15 ms·

Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

317 points by ohjeez 6y ago

quanticle 6y ago
As others have pointed out, it's laughable to consider Zoom to be critical infrastructure when so many alternatives exist. Moreover, I find it somewhat strange that he's referring to Zoom as "critical infrastructure" instead of the major cloud providers like AWS or Azure. If Zoom goes down, it's an inconvenience to many. If AWS or Azure goes down, many business just stop functioning. Heck, many government departments might stop functioning, given how government infrastructure has been moving to "the cloud".
baldgeek 6y ago
The internet in general has become critical infrastructure for a while now. Yet it is not treated that way that is the root of the problem.
s09dfhks 6y ago
There are other options though. Things lit jitsi are growing in popularity. Its frustrating that a few "big companies" decided to use these tools so the rest of the world followed suit without doing their own research
nicoburns 6y ago
> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market. I don't think that's true of video-conferencing either. Zoom is probably the most popular (and technically superior), but there is also: Microsoft Teams, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, and many others, including open source options like Jitsi. And they all pretty much do the job.
- briffle 6y ago
  Yeah, it used to be (a year or two back) GotoMeeting and Webex were the 'big 2' and now, they hardly get mentioned.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    Zoom has been the major player in Uni for the last 2-3 years I would say.
- youeseh 6y ago
  For those that haven't tried Jitsi - my friends and I catch up on it almost daily. It is awesome. The phone app is great too. You can setup a room that people can jump in and out of, which is pretty convenient. If you're looking for that office feel for your small team, then Jitsi might be worth a shot. And, I think you can host your own server if you'd like to!
  - thechao 6y ago
    Have you used Lifesize? I'm not fond of either Hangouts or Zoom.
    - youeseh 6y ago
      I have not tried Lifesize.
  - vz8 6y ago
    We've tried Jitsi multiple times (as recently as a month ago) and the experience has been uniformly bad at anything beyond a handful of people. When we scaled to > 20 it was completely unusable (feedback / echos, delays, stuttering, dropouts, you name it).
    - boudin 6y ago
      Was it with a self-hosted version or the meet.jit.si public instance? Around 20 we had the same problem on the public instances but I wonder how much is server side or limitation on the client side. It also definitely worked better in Chrome, it seems that the Firefox situation is much better now though. On Safari echo cancellation was just not working.
    - nessunodoro 6y ago
      Were you self-hosting, or using the free service? If self-hosting, I'm curious what resources you were devoting to your VPS, and which hosting provider?
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Jitsi makes one of my friend's MacBooks fan too loud so we can't use it.
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  And unlike many other services, the network effect is quite low because I can easily install multiple video conferencing software or even run some in the browser. If someone organising a meeting asks to use something unusual, I'm normally not that bothered.
  - lima 6y ago
    Even WebEx is still around and, ironically, works much better in a browser than Zoom.
    - Geezus_42 6y ago
      New webex sucks for remote support. It forces me to re-request control every time I paste something. Yes I could manually type everything out but that is a pita when dealing with long Linux commands pulled from documentation.
      - GloriousKoji 6y ago
        Also the random hot keys webex picks up. All too often i'll mute myself instead of escape out of edit mode in vi.
      - dllthomas 6y ago
        Is it every time you paste something, or every time you leave the program and focus on another to copy something? If the latter, and you're using X, it should be possible to write a program that takes the selection buffer and provides a different response to each SelectionRequest in turn, letting you walk through a script pasting a command at a time without having to leave the current window. I don't know whether such a thing already exists.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      Even WebEx is still around and, ironically, works much better in a browser than Zoom. I had a videoconference with some Apple people this month, and they were all on WebEx. Maybe there's a reason. I couldn't tell you. My company is a hodgepodge of Zoom, Teams, BlueJeans, and who knows what else.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Microsoft Teams has improved quite a bit since the pandemic started also. They added things that were missing, like a tile view (max 9), raise your hand, and blurred or custom backgrounds. Zoom is still better, but Teams now seems "good enough" to me.
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    Max 9?! Zoom can do 25 without breaking a sweat.
- thebean11 6y ago
  Yeah, when Zoom went down the other day at work we just used the Google Meet link directly from the gcal invites. Like any mission critical infrastructure, it's up to organizations to have some redundancy. Nothing new.
- 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
  technically superior? I find it quite limiting and bare as an end user.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
Like backing up data, having a contingency plan is important. Even if you like zoom because of certain features, having a backup service you can use in case of emergency is important. If everyone knows beforehand "which link to try if zoom is down today", then it is merely an inconvenience instead of an emergency.
- aassddffasdf 6y ago
  Umm Slack can be used to coordinate a hop to another channel.
  - brobdingnagians 6y ago
    Yep, that's what I do, and work is easy to coordinate, but some other social events or organizations with inexperienced non-tech people don't have slack and don't think to check their email. It is easier for them to have a pre-specified backup option.
- smsm42 6y ago
  Email still exists. Just create google or microsoft or webex meeting and send email to all participants.
dougmwne 6y ago
Is this a submarine written by Microsoft PR? Seems very likely it could be. Seems to boil down to: "Little upstart company can't be trusted with important business, better buy from an established player."
- iso1210 6y ago
  Apple actually, although they claim it's not influenced by apple.
- brawnelamia 6y ago
  My company prohibited and even remote-force uninstalled zoom and mandated Skype or MS Teams right after the last rash of bad zoom PR. I feel pretty certain there was coordination from our Microsoft account manager and Microsoft's PR team on this front. The funny part is that Skype is famous for zero days while zoom is famous for people running pseudo public non-password protected conference calls that got invaded by teenagers.
  - boogies 6y ago
    The less funny part is that to the HN users who together made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23555226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23555226 my current most upvoted comment on HN, Zoom is known for “a history of shadiness (MacOS hidden server to prevent uninstallation), outright lies (E2EE), and attacking the pillars of democracy (censoring Chinese Americans discussing Tienanmen Square).” Not that MS isn’t shady, dishonest, or even a deep state tool of oppression (in light of the Snowden leaks, and at least in some people’s view Github’s ICE contract).
sigstoat 6y ago
has anyone built something on top of twilio's video offering? it looks relatively straightforward, and seems to me like most tech companies (and some university IT departments) could pretty easily build internal conferencing stuff on top of it if they cared to.
- leesalminen 6y ago
  I deployed one of their demo repos [0] and had some medium usage of it in production. It didn’t get a lot of use (most use Zoom) and almost always had < 5 participants. It worked well enough. The cost seemed affordable too, though I never looked too closely. It didn’t make a dent on our overall Twilio bill. [0] - https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-react https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-react
- notahacker 6y ago
  The startup I worked for earlier in the year added it to their existing private platform at great speed when a client asked for videoconferencing.
k__ 6y ago
Is it? I used like 5 different services in the last 7 months and all worked reasonably well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- randomdata 6y ago
  I use like five different services every day that work about as well as each other. I do happen to think Zoom does the best job out of the set, but it is only a marginal lead. It would be nothing to use something else.
