Google bans Zoom from employees' computers
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
1. Google's threat model may not be your threat model, and it definitely isn't the threat model of my daughter's school. A corporation like Google may be concerned using native applications, written in unsafe languages, written by developers from other corporations in China. That said, Zoom isn't wrong for everyone.
2. Google is motivated to push their own solution for obvious reasons.
3. Tavis, or others, at Project Zero might know some things, maybe we'll find out.
Google's threat model surely differs in some way from a school, but the specific threats you named seem like threats equally applicable to the surfaces identifiable in the threat model of a school.
Google's threat model actually does include state level attack (And specifically by China) to steal IP or access confidential user data.
Not if the school actually cares about the future of its students.
From a blog post[0] we published at NuCypher a while back:
> If we fail to take action now, we risk a world in which unsavory actors - domestic and foreign - have built rich, comprehensive profiles for every one of our children, following the trajectories of their education, home life, consumer habits, health, and on and on. These profiles will then be used to manipulate their behavior not only as consumers, but as voters and participants in all those corners of society which, in order for freedom and justice to prevail, require instead that these kids mature into functional, free-thinking adults.
0: https://blog.nucypher.com/todays-kids-need-end-to-end-encryp...
Indeed - they're no better.
It's like the old 5G debate in Europe: who do you want to have a backdoor: Cisco+USA or Huawei+PRC? (Hint for Americans: some/many see China as less malevolent).
"Someone", sure, but not the Chinese Government! That's a completely different threat model!
The Chinese government is the last entity I'd be worried about with this kind of information (unless, of course, you live in China). Certain criminals in your own country are a much bigger concern.
This is similar to the concern some of us had over giving local government departments access to our full Opal card public transport travel histories here in Australia. Not all government employees are up to no good, but some are. Don't give them more than they need.
See their push into universities.
Because China=bad, Google or Facebook or Microsoft (which all provide data to) or NSA =good
There is no specific evidence for this, but it is a possibility. Balancing remote possibilities and accepting some that are beyond our control is what separates the sane from the tinfoil hat crowd. Personally, I would try to stick to apps by companies headquartered in your home country. This is difficult outside of the USA and probably impossible outside of the next 5 top software hub countries.
I like it! I'd totally give that TV series a try!
Of course they are. That's why they are happy to work with NSA which get everything that is routed through frankfurt.
>The subdivision HVA inside the Stasi would be the equivalent to the BND, while the larger and infamous internal surveillance of the Stasi is now in the responsibility of the Verfassungsschutz.
Why is that? It seems like the opposite would be the best advice: make sure to use something from a company not headquartered in your country. Most people probably have more to worry about from their own government than anyone else.
If yes: do not use Zoom right now. If no: do what you want.
But I wouldn't use it for work meetings.
But you made me look into this. Apparently Zoom does "accidentally" (accidents like this don't really happen) send data to China. [1] It's very normal for companies to completely divide up their Chinese servers and non-Chinese servers, so the rerouting makes me suspicious.
Zoom is of course just one vector for this, but the threat model of "it's just schoolwork at risk" is wrong. It's actually integrity of tje computing environment.
For those that use Zoom - consider spending at least a few minutes to make a mental threat model about Zoom. Who might go after you? What features does Zoom have that might be exploitable? What's the worst thing that can happen? The worst case for Google is not the same as the worst case for a professor or elementary school.
Maybe Zoom doesn't work for your use case - fine!
Maybe Zoom is good for your use case - fine!
Lots of people will be using it either way, so it's good to have Alex help lock it down.
- kicking out their colleagues
- muting the teacher
- posting memes in the chat room
It looks like you can't prevent them from muting/kicking out each other. There's a larger threat surface of mean pre-adolescents, than a hacker trying to steal their info.
Better education regarding these tools is required for sure.
Why use it at all? I honestly don't know what's available in this space, since I don't need to, but is there really no alternative?
If they're building a product that does shady things (e.g., macOS install nonsense) and is full of security holes (e.g., zoombombing) that's enough to tell me I don't want to use it and I don't want my son's school using it.
Google isn't alone here. Just another data point.
At best it's a product full of security holes. At worst deliberately designed to spy on people. I don't care who those people are. I care about the intent.
People in the real world care as much about Jitsi as about Bernie Sanders. HN and Reddit are bubbles that Joe Schmitz from MegaCorp Inc. does not know or care about ever despite some aspects being vastly better on the security side. UI/UX is Zoom's domain though and nothing comes close.
Try doing a Teams call with 30+ people.
But look at the whole threat model.
