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At GitLab our fallback from Slack is Zoom https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#emergency-chat https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#emerg

by sytse 6y ago

At GitLab our fallback from Slack is Zoom https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#emergency-chat https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#emergency-c... I'm posting this because I found a lot of people don't know that Zoom includes a complete chat client that includes channels. And #HugOps to the engineers at Slack working on this. I appreciate that they posted a periodic update even when there was no news to report: "There are no changes to report as of yet. We're still all hands on deck and continuing to dig in on our side. We'll continue to share updates every 30 minutes until the incident has been downgraded."

bww 6y ago
Just a reminder that it's probably not a wise idea for anyone to get further in bed with Zoom than they already are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-helped-china-surveillance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he...
- _6fmb 6y ago
  What an overwrought headline, the employee in question has already been fired.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    The optics are still very, very bad for Zoom. I have zero trust in them.
    - noir_lord 6y ago
      There are remarkably few organisations I somewhat trust (even then on a sliding scale) but on that spectrum Zoom sits at the "wouldn't touch them with someone elses bargepole" end.
  - criley2 6y ago
    It's weird that you describe the headline as "overwrought" and call the person an "employee" when the headline is more accurate than you. This was an executive, not just an employee. That's a huge distinction and I can't help but think you intentionally downgraded his position to cover-up his behavior. "Just an employee" "Not a big deal" But when you read the allegations, they seem like a very big deal that an executive was spying on users, giving their information to the Chinese government explicitly for oppressive purposes, including folks who are not in China, and went out of his way to personally censor non-Chinese groups meeting to discuss the Massacre-Which-Cannot-Be-Mentioned. I would say the headline understates the gravity (it's very much a 'by-the-books' headline that you KNOW went through ten levels of Legal), and that your hand waving here feels much more dishonest than the headline.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      Not only that, but this line stuck out to me. > and other employees have been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete. Zoom at least suspects he did not act alone.
    - btown 6y ago
      Regardless of intent, it's undeniable that at some point there were insufficient controls to prevent this executive, or any executive in the future, from gaining this level of surveillance access. And it's also undeniable that the consequences for Zoom (really, just needing to fire a few people, and not even the people who designed those controls if there were any) are so minimal that they have no incentive to strengthen those controls. For some organizations (mine included) the benefits of Zoom outweigh the risks of Zoom having proven itself to not have those controls, namely the possibility of both political and corporate espionage. As with all things, YMMV.
    - _6fmb 6y ago
      It was an executive purposefully brought in for legal compliance with that country's requirements. That he was fired is a huge signal in how seriously aggressive zoom is about protecting data that they would even be willing to go up against national governments. I feel like the firing is a huge part of the story.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    The company in question is still operating. We don't know if the employee was just a scapegoat.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - kemonocode 6y ago
    Sorry, but an executive is not just "an employee" and any alarms are rightfully justified. Took a little bit of cajoling in my company but we've successfully moved to self-hosted tools for the most part (Jitsi and Rocket.chat) with just a couple of projects with outside contractors using Slack.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Imagine if they did that for the US government, which is easier to compel since they are in US territory.
  - xibalba 6y ago
    One nation is currently operating concentration camps and arrests and seizes the property of prominent citizens who criticize the government. Are you sure that's an equivalence you want to draw.
    - jethro_tell 6y ago
      yes, I remember when I got my trump kidney from a poor anti-fascist liberal. /s America is fucked up, that doesn't mean that other countries aren't also fucked up or aren't doing worse things with the data they collect.
      - tehjoker 6y ago
        Yea, but you live here and so you should think about the implications of this for yourself and your countrymen and not through the lens of international competition. That is a distraction. Essentially, the China case proved Zoom is willing to cooperate with a nation state. The US is the nation state we live in, Zoom is HQ'd here. Therefore, the risk to us is high. As an aside, the organ harvesting idea comes from the Fulan Gong, who are similar to Chinese Scientologists. It is not clear to me that their claims are accurate.
    - fhrifjr 6y ago
      Like Guantanamo Bay or prosecution of Assange for his journalistic work to expose wrongdoing of government? Or maybe you’re talking about for-profit prison system and mass incarceration practices? But you’re probably talking about China, right?
      - bananabreakfast 6y ago
        Once again, that is a false equivalence. No one imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay is a US Citizen and neither is Assange. The US prison system is super fucked up but it is not the same as ethnic cleansing. You are comparing apples to concentration camps.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  "Business takes the easy and ethically questionable route to continue making money" news at 11. I'm not condoning Zoom's actions but this is hardly a problem unique to Zoom. Few if any businesses will stand up for consumers and citizens unless it's directly aligned with their profit motive. In this case, the business choice is to operate or not in mainland China. If they choose to stand up against the Chinese government they're going to have difficulty continuing to operate in China and risk losing that entire market. Google played this PR game many years ago in China (rejecting some of the governmental policies) and ultimately caved to Chinese policies to do business there. Businesses are not the organizations we should look to for empowering people, that's simply not their goal no matter how much their marketing team may want to sell that idea by following trending (popular) social movements that they've already done market studies on to assess potential fallback.
