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> I wonder. Are all the vulnerabilities and issues with Zoom because of its popularity? In a sense, yes. I think Zoom has achieved far more popularity than Zoo
by lewiscollard 6y ago
> I wonder. Are all the vulnerabilities and issues with Zoom because of its popularity?
In a sense, yes. I think Zoom has achieved far more popularity than Zoom was prepared for. Everything about Zoom feels like it was thrown together hastily and for a much smaller audience.
It may seem unrelated, but I think a microcosm of all this was: Attention tracking. They removed this feature because of its unpopularity after privacy people flagged it, which may have not happened if Zoom hadn't gotten popular. But it also shows that they have no internal brakes on this sort of thing; no strong product lead or anyone else able to push back on the PowerPoint prodders with "nope, not happening, that's fucking weird and creepy".
Can you expect good code to come out of that environment?
Notably, these vulnerabilities were in features I, a daily user of Zoom in these weird times, did not even know existed (code snippets and GIFs). Strikes me as more "shit rushed out of the door with no oversight and minimal code review to get boxes checked".
- dzhiurgis 6y agoGood code? Absolutely! Zoom works buttery smooth for amount of features it has. No other competitor comes close. Secure? Different story. But if code quality correlates with security, then most likely yes. They can push secure code.
- chrisweekly 6y ago"No competitor comes close" May I introduce you to https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si, which works flawlessly, is open-source, and supports e2e encryption. I really don't understand why "use Jitsi" isn't the stock answer when people start complaining about Zoom, let alone on HN.
- dijksterhuis 6y agoBecause there are other factors to consider for each user's use case. Jitsi wouldn't work for the Zoom meetings I admin. It's too technical for a very untechnical audience. Zoom was hard enough, and 90% of the meetings in our ecosystem use Zoom, meaning they only need one app. Asking them to use Jitsi would require two (as every other meeting uses Zoom), which means a non technical audience has to learn 2 technical things instead of 1. In the case of E2E encryption, every attendee has to type in the meeting key when they join for it to work. The users I work with will forget/won't understand why etc. They just want to speak to people. So that will render e2e useless if 1 out of 20 attendees doesn't do it. Not to mention we have attendees who don't own a smartphone so have to dial in. Making the E2E Jitsi stuff pointless. Jitsi is great for technical people. Zoom is great for non technical people.
- whydoyoucare 6y agoAre you sure you aren't underestimating the intelligence of your audience? ;-)
- jedieaston 6y ago"Zoom was hard enough" Which would imply that some users had issues getting onto Zoom, the easiest of these systems to join. So why make it harder?
- chrisweekly 6y ago"Zoom, the easiest of these systems to join" wat? That's a totally-incorrect assumption. Zoom requires installation of software. Jitsi doesn't.
- dijksterhuis 6y agoPosted this in reply to another reply to my original parent. > I've actually just gone off to try out jitsi again (i do actually check to see if it's worth switching platforms) and it turns out it asks me to install an android app too. So Jit.si itself actually needs me to download software on my smartphone. So......
- dijksterhuis 6y agoThis is exactly one of the points I was trying to make. 90% of of the other meetings in our eco-system of meetings use Zoom. Adding additional barriers is something we have to try and avoid in our use case.
- dijksterhuis 6y agoDon't get me wrong, our users are very intelligent. They've done great things on Zoom. But technical "whizzkid stuff" (as they call it) is not something they are comfortable with.
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoHow and in what way is jitsi "too technical"? It's trivial to use.