* Google's exposure is far greater than merely other languages
* Exposing profiles & activities of an entire generation of kids to a foreign adversarial surveillance govt is itself a serious threat, covered by other responses here
* This creates a massive increase in exposed surface area. E. g., consider abkid using their parent's computer who happens to work at a sub-sub-contractor on a key defense project. Even if the key files are properly encrypted, just some little data points like the fact of their employment, network name, list of known WiFi routers cached, etc., now lets CCP fill out their model of attack vectors. There's a thousand other ways this can be used to gain an edge if you don't like that example
The bottom line is like the precautionary principle - just because you or I can't figure out how to exploit something, doesn't mean that it can't be exploited.
A number of companies have rightfully banned Zoom's native apps, given how insecure they are. I had previously uninstalled it when the news about the secret web server they install came out. Google is still allowing use of the web app, but the web app bizarrely doesn't support Grid/Gallery View, which is the main reason my friends/family wanted to use it.
Hangouts Meet was optimized for work meetings where most people would be dialing in from high-bandwidth meeting rooms, not everyone individually dialing in from home, but hopefully now they've heard the loud feedback about the especial usefulness of Gallery View during quarantine times and will introduce the feature soon.
For now I'm using the Chrome extension that enables this feature client-side using JS/CSS, and staying tf away from Zoom. With how little I used Zoom before quarantine, I don't understand the adoration for it (I found its UI confusing and quality similar to other tools), and I haven't been able to find any benchmarks comparing its video quality for people on less good internet connections (my home network is pretty strong).
The UI is initially confusing, but so is the UI for every video chat app I've used. It seems to be the fad to have "clever" UI in video chats apps (controls that auto-hide, non-standard icons, low contrast, non standard control placement (use the standard toolbar luke!) etc.
On top of that zoom has always "just worked". The "just worked" thing is now resulting in security woes, but still. Start a meeting, send link. Done. Online works, dial in works.
Contrast with hangouts (dropped non-chrome browser support for at least a year). To this day we have users that can't use slack video for unknown reasons (app store slack doesn't work as well as slack installer slack or something). WebEx is some horror show that seems to constantly re-install itself for each meeting. You're lucky if you can get it going before the meeting is over.
Where most apps stop at video chat and maybe poor quality screen sharing, zoom has a pretty deep enterprise feature set. Good webinar support, integration with SIP systems, SSO, recording etc.
(disclaimer - I work at Google, but not on teams that build video chat software)
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21214059/google-hangouts-m... you would be incorrect
To give an example, they prioritize audio over anything else. Which makes sense because if you can't understand what the person is saying, you can't have a meeting. So they automatically downgrade or upgrade your video to try to keep latency decent on audio. Meet just has a manual setting where you can up or downgrade video or audio.
zoom sends proprietary stuff over web sockets instead. Which is also why they prefer you use their fat clients with native decoding
It's mostly equivalent to Zoom, from my experience. Grid view, screen sharing, recording, chat, file sharing, phone dial-in, calendar meetings, etc. If you follow a GTM invite link it downloads the app and run its for you, so nobody needs to have the app previously installed.
It's also rock stable. I've had hundreds of meetings with GTM, and never had any audio/video issues, whereas Google Hangouts/Meet has always been really flaky.
WeChat now often pops up a notice when you try to use web.wechat.com that translates to "For your account safety you cannot use the web version, and you need to download a Windows or Mac client."
Safety my ass -- web is the safest. I know better than you about my safety, Tencent.
That is insane!
Also, Alibaba's conferencing client. If you even have a meeting with anyone at Alibaba, they send you a proprietary desktop client to use for the meeting. More people need to learn to stand up and say no to this. From a corporate executive level, proprietary conferencing apps need to be banned on company-owned machines.
What they should be doing is straight-up WebRTC running in a web browser, which works great, and which will work in China as long as you set up signalling servers there.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
It uses shitty dark patterns that require two or three clicks and at one point, if I'm not mistaken, waiting for a link to appear after a delay.
In my most recent experience with it, it led to a zip file being automatically downloaded to my computer. This when I already have had plenty of previous experience with the web app and was deliberately trying to reach to the web page for a meeting for which I had been sent a URL.
Slack does similar things but isn't quite so aggressive about it.
I'm pretty sure they do that because their web app is garbage, and they know people will get a much better experience in the native app.
Notably, Zoom's native app is truly native; it's not some electron wrapper like Slack or Teams. I don't think it's a coincidence that Zoom is both (A) the only major solution that seem to work consistently with large numbers of participants, and (B) the only one not using WebRTC.
not if I'm a user who is actively trying to not install the native app. for me, and likely many others, security and privacy trump performance benchmarks and UI/UX all day, every day.
My new strategy is to call in and say "Sorry, I can't see your screen because Zoom doesn't work on my computer," which is a completely unnecessary situation that Zoom creates by intentionally adding roadblocks to their web app.
It's hard to imagine why they'd want to push the desktop app that hard. I don't want to assume anything untoward, but it'd be a lot easier to dismiss the whole sending-data-to-China thing if they didn't try so hard to force you onto the version of their product that's capable of such a thing.
I trust zoom a lot more when it is running inside a chrome sandbox than as a native app.
