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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> God please don't make me use a non-zoom video conferencing tool!

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.

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> Because it has a better UI or makes their life very slightly more convenient in some way.

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.

Personal opinion, you don't need video or talking heads to have a conference. Some combination of text chat to share documents with simultaneous good quality audio is sufficient.

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.

I disagree. To build connection, read body language, and show people are paying attention it’s important to see the person... we ask that of all of our internal remote calls.

oh yeah, let's try to look each other into the eyes. ooooh no, seems that doesn't work. And "show people paying attention": why do a conference at all if people have no stake in it?

VC > Audio > Text

Tone, emotion, and intent are incapable of being conveyed properly without facial expressions and audible cues.

Audio < Text when too many people are trying to communicate at the same time.

<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>

Deciding what story to pull generally revolves around conversations during sprint planning or with a product manager. What commits you did means you're committing which means you probably (should) have had code reviews. Often times code reviews involve discussions.

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.

I think you didn't parse their sentence correctly.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

Exactly. A lot of tools barely recognize webcams or desktop mics. You’re expected to dial in, which means being tied to whatever terrible audio quality the phone bridge provides for talking to 20 people.

wait what, are you using the DOS-zoom client? Or how is it, that everyone else got general drivers for their devices so applications can use standardized APIs and "just work"

If you've never been on a conference call where someone can't get their dial-in, audio, camera, screen share, or mute button to work, I'd suspect you've never been in a conference call. These recurring issues are fewer with Zoom. I spent 6 hours on zoom today (ugh), and every day I'm in a 25-to-50-person call that has consistently been buttery smooth.

WebRTC is much better at having "consistently good video quality" as this benchmark convincingly shows: https://jitsi.org/news/a-simple-congestion-test-for-zoom/

Just in case anyone else was wondering, here's a web app where you can try WebRTC. https://appr.tc/

On a 1:1 video call. There a dozens of good tools for that - show me a good webrtc app that can handle a 50 user video call well. Or even 10-15 users.

WebRTC fell down for 6 users the other day, so we switched to G2M

GoToMeeting is the WORST!

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.

Wow, I've never had that happen in GoToMeeting, but I had something similar happen in MS Teams today.

On the other hand Microsoft Office is still used today - and is still the #1 office suite, especially with Excel. They've since cleaned up most of their security issues (I'm sure some exist, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be).

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).

Other than pivot tables, what makes Office better than iWork?

iWork doesn't even have a [pro scene](https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY)

For everyone freaking out about zoom security, some facts: 52 CVEs for Zoom https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=zoom 240 for webex https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=webex 1 for gotomeeting https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=gotomeeting and 2 for pexip https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=pexip which means nobody is looking at the last two...

What are you advocating for? Either way business will continue; lock down security and people (and productivity) will suffer but still continue, ignore security and business will still happen. Different business will fail in each scenario, but the world won't end. Heck, force people to jump through hoops to support insecure software and work still gets done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804208

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.

I am specifically advocating that organizations with important data to protect take a more cautious and measured approach to installing software on their workstation computers.

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.

That sounds like an appropriate response. I do think the BYOD push over the past 10+ years has improved Enterprise experience for end users and I expect things like Zoom and the current push for work-from-home does the same for working remotely.

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.

coughInternet Explorercough :-)

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.

C'mon, jitsi is just as good/bad a name as slack, discord, webex, bluejeans, skype, zoom, or any other video conference system name.

Ah the days of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting I recall them so well. Desktop videoconferencing and whiteboard interaction was all about to go mainstream back then by many a manager evangelistic eye just far enough of the base of reality that it was almost believable. Yet still such things have to find a champion that rings true for all, let alone interoperability. Which is a shame as many standards out there matured over time.

their popularity was the reason why there were so many exploits

So many? I thought there were two, and I wouldn't call either of them "gaping" as GP did. https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/01/zoom-doom/

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