  - tw04 6y ago
    I think it's a pretty bold claim to state that Zoom's actions aren't unique. What other business in this space has given China unfettered access to US users and data? I'm not aware of it occurring with Webex, Teams or go2meeting. The "one rogue employee" thing falls flat pretty quickly when they're the only ones that had this issue. This feels like their encryption thing all over again, there's an "oversight" that is equivalent to a backdoor that only gets fixed when they get caught.
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      I didn't realize they shared any user data outside China (misread the WP portion). It appears they did share 10 users' data which is a bit questionable but I'd hardly call that unfettered access to US data. The fact is all of the US businesses operating in China give surveillance ability to the Chinese government for the Chinese users and are operating in an ethically questionable space being primarily based outside of China, at least in my opinion. It's really not too different than the businesses sharing US citizen data to the US government, much of which Snowden and others before him exposed. I suspect there's a lot more surveillance going on everywhere than the general public know about and the businesses best positioned to do the surveillance are probably doing it.
- Havoc 6y ago
  And yet a surprising number of firms with sensitive info continue to use it. Law firms etc
  - dylan604 6y ago
    Is this an attempt to refute the claim using Zoom is bad, or an indictment against those still using it?
    - xevrem 6y ago
      an indictment that so many people who should know better, still use a tainted and non-benign product.
      - yabuttslivnwds 6y ago
        Elaine Chao’s sister is married to Xi, while Elaine, as transportation secretary under Trump, was busted inviting family with business ties to the CCP to official US government meetings. The fear on this forum is imagined political thriller more than realistic. Every technologist is grifting off the military industrial complex.
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    The lesser of two evils and the product just works. They might have a few governance issues they need to fix. But at the end of the day, they signed a BAA with us and will take the liability and fallout of a breach.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ff333ttee 6y ago
Aren't you worried about so many security vulnerabilities found in Zoom?
vorpalhex 6y ago
Please reconsider using or supporting Zoom in any way. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/technology/zoom-china-tiananmen-square.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/technology/zoom-china-tia...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ourcat 6y ago
I'm quite surprised that you don't use Mattermost as a 'Slack fallback' at GitLab.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Indeed, if you champion FOSS, why would you recommend a proprietary piece of software as fallback?
  - ourcat 6y ago
    My point was really that it's GitLab's own product. "GitLab Mattermost" [https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/gitlab-mattermost/ https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/gitlab-mattermost/] I'm amazed they use Slack at all. Let alone as a fallback.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      No I'm pretty sure that's just a sort of 'integration', Mattermost shipped with GitLab? https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/08/18/gitlab-loves-mattermost/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/08/18/gitlab-loves-matter... > Like many companies in the last year we've switched to using Slack to improve internal communication. [...] Since Slack doesn't offer an on-premises version, we searched for other options. We found Mattermost to be the leading open source Slack-alternative and suggested a collaboration to the Mattermost team. I'm not really sure why it's 'GitLab Mattermost' and not (at your link) 'GitLab Nginx' et al. though.
      - ourcat 6y ago
        Ah I see now, having read more of the history. Calling it that seems pretty misleading/odd. (We use GitLab and Mattermost (integration) where I work. I've been 'remote / WFH' for the past 7 years.)
        sytse 6y ago
        I agree it can be improved and created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/-/merge_requests/4877 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/-/merge_request... to do so.
sergiotapia 6y ago
At Papa we use Discord as backup.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mxuribe 6y ago
I continue to be impressed by GitLab's operations and documentation! While, yes, others may have similar backup plans, as an outsider, it feels like GitLab's handbook seems cooler even if only for their publishing, and making public of their practices and processes. I'll caveat that I'm not really a fan of zoom/slack/hangouts (I'm an unashamed fanboy of matrix and its numerous clients), but gitlab's approach is still really neat! Kudos to gitlab!
jayd16 6y ago
Is this accessible from the web? Can't seem to find it with this Chromebook.
isodev 6y ago
Nice tip! Zoom chat is cool (although chats without gifies are way too productive ).
kburman 6y ago
Why not Mattermost or Flock?
trykondev 6y ago
Oh wow -- after years of using Zoom I definitely did not know about this. Thank you for pointing it out!
bovermyer 6y ago
As someone who has to use Zoom Chat to interact with a client on a daily basis, please, do not recommend Zoom Chat to anyone except as an example of how not to do chat software. -- Though, I do agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment that the Slack team needs all the positive vibes they can get right now.
- meffie 6y ago
  As someone who has to use Zoom Chat every day, this a thousand times. (We still run an XMPP server on the side just to avoid the horror that is Zoom chat.)
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Yeah, this is baffling. I'd rather run turn of the century ICQ than Zoom chat...
cgh 6y ago
Unpopular opinion, but WebEx beats the pants off Zoom. Of course, it's neither free nor open. But it does support strong end to end encryption and authentication and has regulatory compliance to a bunch of things, if that's important to you. I get that there is WebEx hate because "enterprise" etc, but we use it around here and it works quite well.
- lima 6y ago
  +1, both are a PITA but Webex at least has a really good web client.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