I haven't audited the files yet to see what technology they use (e.g. why is the web experience shit, but the Chrome App is OK), but I certainly trust Zoom a lot more in a sandbox.
It mainly sucks for when an employee (especially in sales) has a call with a client that uses Zoom and can't use Meet, because then you're forced to dial in, which just puts you at a disadvantage when everyone can see everyone's face except yours.
Edit: per comments, people can still use the browser version of Zoom, so doesn't seem that bad.
Can't they just participate in a call from the browser? I thought Google only banned the application/app, not usage of the service altogether.
Jitsi and Google Meet seem to work in both browsers, without requiring me to log in.
Or better yet, don't use Zoom...
1. Go to zoom.com 2. Click "Join a meeting" 3. Enter meeting id and click Join 4. Ignore the automatic app download 5. Go back 6. Click "Join a meeting" again 7. Enter meeting id and click Join again 8. Ignore the app download again 9. Click at "If nothing prompts, click here" 10. Click "Join from your browser" 11. Agree to terms of service 12. Enter password and name, click Join
Not saying you should do that, but that's why there's a difference.
Seems to work for them, and gets around that whole song and dance you described.
And in truth, I usually don't want to see anyone else's face either. Aren't there companies that forbid looking at someone for more than five seconds? Well guess what, on a video call, they're staring at you for minutes on end.
Wait what? Could someone explain to me the reasoning behind a policy like this?
Edit: it appears to be a sexual harassment policy, and apparently Netflix has tried it [0]
[0] https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/netflix-five-second-s...
Examples like this can accidentally or intentionally be misread as policy, but it is not actually policy. It's an example of what can be not OK in some contexts. Of course, I'm happy to be corrected if someone who works there wants to jump on and say otherwise. But I very much doubt that such a policy exists. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
https://qz.com/work/1306193/is-it-sexual-harassment-to-stare...
"A spokeswoman clarified there is no such “rule” at Netflix. However, she confirms that the recommendation was, in fact, discussed in an anti-harassment training session, though it’s not an official guideline."
> Employees who have been using Zoom [...] can continue to do so through a web browser or via mobile.
Before Google Docs existed, many employees used MS Office, and when Docs was being rolled out Googlers were incentivized to switch to Docs by being offered kudos, swag, etc (ie, the carrot, not the stick).
Google is the fourth biggest public company in the world as measured by market cap.
A Microsoft 365 "E3" license is $20/user/month. They can afford it.
This restriction is entirely about eating your own dogfood.
Maybe I'm dumb, why wouldn't they be saving money by not paying for Office? Obviously they could buy it for every employee, including the majority that don't need it, but why? They could also just light money on fire (but why?)?
I work for another FAANG and we don’t use MS Word. It certainly isn’t “standard” for us. It’s not standard for two of the three FAANG companies, so “everywhere” is inaccurate. Being popular isn’t the same thing as standard. Pages is a far more usable for the vast majority of use cases. Most people aren’t creating extremely complicated word processing documents in their day-to-day. Word is a bloated mess. Keynote is far easier and more elegant than PowerPoint. Excel however certainly shines for big spreadsheet work, but for most spreadsheet work Numbers and the google spreadsheet are perfectly fine.
1. Google is dogfooding it's own products to improve them and make them competitive and stop potential data/privacy/security leaks by using external software.
2. Google is trying to save 20 bucks
There is nothing wrong with Google docs or sheets and I have used them both. But sooner or later you make enough documents or work with enough spreadsheets you're going to want or need some feature that office has.
Google may be a rich company but it's also a very frugal company in many ways, particularly wrt technology (they pioneered the "huge amounts of redundant cheap hardware" approach to DC construction, for example). When Googlers were being coaxed into switching to Docs from MS Office, the financial benefits were front and centre to that pitch.
1. Yes, Google probably prefers for people to use its own products both for usability and security reasons.
2. Google also wants to save money. However, if someone wants a license for a Microsoft product, they can get one.
three?
It's not just the money it's also additional security vulns to defend.
I did most of my doc writing in LyX before Google, though.
Word in the browser is a billion times better for formatting than Google Docs. I loath using google docs. But when it comes to Collab, Google docs wins hands down.
As someone who has had to build relatively complex tools in both Sheets and Excel, I would have to say Sheets has done a much more impressive job with their builtin formulas/functions than Excel.
The JS in Sheets also run in the cloud. Really nice for scheduled things or things that talk to an api or similar. But being able to run stuff locally is nice to.
I have used about a dozen over the years in my role as a consultant, and Zoom has been by far the most reliable. I’m hopeful lots of good can come from the scrutiny, but please Zoom get your act together so I don’t have to use some other buggy thing that doesn’t actually work.
Human interaction that actually works right now is so important. And I simply have a hard time trusting another product to actually do the call reliably
Perhaps I'm just used to them as a remote worker, but they were never all that janky to begin with. Or, rather, more janky than the other tools available at the time.
