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Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
- swiley 5y agoWait, governments are still using zoom? WTF?
- nsizx 5y agoWhat should they use instead, some half assed open source solution subcontracted to the usual cronies of the consulting business?
- rblatz 5y agoI don’t know what rock you are living under but everyone uses Zoom. Even Cisco sales reps use it for sales meetings and they own WebEx.
- baal80spam 5y ago> everyone uses Zoom Well, my org uses Teams and I don't know anyone who uses Zoom professionally.
- brewdad 5y agoMy son's university has been holding tons of virtual sessions for incoming first-year students and their parents. Every one has been on Zoom. In my experience, Zoom is the standard when you are dealing with the public at large. Teams/Hangouts/WebEx, etc are the go to options when dealing with an internal organization where all of the users are "known" ahead of time.
- f1refly 5y agoAt my university the computer science + electrical engineering student councils protested so persistently that the university gave in and banned zoom across operations. I guess not every university was so lucky?
- el-salvador 5y agoTeams comes from free with Office 365. I think last year someone from the accounting department suggested cancelling Zoom because we had meetings already included in Teams. It caused quite a commotion from the Zoom users a few minutes after we learnt about it. The plan was promptly cancelled.
- csydas 5y agoFor a time in 2020, Zoom for whatever reason had a significant boom of popularity (I suppose they had some freemium option for group calls? I really don't know). As a result, a lot of companies bought licenses because Zoom was the cool tech at the time. My company did this, despite there being an official mandate that all official communication/calls must go through Teams the year prior†. I think the persistence of Zoom is just whatever the tech equivalent of a hangover is. Everyone binged on Zoom in 2020, and now that we're far more comfortable with work from home and have more stable setups, a lot of places are stuck with Zoom licenses. Embarrassingly, our company's periodic all-hand-calls still are on Zoom when every other operation is done on Teams. I think our brand team also decided to host a few presentations on Zoom when we presented in the US for the sole reason of "well, it's cool." † I have no love for Teams to be clear, it's awful software. I do understand IT's mandate though, since the entire point of the mandate was to get people to stop installing random stuff on their work computers, which turned out to be a great idea when it comes to Zoom.
- breakfastduck 5y agoWell that must mean nobody uses it then. Huh.
- ubermonkey 5y agoI have a couple of (honestly not very tech savvy) clients who adopted Zoom at the beginning of the COVID era, and who are absolutely swallowing whatever lies Zoom is telling about security and encryption and whatnot. Zoom has the absolutely BALLS to sell a product called "ZoomGov" they say is more secure or whatever, but who wants to bet it's the same code running on different servers? They're also claiming HIPAA compliance, which I'm also certain is a complete lie. They don't care. They'll say literally anything, and pay whatever fines happen if they get caught.
- metalliqaz 5y agoNot surprised. Among the various solutions discussed in this thread, WebEx is the worst. Hangouts, Zoom, and Teams are way ahead.
- el-salvador 5y agoSounds famliar! I remember attempting to do a meeting with a company that resellls Webex. The meeting was not Webex related but related to another product they sell. We ended up switching to Zoom because Webex wasn't working.
- wil421 5y agoDon’t know many people who use Zoom except one of our software vendors.
- raxxorrax 5y agoI have never seen it in a professional setting and I sadly have too many meetings. In my corporate world at least it is almost always teams and people don't want to use zoom. Sales might be different though.
- whoomp12342 5y agoMaybe I am missing the point but what is the problem here? is there some major security flaw in zoom?
- mishafb 5y agoZoom is not end to end encrypted at all, and they can see every video stream. Also their clients had vulnerabilities in the past.
- whoomp12342 5y agofalse. if you configure zoom correctly, it is infact encrypted.
- djrogers 5y agoFor one thing, zoom does have E2EE (https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-enable-zoom-encryption/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-enable-zoom-encryption/) and secondly - if we're talking about public meetings (like city council meetings) why would it matter?
- swiley 5y agoE2EE means just about nothing without open source clients.
- howaboutnope 5y agoWell, for one, this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25474372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25474372
- dredmorbius 5y ago"This" being "Zoom executive charged with disrupting meetings commemorating Tiananmen Square".
- shakna 5y agoZoom has had several major security flaws [0]. (Arbitrary execution, installers with malware in them, and so on.) Executives charged with coordinating attacks against citizens outside China, on behalf of the PRC. [1] They recently settled a class action for lying about having E2E encryption. [2] [0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=2159&product_id=0 https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=... [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/china-based-executive-us-telecommunications-company-charged-disrupting-video-meetings https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/china-based-executive-us-tele... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58050391 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58050391
- cupcake-unicorn 5y agoYup, just had some meetings with my city's local government as well as local nonprofits over Zoom. Concerning from a security standpoint.
- wintermutestwin 5y agoZoom is used in some courts: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/19/880859109/zoom-call-eviction-hearings-they-ll-throw-everything-i-have-out-on-the-street https://www.npr.org/2020/06/19/880859109/zoom-call-eviction-...
- saeergsergesrg 5y agoYes, there is version of zoom specifically for government. https://www.zoomgov.com/ https://www.zoomgov.com/
- aendruk 5y agoThe actual announcement: - de https://datenschutz-hamburg.de/pressemitteilungen/2021/08/2021-08-16-senatskanzlei-zoom https://datenschutz-hamburg.de/pressemitteilungen/2021/08/20... - en (auto) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdatenschutz-hamburg.de%2Fpressemitteilungen%2F2021%2F08%2F2021-08-16-senatskanzlei-zoom https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3...