- topspin 6y ago
  Likewise. I often use several different conference platforms a day. This fixation on Zoom really mystifies me. A couple months ago trolls were wandering around in Zoom conferences, recording things and interfering, making headlines. I would have thought users would abandon this open wound immediately for any of a plethora of alternatives, but for some reason they're dogmatically faithful. Somehow Zoom appears exempt from confidentiality or privacy concerns, even among corporate and government users. Have all the lawyers vanished with the appearance of COVID-19?
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  Zoom vs Hangouts is really like going from VHS to DVD. Hangouts' horribly pixelated video and frequent dropped frames and/or loss of video paints a huge contrast to Zoom's good video quality with very few glitches. Am surprised at people who think the two are comparable.
howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
State Courts are too reliant on Zoom and using its breakout rooms for very sensitive communications. This IS infrastructure and should be very concerning. Its an area DHS needs to take a close look at.
- bluedino 6y ago
  We interface with courts every day, they pretty much forgot about our direct connections using Polycom VC and went straight to Zoom
swiley 6y ago
The navy did a decent job with sqlight and TOR. I’d love to see a video chat app from them.
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > The navy did a decent job with sqlight and TOR. Tell us more?
peterwwillis 6y ago
Most of the internet that everyone in the world uses is constructed and maintained by companies that you don't give a single cent to, and who don't owe you anything if it goes down. This applies to a lot (maybe most?) things in the world. Say freight (trucks, trains, ships, etc) stops moving, for example. Within a month or two all the grocery stores would be empty. We'd have Mad Max-style convoys of cars driving around trying to find food and raid stores. It wasn't but a hundred or so years ago that most people survived on local food suppliers, and today almost none of our food is local.
ryeguy_24 6y ago
Zoom was not critical infrastructure 5 months ago. I think we’d adapt if needed.
look_lookatme 6y ago
This and email should have been what USPS was building over the last 20 years.
isatty 6y ago
It's not. People always find a way to adapt.
- kevincox 6y ago
  It is critical infrastructure if you don't have a backup. I think that it would be easy to have a backup plan to replace Zoom, but this needs to exist.
  - isatty 6y ago
    But there are many alternatives - Facetime, Google Meet, Skype, etc;
- kube-system 6y ago
  The fact that people adapt to not having it does not mean that something isn't critical infrastructure. Everything considered critical infrastructure has, at one time or another, been something that humans were adapted to not having.
xwdv 6y ago
Honestly what's the worst that could happen?
vicmiclovich 6y ago
Brookings, fix the HTTPS (SSL certificate missing on this blog page)
WilTimSon 6y ago
Zoom is only going to stay widely adopted until an easy, viable alternative comes along and gets in the good graces of people in charge. There are some alternatives now, like Facebook's group calls on WhatsApp but that one's fallen out of favour for obvious reasons.
- thekyle 6y ago
  Aren't WhatsApp calls only on the mobile app? I think the desktop only does chats.
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    This rules WhatsApp out for many professional settings.
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  Thinking about it another way, consider the poor usability and experience of WebEx/Lync and juxtapose that to Zoom -- Zoom just works without any friction. A future Zoom-killer app would need to provide that much better service.
  - soylentcola 6y ago
    I'm curious as to how Zoom is that much different from Webex (at least from the user perspective). I've been using both working in a university setting with all remote classes and as far as the UI, Zoom is almost a copy of Webex with some minor differences. In Webex I can either send someone the link to my personal room or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Webex plugin)or the Webex app. With Zoom I can either start a meeting with my personal meeting ID or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Zoom plugin) or the Zoom app. Inside both there are buttons to turn on/off mic, camera, change settings of those things, share the screen, and if I am the host, I can assign various privileges or revoke them. I haven't used Lync in years so I have no idea what that's like, but from what I've seen, Webex and Zoom are basically in a back and forth to add the handful of minor features they're missing compared to the other. Zoom has been improving security options and defaults. Webex added virtual backgrounds and is about to add breakout rooms. I understand that there are bigger differences in enterprise license options and backend, but for users they seem like similar-looking fraternal twins.
kodablah 6y ago
Where I see effort needing to be spent is an easily setup/usable/configurable video-conferencing package of sorts. A good product would have two things: 1) easy to setup and scale video conferencing out of the box (like literally point at an aws account or k8s cluster and hit "go"), and 2) sdks for manipulating server-side rooms and client-side room/video appearance (but still the default rooms and default grids are in the box). These two things as a common toolkit would accelerate offerings that could decentralize the marketplace. I've seen jitsi offerings (scalable setup isn't as straightforward last I checked which admittedly was a long time ago), twilio (still someone else's servers), etc. I'm sure these toolkits are being worked on (heck I'm working on one), it just takes a bit of time for the players to catch up in a market that exploded overnight.
winrid 6y ago
Not really. If it goes down I can use Hangouts or Slack, for starters.
esaym 6y ago
Not sure why there isn't more open source alternatives in this realm. Since I only run Linux, I was amazed the first time I used Zoom that it had an actual working linux client. I've always had hopes that webrtc would take over. There's been demo's of video conferencing done over webrtc 5+ years ago and I always hoped it would get more traction. The best I've found lately is "Unamed"[0] but it is the product of one author. [0]: https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/chat/ https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/chat/
- klodolph 6y ago
  The reason is because it's a hard problem that requires a lot of work to solve. Dynamically change video quality to fit in the bandwidth, work correctly with a hundred different types of webcam, do echo cancellation, and wrap the whole thing up with a simple UI. Echo cancellation by itself is a hard problem.
- gpvos 6y ago
  Jitsi is pretty well-known and you can run a server yourself; are there any problems with it?
  - esaym 6y ago
    Never heard of it, but I will try it :)
xoxoy 6y ago
next time someone talks about the first mover advantage point to Zoom its quite funny if you think about it
renewiltord 6y ago
A bit tired of the "critical infrastructure" argument. People are very quick to put all sorts of things into the category. He mentions network effects as the only real moat in the article. If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away.
- boogies 6y ago
  > If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away. Literally. As in being evicted from their home: https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietary-software https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietar...
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    This is so unbelievably messed up, reminds me of Black Mirror.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I mean are you upset that landlords get a default judgement when tenants fail to be physically present because they don't have a car, good access to public transportation, time to take off work? In terms of access to the legal system, being able to phone it in at home or get to any public library is actually doing a lot better than the status quo where you have to take off work to appear downtown.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Honestly, this one is so strange to me. UK government services somehow generally tend to be total rubbish but one of them is actually top-tier: gov.uk They have accessibility and access and all these baked into the design AFAIK. I don't understand why American govs have such a hard time on this. Some are larger than the UK and have problems!
    - Kalium 6y ago