I hadn't used Jitsi until this current situation meant friends wanted to "meet up" drunkenly on Friday evenings but it's the same.
The main obstacles are hardware. The cheapest correct working solution for a single individual participant is a headset and a webcam. Can you use lapel microphones, or (as two of my Youtube creator friends do for Friday evenings) sit in front of a huge professional microphone with filters? Yes, yes you can but that's not for most users. Can you plug a high-end SLR that's focused dead on you into a converter and stream that instead of a webcam? Yup, but again most people either don't own an SLR or don't want to set it up just so they can be a bit clearer and brighter when drunk.
And the thing about hardware is that we abstracted this away entirely. Zoom doesn't have different hardware support from Hangouts or Skype or any other tool.
"Which VC tool should we use for this meeting?" is a bike shed discussion at the best of times. Chances are good either you didn't need a video conference at all, or any of the tools would have been fine.
Teams is awful. Skype is worse. WebEx is just fine. So is Zoom.
Disclaimer: I work for Alphabet, but already held this opinion before I did.
Every second time I’m using it, I either don’t hear the other people, or people do not hear me. YMMV.
Edit: Maybe if I could receive some support from Google to find out what my problem is, I’d be able to fix it. But that ain’t going to happen.
Jitsi and Google Meet worked by following a link and clicking one popup. Much easier UX
I wish Google would just provide the internal tool and sell that. It’s the opposite of dogfooding their product. They eat the good stuff and product a lesser product to their customers.
I tried looking up the features on the Wikipedia page [0] and didn’t see a really comprehensive list. I reviewed Wikipedia because when I searched for google meet, Google’s top result (that seems like their product page) [1] just had an “open” button that linked out to the App Store to install “Hangouts Meet by Google.”
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hangouts [1] https://meet.google.com/
It seems to work only in Chrome and Safari.
My pet peeve with Meet by the way is the absence of a native grid view in big rooms.
These two remove from one-another other.
Zoom just showcased this back to back to back to back in a few weeks time). They played tricks with the words. "we wrote ABC but what we really meant is XYZ" is a shitty response to any type of audit/scrutiny.
This is a public company. They have an Internal Audit. What the hell were these guys been auditing in security audits??? The color of the background????
My experience with Google Meet matches yours with Zoom.
Nothing else comes close on Linux for me.
We use it internally at Xero, more than ever currently with working from home, and it's been solid from what I've experienced.
Given we also use Google Calendar, joining a meeting is pretty straight forward, as a Meet link is populated in each event, and shows up on the home screen for meet.google.com
Usually the only mic issues that occur are people using their own headsets with audio gain set too high or flaky bluetooth connections
Running in Firefox, it works great for the most part although sadly it breaks every few months. It'll tend to drop me from the lobby a few seconds in with "Network Error" or something along those lines. I would get frustrated but given it's a work tool, a few days to a week using Chrome (just for calls) and Firefox is back in action again.
We also conduct our postmortems via Google Meet and it generally seems to support 50+ person calls fairly well. That said, we use Hangouts Streaming for All Hands type of stuff so I couldn't speak on performance with hundreds of users at once
Purely anecdotal but my coworker has an older HP laptop (specs are still a respectable 8GB ram, presumably quad core CPU) and finds that he can't be on a Google Meet call while also doing development as his fans will flare up too much.
I would actually quite appreciate a Google Meet desktop app (that's not electron) but I guess the premium userbase tend to have enough specs to throw at web-based products
Oh yeah, I do appreciate that Zoom presumably doesn't require any fancy logins because running Google Meet on a phone requires a device policy in order to connect to a call.
I can either install it on my device plainly (requiring a pin to login going forward vs say, a fingerprint) or I could install it in a work profile. The latter is cleaner but then I have an entire second set of apps just to join a call on my phone once in a blue moon :(
At least you can dial into meetings but I find the audio is kinda wonky at times.
Having said all this, I can respect the product but I'm always happy for a non-Google entity to win in any given space ;)
* We run into so many issues screen sharing, usually it's just that the persons screen doesn't show up, but it's also often way to compressed to read
* Even just 1 on 1 it makes my laptop cry, with 5 or 6 people in a conference I have to minimize the application or I cannot use my laptop at all because of the CPU load, and at 12+ people even with the application minimized it was maxing out my 2017 Macbook Pro CPU
* For comparison, I recently was in a 230 person Zoom conference, laptop hardly noticed
* I often have audio issues and it requires restarting the application or chrome before it fixes itself
* Really the performance of it is the biggest reason I hate it, we tried having a "lounge" where people join it and just chill while working, but we stopped because once a few of us got on it our computers just became unusable
If you are using firefox you will encounter issues
The phone application had a few updates between the failures and the success, so perhaps everything's sorted out. I also need to give the desktop native application a try.