by sytse 6y ago

bww 6y ago

Just a reminder that it's probably not a wise idea for anyone to get further in bed with Zoom than they already are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-helped-china-surveillance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he...

_6fmb 6y ago
What an overwrought headline, the employee in question has already been fired.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  The optics are still very, very bad for Zoom. I have zero trust in them.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    There are remarkably few organisations I somewhat trust (even then on a sliding scale) but on that spectrum Zoom sits at the "wouldn't touch them with someone elses bargepole" end.
- criley2 6y ago
  It's weird that you describe the headline as "overwrought" and call the person an "employee" when the headline is more accurate than you. This was an executive, not just an employee. That's a huge distinction and I can't help but think you intentionally downgraded his position to cover-up his behavior. "Just an employee" "Not a big deal" But when you read the allegations, they seem like a very big deal that an executive was spying on users, giving their information to the Chinese government explicitly for oppressive purposes, including folks who are not in China, and went out of his way to personally censor non-Chinese groups meeting to discuss the Massacre-Which-Cannot-Be-Mentioned. I would say the headline understates the gravity (it's very much a 'by-the-books' headline that you KNOW went through ten levels of Legal), and that your hand waving here feels much more dishonest than the headline.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Not only that, but this line stuck out to me. > and other employees have been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete. Zoom at least suspects he did not act alone.
  - btown 6y ago
    Regardless of intent, it's undeniable that at some point there were insufficient controls to prevent this executive, or any executive in the future, from gaining this level of surveillance access. And it's also undeniable that the consequences for Zoom (really, just needing to fire a few people, and not even the people who designed those controls if there were any) are so minimal that they have no incentive to strengthen those controls. For some organizations (mine included) the benefits of Zoom outweigh the risks of Zoom having proven itself to not have those controls, namely the possibility of both political and corporate espionage. As with all things, YMMV.
  - _6fmb 6y ago
    It was an executive purposefully brought in for legal compliance with that country's requirements. That he was fired is a huge signal in how seriously aggressive zoom is about protecting data that they would even be willing to go up against national governments. I feel like the firing is a huge part of the story.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  The company in question is still operating. We don't know if the employee was just a scapegoat.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- kemonocode 6y ago
  Sorry, but an executive is not just "an employee" and any alarms are rightfully justified. Took a little bit of cajoling in my company but we've successfully moved to self-hosted tools for the most part (Jitsi and Rocket.chat) with just a couple of projects with outside contractors using Slack.
tehjoker 6y ago
Imagine if they did that for the US government, which is easier to compel since they are in US territory.
- xibalba 6y ago
  One nation is currently operating concentration camps and arrests and seizes the property of prominent citizens who criticize the government. Are you sure that's an equivalence you want to draw.
  - jethro_tell 6y ago
    yes, I remember when I got my trump kidney from a poor anti-fascist liberal. /s America is fucked up, that doesn't mean that other countries aren't also fucked up or aren't doing worse things with the data they collect.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      Yea, but you live here and so you should think about the implications of this for yourself and your countrymen and not through the lens of international competition. That is a distraction. Essentially, the China case proved Zoom is willing to cooperate with a nation state. The US is the nation state we live in, Zoom is HQ'd here. Therefore, the risk to us is high. As an aside, the organ harvesting idea comes from the Fulan Gong, who are similar to Chinese Scientologists. It is not clear to me that their claims are accurate.