      The UK is a deeply centralized place. There are only a few layers of devolved government, that you may or may not be subject to. There is an ability to set and enforce standards centrally. The US is not. A federalized system means that various components work mostly separately from one another. A county court has sharply limited resources, and no ability to ask the federal government to send it a cadre of web developers. The state it's in may not provide a ton of resources for such things at the county level either. The actual question here that may wind up a big deal is if a Zoom hearing is the equivalent of a physical one. If it is, failing to show up means forfeiting the right to be heard. Whether it's Jitsi instead might not be a substantive difference.
tomasreimers 6y ago
I think Zoom has become critical infrastructure, but not from a technological perspective. As @nicoburns points out in another comment, there are many companies that can do the job (MSFT, Google, Cisco, etc. have perfectly comparable alternatives here), and if you're willing to look outside of the biggest companies explicitly targeting business meetings, you have other companies with working technical infrastructure targeted at a different market (i.e. FB, Appl) and a batch-ful of YC startups trying to provide the same functionality to the same market. What I think the article is pointing out is that when Zoom goes down, schools can't teach. And that's true. I think this is indicative of a usability / coordination / culture problem of missing fallbacks. For example, when Zoom goes down a teacher (at least to my knowledge) can't/won't quickly email out a "Hey class, Zoom is down so here is the Google meet link for today". However, this is true of many technologies (if gmail is down I'm not getting email, if slack is down I'm not reading messages, and if Github is down I'm not pushing code). I think the larger problem is HOW MANY institutions it's a critical point of failure for. If Zoom goes down, our courts largely pause, our education largely pauses, our economy largely pauses, etc. The same is not true of Github or Gmail. In this regard it's closer to a powergrid failure. This should go away as verticalized solutions and fallbacks appear (leading to broader diversity, where not all courts use the same platform), but I think the key things to think about until then are: 1. Is there anything Zoom could do to create stronger network effects (https://ayushsood.com/zooms-missing-platform/ https://ayushsood.com/zooms-missing-platform/) preventing new entrants from entering the market? 2. If they did those things, how could we respond to ensure Zoom's incumbent position didn't allow them to prevent new entrants? An old-internet answer would be to centralize the key nodes, effectively utilitize them, and then allow anyone to make a platform that connects to them (i.e. AT&T doesn't own telephony, DNS' don't own the internet, Gmail doesn't own email). I'm not sure how likely this is given (1) we're moving towards centralization generally (2) the importance of performance in video streaming. Any abstraction creates overhead, and that might be a critical failure to open standards in the video streaming space.
beefee 6y ago
Zoom's lack of security focus has been a competitive advantage for them. It's clear that many users don't actually care that much about the confidentiality of their video meetings. The low-friction nature of jumping on a Zoom call with a meeting code and PIN dominates security concerns. In fact, this phrase I've heard people use, "jump on a Zoom," indicates that the speaker expects it to be easy and fast to start the call. Hopefully it's still possible to develop something that's both secure and convenient. But I fear there's no economic incentive to do it.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  Zoom seem to have switched in recent times to using a Meeting ID and password. Most meeting links I get now are very long URLs which seem to hash the meeting ID and password. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
baby 6y ago
It’s not critical infrastructure: people can easily move to google meet.
pc86 6y ago
> When Zoom goes down...business meetings, conferences, and webinars grind to a halt. I mean that's a bit of stretch. I work for a company that uses primarily Cisco Jabber (absolutely god awful, atrocious piece of software), but we also interact with folks using Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack, Skype, join.me, etc. There are no shortage of video conferencing platforms.
koiz 6y ago
Nahhhh its just an app nothing to worry about /s Blows my mind how quickly people accepted the product into their organizations. Zoom Phone... no thank you.
KoftaBob 6y ago
Really playing fast and loose with the term "critical infrastructure" for clicks.
toastal 6y ago
Has the acquisition of Keybase done anything for Zoom yet? What was the purpose--to get engineers that knew about security?
SubiculumCode 6y ago
Frankly Zoom (i.e. video conferenceing) has been essentially pointless for K-6 education.
throwawaysea 6y ago
I feel like Zoom is the least concern. It is relatively replaceable, unlike providers with significant network effects - payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Stripe), social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), ad networks (Google, Apple, Facebook) or dominant share (Google search).
crazygringo 6y ago
> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market. Gmail dominates e-mail in a similar matter. And remember just a year ago barely anyone had even heard of Zoom -- there's still Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, Skype... This piece feels like it's trying to stir up worry over nothing. Yes, critical business software tends to have outages once or twice a year. But no, Zoom doesn't appear to be any obviously better or worse than the competition.
dariusj18 6y ago
Would it be crazy to suggest that the postal service be reabsorbed back into the government and also given the role of managing all government communication channels?
impendia 6y ago
I don't buy it. The same factors that made Zoom easy to adopt, make it equally easy to switch to something else. And "when Zoom goes down, teachers can’t teach"? Come on. I am a college professor. In my class this fall I met my students on Blackboard on Day 1 and Zoom on Day 2. If one of them goes down for the day, we'll switch to the other.
- paulpauper 6y ago
  Thinktanks are always putting out hype/FUD reports like this. That is how they try to stay relevant and get media coverage. Remote learning and video existed well over a decade before zoomn. It is like saying that is Nike were to go out of business, people would not be able to find shoes.
  - hirako2000 6y ago
    You are nice to compare Zoom to Nike.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  You are used to a flexible organization. How about one where IT has locked down the computers mindlessly?
  - tspike 6y ago
    Something tells me an outage will make them think about it
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Most of them probably have their IT team's preferred enterprise vendor's teleconferencing system set up as the exclusive videoconferencing tool long before Zoom became flavour of the month... Also, their employees probably have smartphones.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      A six-year-old student is not an employee.
paulpauper 6y ago
Video over IP has existed forever. Zoom is just one of many companies and services that do it.
beders 6y ago
Anyone remember FUD? This is a FUD-piece á la MSFT-style.
b34r 6y ago
There are a ton of video clients available, it’s not that special. It’s just popular.
tomxor 6y ago
BS, people use what works, it's just video calls. What I find most bizarre is why zoom is on top, this is probably a lesson in how powerful marketing and timing can be for some types of products... But as a counter example: everyone at my company has ended up using google meets, just because through trial and error it fails the least and is the easiest for everyone to get into. The last time I tried zoom for an external meeting and it was a nightmare, it felt like I had to jump through 10 hoops just to get into the frickin meeting, and even then 4/5 people couldn't get it to pick up their microphone through the browser API.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  this is probably a lesson in how powerful marketing and timing can be No, it's a lesson in how powerful "just working" works.
  - tomxor 6y ago
    Except all of my colleagues and I have the opposite experience.
- larrik 6y ago
  Juggling my work with my kids' schools, I've been monitoring bandwidth, and Zoom is a small fraction of the bandwidth of Google Meet, with better performance to boot.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Marketing and Timing? Zoom was founded 9 years ago, from a team that built Webex for 13 years prior. They've been making videoconferencing software for 22 years.
  - tomxor 6y ago