I'm rooting for them, I really hope we get a viable free software option. But we should be honest about the state of things right now.
Considering your alternatives with zoom clients being banned it's not that far of a stretch.
I've been using WebEx in enterprise/corporate environment for couple of years intensively, and it "just works". I can download desktop client, but I can also just run it on browser.
Zoom always wants to install weird clients that violate policies and cause my corporate laptops to refuse or bork.
I recognize my experience may be a minority one, but I'm surprised, genuinely, at this perception that it's "the one video conferencing software" that works.
What people struggle to understand is that Zoom made it easy accross ALL operating systems. While Webex might "just work" on a subset of Windows and Mac hosts.
I use Linux as my day to day OS and WebEx is a nightmare (which sticks well to the stereotypical enterprise tool from Cisco).
Many solutions don't require a local software. That's an onboarding hurdle. Zoom's dial-in system also requires host approval, which lead to mayhem across every Zoom call I've been forced to join today. Most importantly, someone inviting me to a Zoom call says something about how they value security.
Zoom's audio quality is better. But it's not irreplaceably better. In terms of UX and reliability, it's been a mixed bag. In terms of security and branding, it's awful.
- Overall webex UI is very slow/laggy, subjective - yes, but I think it'd be obvious to any regular person.
- It makes my self-view a tiny floating box (this drives me crazy, I want it to be the same size as the others).
- Gallery view doesn't work well, sometimes the speaker is duplicated in sharing content speaker view and again in gallery view.
- Audio switching doesn't work as well between putting airpods on and off.
- More video/audio failures than Zoom in general (enough to be annoying).
I'm not sure why Zoom is the only one that does Gallery view right - the others all seem to mess this interface up (maybe because they can't handle the traffic?)
Also, when I was evaluating conferencing systems for my micro-ISV, I tried several - the screen sharing on Zoom was laggy as hell, moreso than I saw with anything else. It was 1-2 years ago, so things might have changed since then.
And every so often by virtue of being open in the background, WebEx manages to somehow crash my BT headphones.
Other than that, no real complaints.
The default behavior of Webex is to grab the microphone and keep it always-open looking for audio signals from Webex-compatible hardware.
I found this because I was bothered that even though I wasn't on a call Windows was telling me that Webex was actively using the Microphone, so I dug in. IIRC the post that guided me to this, on Apple devices with their earbuds it apparently also significantly degrades the sound due to some codec issue (or did in the past).
I also have a B2B micro-ISV, and chose Webex for that too, largely because it just works, but also because it's almost expected in corporate circles.
not that we save anything from zoom that I need to be concerned about key storage for, but concerning nonetheless.
"The AES-128 keys, which we verified are sufficient to decrypt Zoom packets intercepted in Internet traffic, appear to be generated by Zoom servers, and in some cases, are delivered to participants in a Zoom meeting through servers in China, even when all meeting participants, and the Zoom subscriber’s company, are outside of China."
We need more details about this, ideally from Zoom, as this is not really a lot of detail, and includes a lot of "apparently", "we suspect", etc.
https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/03/response-to-resear...
>There is the thing that all Zoom keys are kept and maintained in China
Their complaint was about zoom's encryption key generation and distribution practices. The post you linked has nothing about the key distribution scheme zoom needs to implement so they actually have end-to-end encryption.
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/04/03/does-zoo...
Without proper encryption, it doesn't matter if all participants in a meeting only connect to zoom servers since you don't know what zoom could be doing inside their network. Are they actually routing data without any storage, or any they storing the data and sending a stream out the back door to interested parties? But with true end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter what zoom does with the meeting data since only the participants can decrypt it.
Not to mention that for a sufficiently interested actor, they don't need to access zoom's network to intercept a copy of a meeting as it makes its way through the internet to a zoom server. End-to-end encryption also ensures they only get junk.
OP: all Zoom keys are kept and maintained in China
me: got a source for that claim?
you: quote citizen lab, sometimes zoom keys are sent to china
me: i didn't ask if keys were sometimes sent to china and that's not what OP said
you: not what the original poster stated.
this is where you lost me
> But with true end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter
i never said it mattered. i don't care if zoom is e2e encrypted or not, which is why i didn't bring it up.
> Not to mention that for a sufficiently interested actor, they don't need to access zoom's network
people get away with this internet boogeyman argument because its technically true, but what percentage of internet traffic inside the continental US is actually being monitored and exfiltrated to APTs? compromises happen internally. i cant remember any stories of a data breach occurring with data in transit, as opposed to data at rest.
A number of our hospital customers were diving in head first with Zoom, but are now backing off. I am curious to hear if there is any legal fallout from any of this.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-...
We have this or skype for b as approved. 10% of all meetings in skype bugs out and at least one person can not hear the rest or gets kicked out or can not see the others in the meeting. Or someone is presenting and a mandatory update is being rolled out and computer restarts but this is more related to the OS.
