that the password option will be set by default starting tomorrow.

How do you know what teachers do in this case?

How often are teachers starting the zoom calls as admins so they have total control over them and can easily disable zoom bombers?

How do we know this is happening more than once every million zoom calls?

Zoom to Teams is definitely frying pan to fire.

Based on what?

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