    Oh webex... I remember that, also something that never worked properly. Marketing and timing can still have everything to do with their success btw, even if they had a 9 year run up.
- 6y ago
pmlnr 6y ago
Whoever wrote this didn't live through the rise and demise of Skype.
FpUser 6y ago
I work from home for the last 20 years. My clients and my workforce/subcontractors are all over the world. I had to use Zoom only with one particular client as of their insistence. Other then that I do just fine with the Skype. Not sure what is so "critical" about Zoom in particular.
jeffrallen 6y ago
One word: Jitsi.
boogies 6y ago
The fact that people are being evicted after not using Zoom https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietary-software https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietar... is insane. The industrial revolution and all of its consequences may not have been exclusively a disaster for the human race, and I personally don’t share Bill Joy’s fears of mass extinction https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/, but proprietary software can cause serious problems for members of the human race and they should have a right to choose not to “use” it. Doesn’t the US Constitution support the Amish’s right to abstain from the power grid, etc.? The Federal Source Code Policy should revert from requiring 20% of software written with forcibly extracted public money to be free to 100% as it was when open for public comment. Any software that the public is forced to use, fund, or through network effects promote, the public should be able to audit and control. Windows is explicitly banned from the ISS. The lowly common people down here deserve a fraction of that privilege.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Why? If Zoom hurts you in some weird way, you can sue. That's how US law works.
  - boogies 6y ago
    Because that’s a massive, expensive endeavor that may only solve one specific problem between one person and one company if it works at all. (Edit:) Much like anti-trust hearings: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/a-tech-antitrust-hearing-misses-the-point https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/a-tech-antitrust-hearing...
- fsflover 6y ago
  > Any software that the public is forced to use, fund, or through network effects promote, the public should be able to audit and control. Sounds like you should agree with this petition: https://publiccode.eu https://publiccode.eu (all publicly funded software must be public).
- anon3280 6y ago
  Zoom is important, but zoom didn't evict anyone. The US government did. The government is the only organization "allowed" to use physical violence against anyone it wants to. The author raises many valid points, but I think the logical conclusion of his points condemns the US legal system more than it does zoom. Author: Having to agree to a contract with a private company in order to access public services is immediately objectionable. Me: I agree! But unlike the US Government, Zoom doesn't make threats of violence against people that don't want to use it's services. Author: Second, for the state to require use of Zoom is for it to promote and subsidize that company. Me: I agree! The but the state wouldn't even BE ABLE to subsidize Zoom if it didn't first threaten me with violence in order to take a large fraction of my money.
asdff 6y ago
When we have trouble connecting with zoom, we just go back to the old school conference call which is pretty smooth. It turns out, you really don't need to see closeups of peoples neck hair to have a functional remote meeting. There are also a dozen other similar popular video chat services that can be step up just as easily as zoom. Zoom isn't a utility, it's just one of the many redundant ways out there that you can use to communicate with people.
anon3280 6y ago
I laughed out loud while reading this article. The author sees some things so correctly, while completely missing the forest for the trees. Author: A single California-based company, Zoom, is now the foundation for education access from elementary school up through graduate school. Me: Hah. The 'foundation' for education for the last 100 years has been the US Government, which exerts so much power over the entire system. Author: Another challenge is that Zoom is a relatively young company (founded in 2011) that has experienced some security-related growing pains. Me: The US Gov. has experienced security-related growing pains, but at least Zoom doesn't kill tens of thousands of people around the world every year. Author: In March 2020, the company was widely criticized for a dubious claim that it supported end-to-end encryption for videoconferences. Me: At least Zoom doesn't have a track record of spending billions of dollars to subvert encryption technology, wiretap hundreds of millions of people, and then lies about it. Author: There are plenty of alternatives to Zoom, including Skype, Webex, and GoToMeeting. The challenge of course, is that Zoom has benefited from an enormous network effect. Me: Oh how I wish there were a less-violent alternative to the US Government. At least Zoom cannot enforce it's monopoly of certain services with violence and billions of dollars of money
- trthomps 6y ago
  The US Government is representative of all voting American citizens, you cannot compare it to a private company that is run by people who are not elected.
  - anon3280 6y ago
    I agree. The US Government is pretty impervious to change. For example, people still get arrested for smoking weed. Most o America supports decriminalizing weed. Why is it still illegal? Shouldn't the government enact policies that most of America agrees with? I mean... don't most of us agree that if a private company were doing any of this stuff, they would lose all their customers ASAP: - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/judge-child-porn-evidence-obtained-via-fbis-tor-hack-must-be-suppressed/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/judge-child-porn... - https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/5jt6k0/where_the_fuck_are_all_of_these_tax_dollars_going/ https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/5jt6k0/where_the... - https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/crime/sterling-correctional-facility-guards-gassed-room-full-of-muslims-beat-1-in-retaliation-lawsuit https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/crime/sterling-correct... - https://www.aufamily.com/forums/topic/156988-obama-nsa-disclosed-years-of-illegal-searches-on-americans/ https://www.aufamily.com/forums/topic/156988-obama-nsa-discl... - https://reason.com/2017/04/25/a-man-died-in-jail-after-getting-no-wate/ https://reason.com/2017/04/25/a-man-died-in-jail-after-getti... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-happens-to-people-who-cant-prove-who-they-are/2017/06/14/fc0aaca2-4215-11e7-adba-394ee67a7582_story.html?utm_term=.8e653e7c2e39 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-happe... I believe the burden of proof is on someone who thinks the US Government is a good representative of it's people.
gregkerzhner 6y ago
We use Google hangouts at work and it.... works just fine. What is the big deal about Zoom?
rogerdickey 6y ago
More like "Live video capability on the internet is now critical infrastructure" but even then, phones probably cover 90%+ of use cases
Fr8TRN 6y ago
The pandemic has increased the load of data collection especially of students in classrooms. Four years ago we were appalled that china was putting cameras in classrooms. Now we are putitng cameras on every individual child with audio and absolutely no regulation or organizaiton structure. The pandemic has significantly increased an already high level of data collection. Does anyone think government should have a role in regulation?
aussieguy1234 6y ago
Zoom is fine, but like everything it will go down now and then. In that case there are alternatives. If it goes down, why not do just that one meeting in Google Meet?
holografix 6y ago
Humm critical infrastructure? No alternatives? Has this guy heard of google hangouts, Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Slack...
tedd4u 6y ago
Meh, my kids just used the Google Meet links the teachers sent out when Zoom was down. Meet is even better - no app needed. Schools already have Google Classroom. With Meet you just click the link and it works.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  Is the quality sufficent for classroom teaching? I use both for work as a teacher and I find Zoom much better than Hangouts. Zoom (when it works) is nearly flawless. Hangouts on the other hand has poor video, limited faciliation functions, limited grid/gallery view (and none at all on the iPad which is what my students use), random problems popping up, etc. Zoom is just much better for educaitonal use.
chenzhekl 6y ago
But we still have choices: Microsoft Teams, Rocket.Chat, Google Meet, etc. As long as it's not the only viable option, I don't think there's a need to worry.