Zoom just works and you hear each others so much better. Stable and working. Lets hope all these new features makes it more secure.
I have honestly lost track of the amount of software I've seen in the past 20 years, that people insist they absolutely must continue to use despite its well documented gaping security flaws. Because it has a better UI or makes their life very slightly more convenient in some way.
Versions of Microsoft Office from the early 2000s where an entire operating system could be pwned simply by opening an excel or word file with malicious vbscript in it were good examples. JPG parsing buffer overflows. People continued to not only not patch it, but use it in its out of the box configuration.
For reference, organizations that have now banned Zoom include google, NYC public schools, SpaceX and NASA.
I think you've missed the point completely. It's not a question of convenient UI. It's the reliability of the video call. I've tried numerous video conferencing tools, and the differentiating factor is literally just whether or not the video quality is consistently good, whether the call is dropped or not, and whether the audio is audible.
The challenges related to audio sucking are mostly individual end users' audio stepping on itself, such as feedback from speakerphone configurations into its own microphone. Easily solved by good quality bluetooth headsets, wired headsets, or simply using something as basic as holding an android or ios phone up to your ear.
And I do put "video quality is consistently good" in the category of "makes peoples' lives slightly more convenient". It's not essential.
Tone, emotion, and intent are incapable of being conveyed properly without facial expressions and audible cues.
<rant> We are supposed to be engineers here. I regularly see this attitude that one thing is always and inherently better than another. Life is (mostly) a zero sum game and it is our job to pick a solution for the problem at hand. And the more we can constrain that problem, the better, cheaper, more reliably we can deliver a solution. More information is not better. Maybe for interview body language is important but for deciding what story to pull or what commits you did? Not really.
</rant>
If you're one of the few people that don't have person-to-person interaction on a daily basis - congratulations. However, that places you firmly in the minority.
Edit: Why the downvotes?
They have this long long outstanding bug where if they deem the audio low-quality (despite the fact it's crystal clear) they gain the audio and it goes crackly and too loud. If you turn down the volume... they gain it again, and again, and again, till you need to restart the app. Only for it to happen again.
The problem with Office and Zoom is that they are _the best_ at what they do right now. And that has a massive impact on what people are willing to give up to use it (money, privacy, risk, etc).
I hope Zoom gets their act together because their competitors, with way more time and resources, suck a lot more. I don't think it's because of the difference in security--maybe it's because competitors were focusing on Enterprise or because it wasn't their core business?
I think each of those companies that have banned it make sense, even if that means the average person should continue using it. Zoombombing elementary school children because of a misconfiguration (or just because of the media reports) isn't a great idea and the security concerns warrant the rest. I still don't see much of an issue for other business and most personal use.
If the very slight productivity hit from having slightly-more-blocky video chat in a slightly-more-awkward GUI client (google hangouts meet for gsuite, for instance, or Teams) is the make-or-break line between a company's continuing success, or not, with everyone working remotely, something else is fundamentally wrong that has no relation to any software package.
I hope both Zoom improves their practices and other enterprise tools step up their game, too. It's been a joke that the first 15m of a meeting is spent getting things working for decades now.
Zoom seems to have spent time in some areas almost completely ignored by most others: Linux, more than a handful of simultaneous users, and poor connections (I feel like Zoom has other benefits, but these are egregiously bad with competitors). At my previous job it wasn't just slightly-more-blocky video chat in a slightly-more-awkward GUI client. We used our own equipment (and mostly used Linux in-house) and were spread all over the world (some countries had poor connectivity). We also had our company meetings via Zoom. We often tried other software and didn't bless any one of them, but I don't think any other single software would work. Without Zoom I imagine we'd do most meetings via voice--likely over POTS.
This is one of the places where FOSS has a great role to play, vendor neutral infrastructure code. Any thing from one of the FAANG companies or even a startup is constantly going to have to find a way to create value for the company and inevitably that leads to data harvesting and sales.
What I have observed is that FOSS folks like to pick poor names for things which limits their ability to penetrate into the world of the non-computer geeks. Case in point, Jitsi. WTF? My parents are never going to remember what something named "Jitsi" does, ever. Call it "GNU Video Conferencing System (GVCS)" or just "Video Conferences" please.
If the issues are ethical or political, they aren't ever going to get fixed.
Once may have been an honest mistake. Twice (and now more) is definitely a culture problem that's not going to be fixed without massive turnover.
Note, works best in Chrome (likely Chromium) based on what the docs say.
If this was a Microsoft/Google product it would be pilloried to death.
Threat modelling is fine for your home security, but it is now dangerously anachronistic when evaluating anything connected to the internet. One solution would be to at least educate people about the need for a security mindset on a massive scale, or at worst craft some laws to force it.
I’m sure there are many people who would accept the risks of drink driving: we don’t let them.