  - fhrifjr 6y ago
    Like Guantanamo Bay or prosecution of Assange for his journalistic work to expose wrongdoing of government? Or maybe you’re talking about for-profit prison system and mass incarceration practices? But you’re probably talking about China, right?
    - bananabreakfast 6y ago
      Once again, that is a false equivalence. No one imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay is a US Citizen and neither is Assange. The US prison system is super fucked up but it is not the same as ethnic cleansing. You are comparing apples to concentration camps.
Frost1x 6y ago
"Business takes the easy and ethically questionable route to continue making money" news at 11. I'm not condoning Zoom's actions but this is hardly a problem unique to Zoom. Few if any businesses will stand up for consumers and citizens unless it's directly aligned with their profit motive. In this case, the business choice is to operate or not in mainland China. If they choose to stand up against the Chinese government they're going to have difficulty continuing to operate in China and risk losing that entire market. Google played this PR game many years ago in China (rejecting some of the governmental policies) and ultimately caved to Chinese policies to do business there. Businesses are not the organizations we should look to for empowering people, that's simply not their goal no matter how much their marketing team may want to sell that idea by following trending (popular) social movements that they've already done market studies on to assess potential fallback.
- tw04 6y ago
  I think it's a pretty bold claim to state that Zoom's actions aren't unique. What other business in this space has given China unfettered access to US users and data? I'm not aware of it occurring with Webex, Teams or go2meeting. The "one rogue employee" thing falls flat pretty quickly when they're the only ones that had this issue. This feels like their encryption thing all over again, there's an "oversight" that is equivalent to a backdoor that only gets fixed when they get caught.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    I didn't realize they shared any user data outside China (misread the WP portion). It appears they did share 10 users' data which is a bit questionable but I'd hardly call that unfettered access to US data. The fact is all of the US businesses operating in China give surveillance ability to the Chinese government for the Chinese users and are operating in an ethically questionable space being primarily based outside of China, at least in my opinion. It's really not too different than the businesses sharing US citizen data to the US government, much of which Snowden and others before him exposed. I suspect there's a lot more surveillance going on everywhere than the general public know about and the businesses best positioned to do the surveillance are probably doing it.
Havoc 6y ago
And yet a surprising number of firms with sensitive info continue to use it. Law firms etc
- dylan604 6y ago
  Is this an attempt to refute the claim using Zoom is bad, or an indictment against those still using it?
  - xevrem 6y ago
    an indictment that so many people who should know better, still use a tainted and non-benign product.
    - yabuttslivnwds 6y ago
      Elaine Chao’s sister is married to Xi, while Elaine, as transportation secretary under Trump, was busted inviting family with business ties to the CCP to official US government meetings. The fear on this forum is imagined political thriller more than realistic. Every technologist is grifting off the military industrial complex.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  The lesser of two evils and the product just works. They might have a few governance issues they need to fix. But at the end of the day, they signed a BAA with us and will take the liability and fallout of a breach.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ff333ttee 6y ago