317 points by ohjeez 6y ago

As others have pointed out, it's laughable to consider Zoom to be critical infrastructure when so many alternatives exist. Moreover, I find it somewhat strange that he's referring to Zoom as "critical infrastructure" instead of the major cloud providers like AWS or Azure. If Zoom goes down, it's an inconvenience to many. If AWS or Azure goes down, many business just stop functioning. Heck, many government departments might stop functioning, given how government infrastructure has been moving to "the cloud".

baldgeek 6y ago

The internet in general has become critical infrastructure for a while now. Yet it is not treated that way that is the root of the problem.

s09dfhks 6y ago

There are other options though. Things lit jitsi are growing in popularity. Its frustrating that a few "big companies" decided to use these tools so the rest of the world followed suit without doing their own research

nicoburns 6y ago

> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market. I don't think that's true of video-conferencing either. Zoom is probably the most popular (and technically superior), but there is also: Microsoft Teams, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, and many others, including open source options like Jitsi. And they all pretty much do the job.

briffle 6y ago
Yeah, it used to be (a year or two back) GotoMeeting and Webex were the 'big 2' and now, they hardly get mentioned.
- MiroF 6y ago
  Zoom has been the major player in Uni for the last 2-3 years I would say.
youeseh 6y ago
For those that haven't tried Jitsi - my friends and I catch up on it almost daily. It is awesome. The phone app is great too. You can setup a room that people can jump in and out of, which is pretty convenient. If you're looking for that office feel for your small team, then Jitsi might be worth a shot. And, I think you can host your own server if you'd like to!
- thechao 6y ago
  Have you used Lifesize? I'm not fond of either Hangouts or Zoom.
  - youeseh 6y ago
    I have not tried Lifesize.
- vz8 6y ago
  We've tried Jitsi multiple times (as recently as a month ago) and the experience has been uniformly bad at anything beyond a handful of people. When we scaled to > 20 it was completely unusable (feedback / echos, delays, stuttering, dropouts, you name it).
  - boudin 6y ago
    Was it with a self-hosted version or the meet.jit.si public instance? Around 20 we had the same problem on the public instances but I wonder how much is server side or limitation on the client side. It also definitely worked better in Chrome, it seems that the Firefox situation is much better now though. On Safari echo cancellation was just not working.
  - nessunodoro 6y ago
    Were you self-hosting, or using the free service? If self-hosting, I'm curious what resources you were devoting to your VPS, and which hosting provider?
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Jitsi makes one of my friend's MacBooks fan too loud so we can't use it.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
And unlike many other services, the network effect is quite low because I can easily install multiple video conferencing software or even run some in the browser. If someone organising a meeting asks to use something unusual, I'm normally not that bothered.
- lima 6y ago
  Even WebEx is still around and, ironically, works much better in a browser than Zoom.
  - Geezus_42 6y ago
    New webex sucks for remote support. It forces me to re-request control every time I paste something. Yes I could manually type everything out but that is a pita when dealing with long Linux commands pulled from documentation.
    - GloriousKoji 6y ago
      Also the random hot keys webex picks up. All too often i'll mute myself instead of escape out of edit mode in vi.
    - dllthomas 6y ago
      Is it every time you paste something, or every time you leave the program and focus on another to copy something? If the latter, and you're using X, it should be possible to write a program that takes the selection buffer and provides a different response to each SelectionRequest in turn, letting you walk through a script pasting a command at a time without having to leave the current window. I don't know whether such a thing already exists.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Even WebEx is still around and, ironically, works much better in a browser than Zoom. I had a videoconference with some Apple people this month, and they were all on WebEx. Maybe there's a reason. I couldn't tell you. My company is a hodgepodge of Zoom, Teams, BlueJeans, and who knows what else.
tyingq 6y ago
Microsoft Teams has improved quite a bit since the pandemic started also. They added things that were missing, like a tile view (max 9), raise your hand, and blurred or custom backgrounds. Zoom is still better, but Teams now seems "good enough" to me.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  Max 9?! Zoom can do 25 without breaking a sweat.
thebean11 6y ago
Yeah, when Zoom went down the other day at work we just used the Google Meet link directly from the gcal invites. Like any mission critical infrastructure, it's up to organizations to have some redundancy. Nothing new.
0xdeadb00f 6y ago
technically superior? I find it quite limiting and bare as an end user.

brobdingnagians 6y ago

Like backing up data, having a contingency plan is important. Even if you like zoom because of certain features, having a backup service you can use in case of emergency is important. If everyone knows beforehand "which link to try if zoom is down today", then it is merely an inconvenience instead of an emergency.

aassddffasdf 6y ago
Umm Slack can be used to coordinate a hop to another channel.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  Yep, that's what I do, and work is easy to coordinate, but some other social events or organizations with inexperienced non-tech people don't have slack and don't think to check their email. It is easier for them to have a pre-specified backup option.
smsm42 6y ago
Email still exists. Just create google or microsoft or webex meeting and send email to all participants.

dougmwne 6y ago

Is this a submarine written by Microsoft PR? Seems very likely it could be. Seems to boil down to: "Little upstart company can't be trusted with important business, better buy from an established player."

iso1210 6y ago
Apple actually, although they claim it's not influenced by apple.
brawnelamia 6y ago
My company prohibited and even remote-force uninstalled zoom and mandated Skype or MS Teams right after the last rash of bad zoom PR. I feel pretty certain there was coordination from our Microsoft account manager and Microsoft's PR team on this front. The funny part is that Skype is famous for zero days while zoom is famous for people running pseudo public non-password protected conference calls that got invaded by teenagers.
- boogies 6y ago
  The less funny part is that to the HN users who together made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23555226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23555226 my current most upvoted comment on HN, Zoom is known for “a history of shadiness (MacOS hidden server to prevent uninstallation), outright lies (E2EE), and attacking the pillars of democracy (censoring Chinese Americans discussing Tienanmen Square).” Not that MS isn’t shady, dishonest, or even a deep state tool of oppression (in light of the Snowden leaks, and at least in some people’s view Github’s ICE contract).

sigstoat 6y ago

has anyone built something on top of twilio's video offering? it looks relatively straightforward, and seems to me like most tech companies (and some university IT departments) could pretty easily build internal conferencing stuff on top of it if they cared to.

leesalminen 6y ago
I deployed one of their demo repos [0] and had some medium usage of it in production. It didn’t get a lot of use (most use Zoom) and almost always had < 5 participants. It worked well enough. The cost seemed affordable too, though I never looked too closely. It didn’t make a dent on our overall Twilio bill. [0] - https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-react https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-react
notahacker 6y ago
The startup I worked for earlier in the year added it to their existing private platform at great speed when a client asked for videoconferencing.