I'm not sure one is necessarily better than the other once you're in the call but I prefer Meet for the Calendar integration.
It got so bad we added a bluejeans on fire emoji on slack to announce our problems. That said, I've not used it for a year, so some of those issues might be fixed: Software doesn't sit still.
https://blog.joeldare.com/creating-an-install-free-dock-icon...
Zoom stopped the browser login from working for a few days, but it seems to be back working now.
I understand there are some business reasons here and there (MS wants people on Teams not Skype) but it doesn't matter.
'Basic Video' should be as common, robust and reliable as making a phone call.
Our church group has been using it with 12-ish participants once a week for several weeks now. There are individuals who consistently have problems, but since it's always the same people, I tend to think they'd have similar issues with Zoom. (Zoom meetings with different sets of people have had similar sorts of issues.)
People are saying that Firefox "technically works" but that due to limitations in the spec, one person in your conference using FF causes everyone else's cpu to go through the roof. (Can't speak authoritatively on that, but FF is labeled as not fully supported.)
Fundamentally, I think it probably comes down to the business model. The company that runs meet.jit.si, 8x8, doesn't make money on that service; they make money selling some large integrated business solution. Running the free service seems to be less of a loss leader than a massive pool of beta testers. So they aren't pushing it as hard as Zoom, where (at least originally) the free version was limited to 40 minutes to directly up-sell you to the paid version.
Two other things about Zoom:
1. Easy to get the client installed, and once it's installed, it's easy to use. Of course, they consistently do that by working around the protections your OS has in place by dodgy methods.
2. It seems to work well in China. Not sure how Jitsi fares in that respect.
EDIT: Some cool things about Jitsi:
1. NO INSTALL AT ALL for desktops. People just click the link and bam, you're in a meeting.
2. Rooms are created when a URL is visited. So if you want so split into two groups, half of you can just add "2" to the URL, and bam -- group is split in two. Ready to join back together? Delete the '2' and you're back together again.
Anyway, all that to say -- I think Jitsi is definitely worth a try. Tell people to use something Chromium-based until they've fixed the issue with FF (I use Brave) and give it a shot.
1. We used google meet a lot, but it's very CPU intense and also does not run in Safari so I have to start Chrome to run it 2. It's a better UI and Video Conf experience, hands down.
I realize that it has issues but nothing truly major as far as I can see.
You can't safely assume all your employees are properly assessing the risks unless that is their actual job. If you only allow what you know then you can reason about your risk.
Engineers aren’t clamoring to get into the kinds of companies where IT needs to pre-approve software for their workstations.
Of course, after years and years and hundreds of thousands of engineers, the whitelist is pretty robust.
I don't know for sure, but I bet Zoom has been on that whitelist, and "banning" is removing it from that whitelist.
Our laptops are configuration managed, force upgraded, and surveilled, but we all have root and IT has never stood in the way of "power user" behavior. The extent of the frustration in engineering is that their management processes sometimes eat CPU. My understanding is that most of the Valley is like this.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2159...
There is nothing new/outstanding.
Once may have been an honest mistake; 2+ times is now a pattern.
Installing third-party software on corp devices is generally a no-go at a lot of workplaces. With the security problems that Zoom has been having, it's only prudent of IT to ban its use on work devices.
> Why would forcing use of web version mitigate any concerns?
Because the web version runs in a browser sandbox, so there's a reduced risk of it compromising the security of the corp device.
> The concerns I have heard are lack of proper end-to-end encryption, servers in China and the possibility to join chatrooms by guessing a name (zoom-bombing)).
Googlers don't use Zoom for work, they use it for personal stuff, so that's not the problem.
From the perspective of a generic IT department: Even if there aren't any security problems with having the client installed on your workstation - the problem is that when they've made so many amateurish security mistakes, it's difficult for IT to trust the binary blob that Zoom wants you to install on your computer.
Corporate device security is a series of safety-versus-efficiency tradeoffs, made with incomplete information. Banning Zoom does not really compromise efficiency, if you aren't using it for work stuff.
"For those who have no choice but to use Zoom, including in contexts where secrets may be shared, we speculate that the browser plugin may have some marginally better security properties, as data transmission occurs over TLS."
Apparently the web version doesn't use their homegrown encryption scheme.
But your point stands either way. I'm just surprised at the pass being given to Zoom given the blitheness of their gaffes.
I write like this because I am not sure what I can disclose.
I really want to know what goes on within Product Management at Google, because looking from the outside in I cannot imagine anything other than sheer incompetence.
A friend was managing a project on a shoestring budget. Upper management (C-suite) had reviewed the idea and green-lit it. He had been told Larry and Sergei in particular had voiced support. He got it done ahead of schedule and under budget by managing a stream of off-cycle interns. The week it was scheduled to go live, someone in middle management killed it. My friend and his team got zero credit for a job very well done, a big setback for him. He and I were working on an internal tool for datacenter management as a 20% project when I left. I asked him about it later, and our 20% project met a similar fate: enthusiastic support from management, including giving us some resources, all the way through completion, followed by cancellation shortly after completion. My friend left less than a year later.
