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Comment by 0xmarcin | Hacker News Reader

Maybe services like Okta (at least the core part without UI, just like macOS & Darwin) should be open source by default? That would be a good policy to forcibly open source anything connected to encryption/authorization/authentication or PKI.

Whoever solen this code can sell it to criminals/evil countries/black hats around the world, so on Okta's place I would start scanning the code with all available static checkers and fix as much and as fast as I could.

Okta become quite popular among startups, I used it at my prev work and I use it at my current job. I even considering investing into its stock. My only complain is that it is somehow slow, otherwise UI is acceptable and Chrome plugin is OKish.

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There's nothing in Okta that isn't already open-source in projects like Keycloak or Ory.

Okta is a terrible, expensive, and potentially incompetent (this is not their first breach) hosted knockoff of the above.

They are to auth what Zoom is to webconfs: Just Bad But Good At Marketing. In the winner-takes-all environment of the web economy, they must be making pretty good money.

Zoom legitimately has better video quality than everyone else. I wish they didn't but they do.

Zoom client also Just Works.

I can test the mic and video before joining. I can also change my mic and video source after joining.

You'd think that both are 100% basic features, but nope. Can't do either in Google Meet or Teams...

You can do that in Teams client for macOS at least. Teams is even smart enough to pick up new audio devices mid-meeting, if, say, you connect a new pair of headphones.

Didn't work the last time I had to have a meeting with my kid's teacher on Teams.

Had to literally quit the meeting to pick a new webcam, Teams wanted to pick the shitty laptop one instead of my dedicated camera on top of the main monitor. It also wanted to use the webcam's microphone and display's speakers instead of my actual speakers and proper microphone.

Teams definitely supports changing video and audio devices after joining a meeting, I use that feature almost daily. It’s not new.

Are you using the macOS client a browser client?

Meet does both of those things.

To be fair, Zoom is the only modern conferencing software that actually has a native client instead of Electron garbage.

Back in the day many services had beautiful native clients (MSN/Windows Live, Skype pre-Microsoft, etc) that successfully delivered videoconferencing on single-core CPUs and sub-gigabyte RAM capacities but clearly it was worth sacrificing all that just to give Javascript developers a career.

Nowadays few companies besides Zoom seem to be able to replicate this experience despite processing power being more than double (not that Zoom is perfect, but it's the least bad).

Zoom's native client uses Qt WebEngine, so not Electron garbage but still Blink garbage.

I haven't used lots of videoconference tools, but Zoom has a killer feature I haven't seen elsewhere:

The ability to put camera feeds on one screen and screenshare on another.

If you're using a laptop's built-in webcam, and you have external monitors, that makes the "video meeting with a screenshare" experience noticeably better.

I disagree about Zoom. They managed to get big by being better than Skype and Teams. And that was who they needed to compete with.

Absolutely. Zoom is the first video conference software I have used where the first 15 minutes of the meeting is not spent on impromptu tech support to get everyone connected, seeing, and hearing everyone else. And I'm exaggerating only slightly.

They did that by breaking user privacy and security on an unprecedented level. That's why I said they are Just Bad - their practices are terrible. But they were good at selling (i.e. deflecting when challenged on their bad behaviour), and that worked. They are "better" than alternatives in the same way Oracle is "better" than other database vendors.

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