k__ 6y ago

Is it? I used like 5 different services in the last 7 months and all worked reasonably well.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
randomdata 6y ago
I use like five different services every day that work about as well as each other. I do happen to think Zoom does the best job out of the set, but it is only a marginal lead. It would be nothing to use something else.
topspin 6y ago
Likewise. I often use several different conference platforms a day. This fixation on Zoom really mystifies me. A couple months ago trolls were wandering around in Zoom conferences, recording things and interfering, making headlines. I would have thought users would abandon this open wound immediately for any of a plethora of alternatives, but for some reason they're dogmatically faithful. Somehow Zoom appears exempt from confidentiality or privacy concerns, even among corporate and government users. Have all the lawyers vanished with the appearance of COVID-19?
kiwijamo 6y ago
Zoom vs Hangouts is really like going from VHS to DVD. Hangouts' horribly pixelated video and frequent dropped frames and/or loss of video paints a huge contrast to Zoom's good video quality with very few glitches. Am surprised at people who think the two are comparable.

howmayiannoyyou 6y ago

State Courts are too reliant on Zoom and using its breakout rooms for very sensitive communications. This IS infrastructure and should be very concerning. Its an area DHS needs to take a close look at.

bluedino 6y ago
We interface with courts every day, they pretty much forgot about our direct connections using Polycom VC and went straight to Zoom

swiley 6y ago

The navy did a decent job with sqlight and TOR. I’d love to see a video chat app from them.

dctoedt 6y ago
> The navy did a decent job with sqlight and TOR. Tell us more?

peterwwillis 6y ago

Most of the internet that everyone in the world uses is constructed and maintained by companies that you don't give a single cent to, and who don't owe you anything if it goes down. This applies to a lot (maybe most?) things in the world. Say freight (trucks, trains, ships, etc) stops moving, for example. Within a month or two all the grocery stores would be empty. We'd have Mad Max-style convoys of cars driving around trying to find food and raid stores. It wasn't but a hundred or so years ago that most people survived on local food suppliers, and today almost none of our food is local.

ryeguy_24 6y ago

Zoom was not critical infrastructure 5 months ago. I think we’d adapt if needed.

look_lookatme 6y ago

This and email should have been what USPS was building over the last 20 years.

isatty 6y ago

It's not. People always find a way to adapt.

kevincox 6y ago
It is critical infrastructure if you don't have a backup. I think that it would be easy to have a backup plan to replace Zoom, but this needs to exist.
- isatty 6y ago
  But there are many alternatives - Facetime, Google Meet, Skype, etc;
kube-system 6y ago
The fact that people adapt to not having it does not mean that something isn't critical infrastructure. Everything considered critical infrastructure has, at one time or another, been something that humans were adapted to not having.

xwdv 6y ago

Honestly what's the worst that could happen?

vicmiclovich 6y ago

Brookings, fix the HTTPS (SSL certificate missing on this blog page)

WilTimSon 6y ago

Zoom is only going to stay widely adopted until an easy, viable alternative comes along and gets in the good graces of people in charge. There are some alternatives now, like Facebook's group calls on WhatsApp but that one's fallen out of favour for obvious reasons.

thekyle 6y ago
Aren't WhatsApp calls only on the mobile app? I think the desktop only does chats.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  This rules WhatsApp out for many professional settings.
TuringNYC 6y ago
Thinking about it another way, consider the poor usability and experience of WebEx/Lync and juxtapose that to Zoom -- Zoom just works without any friction. A future Zoom-killer app would need to provide that much better service.
- soylentcola 6y ago
  I'm curious as to how Zoom is that much different from Webex (at least from the user perspective). I've been using both working in a university setting with all remote classes and as far as the UI, Zoom is almost a copy of Webex with some minor differences. In Webex I can either send someone the link to my personal room or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Webex plugin)or the Webex app. With Zoom I can either start a meeting with my personal meeting ID or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Zoom plugin) or the Zoom app. Inside both there are buttons to turn on/off mic, camera, change settings of those things, share the screen, and if I am the host, I can assign various privileges or revoke them. I haven't used Lync in years so I have no idea what that's like, but from what I've seen, Webex and Zoom are basically in a back and forth to add the handful of minor features they're missing compared to the other. Zoom has been improving security options and defaults. Webex added virtual backgrounds and is about to add breakout rooms. I understand that there are bigger differences in enterprise license options and backend, but for users they seem like similar-looking fraternal twins.

kodablah 6y ago

Where I see effort needing to be spent is an easily setup/usable/configurable video-conferencing package of sorts. A good product would have two things: 1) easy to setup and scale video conferencing out of the box (like literally point at an aws account or k8s cluster and hit "go"), and 2) sdks for manipulating server-side rooms and client-side room/video appearance (but still the default rooms and default grids are in the box). These two things as a common toolkit would accelerate offerings that could decentralize the marketplace. I've seen jitsi offerings (scalable setup isn't as straightforward last I checked which admittedly was a long time ago), twilio (still someone else's servers), etc. I'm sure these toolkits are being worked on (heck I'm working on one), it just takes a bit of time for the players to catch up in a market that exploded overnight.

winrid 6y ago

Not really. If it goes down I can use Hangouts or Slack, for starters.

esaym 6y ago

Not sure why there isn't more open source alternatives in this realm. Since I only run Linux, I was amazed the first time I used Zoom that it had an actual working linux client. I've always had hopes that webrtc would take over. There's been demo's of video conferencing done over webrtc 5+ years ago and I always hoped it would get more traction. The best I've found lately is "Unamed"[0] but it is the product of one author. [0]: https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/chat/ https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/chat/

klodolph 6y ago
The reason is because it's a hard problem that requires a lot of work to solve. Dynamically change video quality to fit in the bandwidth, work correctly with a hundred different types of webcam, do echo cancellation, and wrap the whole thing up with a simple UI. Echo cancellation by itself is a hard problem.
gpvos 6y ago
Jitsi is pretty well-known and you can run a server yourself; are there any problems with it?
- esaym 6y ago
  Never heard of it, but I will try it :)

xoxoy 6y ago

next time someone talks about the first mover advantage point to Zoom its quite funny if you think about it

renewiltord 6y ago

A bit tired of the "critical infrastructure" argument. People are very quick to put all sorts of things into the category. He mentions network effects as the only real moat in the article. If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away.

boogies 6y ago
> If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away. Literally. As in being evicted from their home: https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietary-software https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietar...
- save_ferris 6y ago
  This is so unbelievably messed up, reminds me of Black Mirror.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I mean are you upset that landlords get a default judgement when tenants fail to be physically present because they don't have a car, good access to public transportation, time to take off work? In terms of access to the legal system, being able to phone it in at home or get to any public library is actually doing a lot better than the status quo where you have to take off work to appear downtown.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Honestly, this one is so strange to me. UK government services somehow generally tend to be total rubbish but one of them is actually top-tier: gov.uk They have accessibility and access and all these baked into the design AFAIK. I don't understand why American govs have such a hard time on this. Some are larger than the UK and have problems!
  - Kalium 6y ago
    The UK is a deeply centralized place. There are only a few layers of devolved government, that you may or may not be subject to. There is an ability to set and enforce standards centrally. The US is not. A federalized system means that various components work mostly separately from one another. A county court has sharply limited resources, and no ability to ask the federal government to send it a cadre of web developers. The state it's in may not provide a ton of resources for such things at the county level either. The actual question here that may wind up a big deal is if a Zoom hearing is the equivalent of a physical one. If it is, failing to show up means forfeiting the right to be heard. Whether it's Jitsi instead might not be a substantive difference.