Another friend started a modest improvement to chat as a 20% project, which later got expanded to a full-time project for several engineers. I forget the external name, but the internal code name was "Taco Town" after the SnL skit. Walkabout / Wave was a skunkworks project that used its separate repository, which was very rare at Google. People knew something mysterious was going on down in Australia, but we really had no idea what it was, other than the Google Maps guys were running it and it was named "Walkabout". When Walkabout / Wave came out of skunkworks mode shortly before external launch, the Taco Town team realized they needed to launch very soon or their project would never launch because its functionality was subsumed by Walkabout / Wave. Taco Town rushed its launch, was a bit buggy and had some scalability issues that they knew about, but expected to be able to improve shortly after launch. I think Taco Town's botched launch a few weeks before Walkabout/Wave contributed to initial confusion around Wave and some of Taco Town's problems colored perceptions of Wave's launch.
Shortly after I left, Google publicly announced they'd be putting "more wood behind fewer arrows", which was a step in the right direction.
I get it that management doesn't want to discourage engineers or stifle innovation, and they know they don't have a good handle on what will be successful and what won't, but keeping around zombie projects gives engineers false hope. The "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" style of project management can be soul-crushing for talented junior people managing small projects, unless they're properly supported and really get proper credit for doing a very good job engineering something that fails for non-engineering reasons.
It was banned as in it can no longer be installed on corp laptops.
Especially at Google scale, where the BeyondCorp system described in their papers could automatically see when an endpoint was doing something naughty, block the user from accessing corporate resources, and give the user information on how to fix it, instead of blocking them from installing anything (even if what they want is perfectly harmless).
I have no idea how I know this. ;)
There's also that zoom free tier creating a 'Shadow IT' situation. Slack used this to great effect and everybody on HN was very impressed. It should be no surprise that Zoom is finding its way onto random employee laptops, that is something tech firms are trying to do on purpose now.
With various levels of being merged or not.
Many (most?) companies are perfectly fine with you using your corporate machine for typical home-life stuff and side projects as well.
Reduces waste of having to buy two devices.
Seems nothing wrong with it to me?
> They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach.
If an engineer from Microsoft has to speak to an engineer from Google, and you think they should both be dog-fooding their own video application... how do you see that working? Just both dig their feet in and never talk to each other? Seems silly to me.
One or both are going to have to install a video application that isn't their own aren't they?
They could use a telephone. (Yes, they still exist.)
Edit for response:
Neither Google nor Microsoft forbid their employees from using telephones, and neither would even consider it. The assumption that they'd dogfood their own video chat platforms is obviously not a supposition that they'd ban telephones. Your comment frames the matter as though a third party video chat service is the only pragmatic option. Video chat was a fringe concept not very long ago, considered mostly to be in the realm of science fiction. Even today, inter-company telephone meetings are still common. Tech-fetishists working in this industry often seem to lose sight of the obvious time-tested solutions that still work today. I think a lot of people are earnestly forgetting that telephones still exist.
Well that's example of what I suggested they'd have to do - use someone else's service.
We're using MS Teams and it seems to be pretty great for us (team of about 15), we use Skype to contact the remaining 20ish more junior staff who don't need Teams licenses just to be able to keep in touch with their work and keep the face to face communication going.
That kinda applies to any modern client. H.323 and SIP are ok, but webrtc is brutal.
Since finding this I find hangouts meet much more tolerable!
Uh. Are we reading different websites? This is the most vocally anti-everything-FAANG community I've seen on the Internet, since about 2017 or so. Except Apple, mostly.
EDIT: Ok MS is not FAANG.
lacker put it particularly nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22814338
Google, Facebook and others get criticism for exactly the same reasons
- your friends set up a zoom happy hour - current personal laptop is fubar or super old/unsupported - you use work laptop, installing zoom
As someone not in sales, I have never seen anyone try to use Zoom for actual work meetings.
Some of this is consumer vs. enterprise tension, though. Emoji demo really well on an initial product tour; reliability is one of those key features that's really hard to get people excited about, but which people hate to find lacking.
I wouldn't go that far - there's something like 250k hangout meetings per day at Google[0] and that was before Covid.
[0] https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/how-google-went-all... (2017)
"Nearly a decade has passed since we built the first prototype. Face-to-face collaboration is ingrained in Google’s DNA now—more than 16,500 meetings rooms are VC-equipped at Google and our employees join Hangouts 240,000 times per day!"
Hangouts Chat, on the other hand...well okay, it seems reliable enough, doesn't have that problem that old Hangouts did. Comparing the UX to Discord just makes me sad though.
Joking asides, this is a weak way to promote the fact they have a competing tool.