Aren't you worried about so many security vulnerabilities found in Zoom?

vorpalhex 6y ago

Please reconsider using or supporting Zoom in any way. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/technology/zoom-china-tiananmen-square.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/technology/zoom-china-tia...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ourcat 6y ago

I'm quite surprised that you don't use Mattermost as a 'Slack fallback' at GitLab.

ekianjo 6y ago
Indeed, if you champion FOSS, why would you recommend a proprietary piece of software as fallback?
- ourcat 6y ago
  My point was really that it's GitLab's own product. "GitLab Mattermost" [https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/gitlab-mattermost/ https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/gitlab-mattermost/] I'm amazed they use Slack at all. Let alone as a fallback.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    No I'm pretty sure that's just a sort of 'integration', Mattermost shipped with GitLab? https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/08/18/gitlab-loves-mattermost/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/08/18/gitlab-loves-matter... > Like many companies in the last year we've switched to using Slack to improve internal communication. [...] Since Slack doesn't offer an on-premises version, we searched for other options. We found Mattermost to be the leading open source Slack-alternative and suggested a collaboration to the Mattermost team. I'm not really sure why it's 'GitLab Mattermost' and not (at your link) 'GitLab Nginx' et al. though.
    - ourcat 6y ago
      Ah I see now, having read more of the history. Calling it that seems pretty misleading/odd. (We use GitLab and Mattermost (integration) where I work. I've been 'remote / WFH' for the past 7 years.)
      - sytse 6y ago
        I agree it can be improved and created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/-/merge_requests/4877 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/-/merge_request... to do so.

sergiotapia 6y ago

At Papa we use Discord as backup.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mxuribe 6y ago

I continue to be impressed by GitLab's operations and documentation! While, yes, others may have similar backup plans, as an outsider, it feels like GitLab's handbook seems cooler even if only for their publishing, and making public of their practices and processes. I'll caveat that I'm not really a fan of zoom/slack/hangouts (I'm an unashamed fanboy of matrix and its numerous clients), but gitlab's approach is still really neat! Kudos to gitlab!

jayd16 6y ago

Is this accessible from the web? Can't seem to find it with this Chromebook.

isodev 6y ago

Nice tip! Zoom chat is cool (although chats without gifies are way too productive ).

kburman 6y ago

Why not Mattermost or Flock?

trykondev 6y ago

Oh wow -- after years of using Zoom I definitely did not know about this. Thank you for pointing it out!

bovermyer 6y ago

As someone who has to use Zoom Chat to interact with a client on a daily basis, please, do not recommend Zoom Chat to anyone except as an example of how not to do chat software. -- Though, I do agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment that the Slack team needs all the positive vibes they can get right now.

meffie 6y ago
As someone who has to use Zoom Chat every day, this a thousand times. (We still run an XMPP server on the side just to avoid the horror that is Zoom chat.)
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Yeah, this is baffling. I'd rather run turn of the century ICQ than Zoom chat...

cgh 6y ago

Unpopular opinion, but WebEx beats the pants off Zoom. Of course, it's neither free nor open. But it does support strong end to end encryption and authentication and has regulatory compliance to a bunch of things, if that's important to you. I get that there is WebEx hate because "enterprise" etc, but we use it around here and it works quite well.

lima 6y ago
+1, both are a PITA but Webex at least has a really good web client.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]