tomasreimers 6y ago

I think Zoom has become critical infrastructure, but not from a technological perspective. As @nicoburns points out in another comment, there are many companies that can do the job (MSFT, Google, Cisco, etc. have perfectly comparable alternatives here), and if you're willing to look outside of the biggest companies explicitly targeting business meetings, you have other companies with working technical infrastructure targeted at a different market (i.e. FB, Appl) and a batch-ful of YC startups trying to provide the same functionality to the same market. What I think the article is pointing out is that when Zoom goes down, schools can't teach. And that's true. I think this is indicative of a usability / coordination / culture problem of missing fallbacks. For example, when Zoom goes down a teacher (at least to my knowledge) can't/won't quickly email out a "Hey class, Zoom is down so here is the Google meet link for today". However, this is true of many technologies (if gmail is down I'm not getting email, if slack is down I'm not reading messages, and if Github is down I'm not pushing code). I think the larger problem is HOW MANY institutions it's a critical point of failure for. If Zoom goes down, our courts largely pause, our education largely pauses, our economy largely pauses, etc. The same is not true of Github or Gmail. In this regard it's closer to a powergrid failure. This should go away as verticalized solutions and fallbacks appear (leading to broader diversity, where not all courts use the same platform), but I think the key things to think about until then are: 1. Is there anything Zoom could do to create stronger network effects (https://ayushsood.com/zooms-missing-platform/ https://ayushsood.com/zooms-missing-platform/) preventing new entrants from entering the market? 2. If they did those things, how could we respond to ensure Zoom's incumbent position didn't allow them to prevent new entrants? An old-internet answer would be to centralize the key nodes, effectively utilitize them, and then allow anyone to make a platform that connects to them (i.e. AT&T doesn't own telephony, DNS' don't own the internet, Gmail doesn't own email). I'm not sure how likely this is given (1) we're moving towards centralization generally (2) the importance of performance in video streaming. Any abstraction creates overhead, and that might be a critical failure to open standards in the video streaming space.

beefee 6y ago

Zoom's lack of security focus has been a competitive advantage for them. It's clear that many users don't actually care that much about the confidentiality of their video meetings. The low-friction nature of jumping on a Zoom call with a meeting code and PIN dominates security concerns. In fact, this phrase I've heard people use, "jump on a Zoom," indicates that the speaker expects it to be easy and fast to start the call. Hopefully it's still possible to develop something that's both secure and convenient. But I fear there's no economic incentive to do it.

kiwijamo 6y ago
Zoom seem to have switched in recent times to using a Meeting ID and password. Most meeting links I get now are very long URLs which seem to hash the meeting ID and password. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction.

baby 6y ago

It’s not critical infrastructure: people can easily move to google meet.

pc86 6y ago

> When Zoom goes down...business meetings, conferences, and webinars grind to a halt. I mean that's a bit of stretch. I work for a company that uses primarily Cisco Jabber (absolutely god awful, atrocious piece of software), but we also interact with folks using Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack, Skype, join.me, etc. There are no shortage of video conferencing platforms.

koiz 6y ago

Nahhhh its just an app nothing to worry about /s Blows my mind how quickly people accepted the product into their organizations. Zoom Phone... no thank you.

KoftaBob 6y ago

Really playing fast and loose with the term "critical infrastructure" for clicks.

toastal 6y ago

Has the acquisition of Keybase done anything for Zoom yet? What was the purpose--to get engineers that knew about security?

SubiculumCode 6y ago

Frankly Zoom (i.e. video conferenceing) has been essentially pointless for K-6 education.

throwawaysea 6y ago

I feel like Zoom is the least concern. It is relatively replaceable, unlike providers with significant network effects - payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Stripe), social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), ad networks (Google, Apple, Facebook) or dominant share (Google search).

crazygringo 6y ago

> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market. Gmail dominates e-mail in a similar matter. And remember just a year ago barely anyone had even heard of Zoom -- there's still Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, Skype... This piece feels like it's trying to stir up worry over nothing. Yes, critical business software tends to have outages once or twice a year. But no, Zoom doesn't appear to be any obviously better or worse than the competition.

dariusj18 6y ago

Would it be crazy to suggest that the postal service be reabsorbed back into the government and also given the role of managing all government communication channels?

impendia 6y ago

I don't buy it. The same factors that made Zoom easy to adopt, make it equally easy to switch to something else. And "when Zoom goes down, teachers can’t teach"? Come on. I am a college professor. In my class this fall I met my students on Blackboard on Day 1 and Zoom on Day 2. If one of them goes down for the day, we'll switch to the other.

paulpauper 6y ago
Thinktanks are always putting out hype/FUD reports like this. That is how they try to stay relevant and get media coverage. Remote learning and video existed well over a decade before zoomn. It is like saying that is Nike were to go out of business, people would not be able to find shoes.
- hirako2000 6y ago
  You are nice to compare Zoom to Nike.
MattGaiser 6y ago
You are used to a flexible organization. How about one where IT has locked down the computers mindlessly?
- tspike 6y ago
  Something tells me an outage will make them think about it
- notahacker 6y ago
  Most of them probably have their IT team's preferred enterprise vendor's teleconferencing system set up as the exclusive videoconferencing tool long before Zoom became flavour of the month... Also, their employees probably have smartphones.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    A six-year-old student is not an employee.

paulpauper 6y ago

Video over IP has existed forever. Zoom is just one of many companies and services that do it.

beders 6y ago

Anyone remember FUD? This is a FUD-piece á la MSFT-style.

b34r 6y ago

There are a ton of video clients available, it’s not that special. It’s just popular.

tomxor 6y ago

BS, people use what works, it's just video calls. What I find most bizarre is why zoom is on top, this is probably a lesson in how powerful marketing and timing can be for some types of products... But as a counter example: everyone at my company has ended up using google meets, just because through trial and error it fails the least and is the easiest for everyone to get into. The last time I tried zoom for an external meeting and it was a nightmare, it felt like I had to jump through 10 hoops just to get into the frickin meeting, and even then 4/5 people couldn't get it to pick up their microphone through the browser API.

reaperducer 6y ago
this is probably a lesson in how powerful marketing and timing can be No, it's a lesson in how powerful "just working" works.
- tomxor 6y ago
  Except all of my colleagues and I have the opposite experience.
larrik 6y ago
Juggling my work with my kids' schools, I've been monitoring bandwidth, and Zoom is a small fraction of the bandwidth of Google Meet, with better performance to boot.
sukilot 6y ago
Marketing and Timing? Zoom was founded 9 years ago, from a team that built Webex for 13 years prior. They've been making videoconferencing software for 22 years.
- tomxor 6y ago
  Oh webex... I remember that, also something that never worked properly. Marketing and timing can still have everything to do with their success btw, even if they had a 9 year run up.
6y ago

pmlnr 6y ago

Whoever wrote this didn't live through the rise and demise of Skype.

FpUser 6y ago

I work from home for the last 20 years. My clients and my workforce/subcontractors are all over the world. I had to use Zoom only with one particular client as of their insistence. Other then that I do just fine with the Skype. Not sure what is so "critical" about Zoom in particular.

jeffrallen 6y ago

One word: Jitsi.

boogies 6y ago

The fact that people are being evicted after not using Zoom https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietary-software https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietar... is insane. The industrial revolution and all of its consequences may not have been exclusively a disaster for the human race, and I personally don’t share Bill Joy’s fears of mass extinction https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/, but proprietary software can cause serious problems for members of the human race and they should have a right to choose not to “use” it. Doesn’t the US Constitution support the Amish’s right to abstain from the power grid, etc.? The Federal Source Code Policy should revert from requiring 20% of software written with forcibly extracted public money to be free to 100% as it was when open for public comment. Any software that the public is forced to use, fund, or through network effects promote, the public should be able to audit and control. Windows is explicitly banned from the ISS. The lowly common people down here deserve a fraction of that privilege.

sukilot 6y ago
Why? If Zoom hurts you in some weird way, you can sue. That's how US law works.
- boogies 6y ago
  Because that’s a massive, expensive endeavor that may only solve one specific problem between one person and one company if it works at all. (Edit:) Much like anti-trust hearings: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/a-tech-antitrust-hearing-misses-the-point https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/a-tech-antitrust-hearing...
fsflover 6y ago
> Any software that the public is forced to use, fund, or through network effects promote, the public should be able to audit and control. Sounds like you should agree with this petition: https://publiccode.eu https://publiccode.eu (all publicly funded software must be public).
anon3280 6y ago
Zoom is important, but zoom didn't evict anyone. The US government did. The government is the only organization "allowed" to use physical violence against anyone it wants to. The author raises many valid points, but I think the logical conclusion of his points condemns the US legal system more than it does zoom. Author: Having to agree to a contract with a private company in order to access public services is immediately objectionable. Me: I agree! But unlike the US Government, Zoom doesn't make threats of violence against people that don't want to use it's services. Author: Second, for the state to require use of Zoom is for it to promote and subsidize that company. Me: I agree! The but the state wouldn't even BE ABLE to subsidize Zoom if it didn't first threaten me with violence in order to take a large fraction of my money.

asdff 6y ago

When we have trouble connecting with zoom, we just go back to the old school conference call which is pretty smooth. It turns out, you really don't need to see closeups of peoples neck hair to have a functional remote meeting. There are also a dozen other similar popular video chat services that can be step up just as easily as zoom. Zoom isn't a utility, it's just one of the many redundant ways out there that you can use to communicate with people.

anon3280 6y ago

I laughed out loud while reading this article. The author sees some things so correctly, while completely missing the forest for the trees. Author: A single California-based company, Zoom, is now the foundation for education access from elementary school up through graduate school. Me: Hah. The 'foundation' for education for the last 100 years has been the US Government, which exerts so much power over the entire system. Author: Another challenge is that Zoom is a relatively young company (founded in 2011) that has experienced some security-related growing pains. Me: The US Gov. has experienced security-related growing pains, but at least Zoom doesn't kill tens of thousands of people around the world every year. Author: In March 2020, the company was widely criticized for a dubious claim that it supported end-to-end encryption for videoconferences. Me: At least Zoom doesn't have a track record of spending billions of dollars to subvert encryption technology, wiretap hundreds of millions of people, and then lies about it. Author: There are plenty of alternatives to Zoom, including Skype, Webex, and GoToMeeting. The challenge of course, is that Zoom has benefited from an enormous network effect. Me: Oh how I wish there were a less-violent alternative to the US Government. At least Zoom cannot enforce it's monopoly of certain services with violence and billions of dollars of money

trthomps 6y ago
The US Government is representative of all voting American citizens, you cannot compare it to a private company that is run by people who are not elected.
- anon3280 6y ago
  I agree. The US Government is pretty impervious to change. For example, people still get arrested for smoking weed. Most o America supports decriminalizing weed. Why is it still illegal? Shouldn't the government enact policies that most of America agrees with? I mean... don't most of us agree that if a private company were doing any of this stuff, they would lose all their customers ASAP: - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/judge-child-porn-evidence-obtained-via-fbis-tor-hack-must-be-suppressed/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/judge-child-porn... - https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/5jt6k0/where_the_fuck_are_all_of_these_tax_dollars_going/ https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/5jt6k0/where_the... - https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/crime/sterling-correctional-facility-guards-gassed-room-full-of-muslims-beat-1-in-retaliation-lawsuit https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/crime/sterling-correct... - https://www.aufamily.com/forums/topic/156988-obama-nsa-disclosed-years-of-illegal-searches-on-americans/ https://www.aufamily.com/forums/topic/156988-obama-nsa-discl... - https://reason.com/2017/04/25/a-man-died-in-jail-after-getting-no-wate/ https://reason.com/2017/04/25/a-man-died-in-jail-after-getti... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-happens-to-people-who-cant-prove-who-they-are/2017/06/14/fc0aaca2-4215-11e7-adba-394ee67a7582_story.html?utm_term=.8e653e7c2e39 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-happe... I believe the burden of proof is on someone who thinks the US Government is a good representative of it's people.

gregkerzhner 6y ago

We use Google hangouts at work and it.... works just fine. What is the big deal about Zoom?

rogerdickey 6y ago

More like "Live video capability on the internet is now critical infrastructure" but even then, phones probably cover 90%+ of use cases

Fr8TRN 6y ago

The pandemic has increased the load of data collection especially of students in classrooms. Four years ago we were appalled that china was putting cameras in classrooms. Now we are putitng cameras on every individual child with audio and absolutely no regulation or organizaiton structure. The pandemic has significantly increased an already high level of data collection. Does anyone think government should have a role in regulation?

aussieguy1234 6y ago

Zoom is fine, but like everything it will go down now and then. In that case there are alternatives. If it goes down, why not do just that one meeting in Google Meet?

holografix 6y ago

Humm critical infrastructure? No alternatives? Has this guy heard of google hangouts, Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Slack...

tedd4u 6y ago

Meh, my kids just used the Google Meet links the teachers sent out when Zoom was down. Meet is even better - no app needed. Schools already have Google Classroom. With Meet you just click the link and it works.

kiwijamo 6y ago
Is the quality sufficent for classroom teaching? I use both for work as a teacher and I find Zoom much better than Hangouts. Zoom (when it works) is nearly flawless. Hangouts on the other hand has poor video, limited faciliation functions, limited grid/gallery view (and none at all on the iPad which is what my students use), random problems popping up, etc. Zoom is just much better for educaitonal use.

chenzhekl 6y ago

But we still have choices: Microsoft Teams, Rocket.Chat, Google Meet, etc. As long as it's not the only viable option, I don't think there's a need to worry.