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoOffer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts/WebEx/GotoMeeting because their company bans Zoom, it's a recipe for a fruitless meeting. Someone will fumble the sharing controls; screens will take forever to present; at least one person's microphone will become inaudible, static-y, or suffer from "robot voice slow-down" lag. To say nothing of the clusterf*ck that happens when two company-specific instances of Microsoft Teams try to communicate with each other and I'm left with a bunch of orphaned chatrooms with outside personnel after the meeting concludes.
- IncRnd 5y agoI think Teams has every bug known to computers. Though, I've found GotoMeeting to work extremely well, and WebEx has been very decent but much better than Teams.
- rjsw 5y agoTeams manages to reboot Macintosh M1 machines after a few minutes in a call.
- IncRnd 5y agoGiven my experience as a sad participant in Teams meetings, I'll go on a limb and say Teams is probably running an electron shell implemented in x86 code calling a 64bit shim layer inside an ARM hosted VM.
- el-salvador 5y agoI'm not surprised. It can runs super slow on my computer with plenty of RAM and lots of CPU.
- wsinks 5y agoDang, Webex is still that bad for you? Is it because you're using company's instances where it's more locked down and they're on older code? I know it's not perfect, but it's pretty reliable for me (and full disclosure, I work for a different subsidiary of Cisco - but I also try to be pretty critical of it since I'm close to it) I don't use Zoom a ton, but I've experienced what feels like a similar amount of sluggishness and AV issues as I have on Webex. At this point I know I'm a bit too close to have a useful anecdote, I'm just surprised that Webex is still put in the same group as Teams / Hangouts / GTM. Again, not trying to sway you, just understand a bit better.
- rblatz 5y agoSo this is different than all the other Zoom is insecure things. This is related to Zoom sending data to a “hostile” state (the US) which cannot guarantee GDPR compliance and there is no waiver to allow transmission of protected data to The US.
- stalfosknight 5y agoIt would be nice if Teams weren't yet another Electron disaster.
- foepys 5y agoAnd instead of improving their code so Teams is fast as VS Code, they delegated it to the Edge team to write a new version of Electron called WebView2. Teams' codebase is apparently so bad that it's not fixable and they need to rely on others to rewrite the runtime for them. For good measure it also subscribes to the media keys on the keyboard. To mute your microphone you might think, but no, to play the dial tone twice when pressing play/pause for your music! Very useful, thank you Microsoft.
- wila 5y agoWebView2 is the MS Edge browser technology that can be instanced as a browser control in your application. [1] It is not electron. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
- foepys 5y agoSince it's unreleased they might name it differently when releasing but I don't think they will make it open source. Microsoft will most likely use it for themselves.
- Hawxy 5y agoWebView2 has been out for ages, it released with the new edge browser. You can launch what you like in it from your own application.
- ezconnect 5y agoEconomic competition has now become who can control state government.
- caseydm 5y agoAnybody else prefer Google meet over zoom lately? I feel like it's a cleaner layout.
- kevincox 5y agoAlso depending on the type of calls you have Google Meet can be a lot more usable. Zoom seems to come from the Seminar/Presentation mindset. By default no one can join until the host does, only the host can share their screen and no one except the host can mute other participants. Most of the default ACLs can be relaxed if the organizer changes their default meeting settings but most people won't. Google Meet seems to assume some level of trust between the participants which matches my use case much more. So by default anyone can share their screen when they need too and if someone forgets to mute themselves when they take a call someone else can help them out (I have seen a Zoom meeting that had to be abandoned because someone took a call thinking they were on mute.) I'm not saying that the Zoom defaults are "wrong". In fact they are the safer defaults. But for my most common use case of a meeting between people in the same company the Meet defaults work much better. (Although it is nice when a meeting gets "canceled" because the organizer is out sick and no one can join /s)
- gtsteve 5y agoI'll give it another shot, but every time I do I'm not impressed. I'd love to use Google Meet and save some money but the audio and video quality looks like a cheap trick compared to Zoom. My users complain endlessly about this. We discovered Zoom a few years back because we were desperate to get away from Hangouts. I expect their client does a lot of work around clearing up audio and similar whereas you'd need to do that on the server-side (and accept the lag) for Google Meet unless you can use WebAsm to clean up the audio stream possibly. I don't know if developers have that access. I guess Google could solve this but it would require some considerable resources. I think this is one of those situations where video calls are a hobby for Google but they're the entire business for Zoom.
- toastal 5y agoNo. I often have connection issues and it's Google so I don't feel secure. I suggest and prefer Jitsi. Or Jami.
- bjourne 5y agoZoom is an incredibly creepy company. I completely loathe that my company forces us to use it.
- Ansil849 5y agoI use Zoom for the simple reason that it provides end to end encryption and can seamlessly support large (50+) team meetings. Other than WebEx, which is more cost-prohibitive and has a clunkier UI/UX to boot, I believe there are no other video conferencing apps that can provide the service I'm looking for (which is 1. E2EE, and 2. support for 50+ attendees). _Is_ there anything else that can provide this, besides Zoom or WebEx?
- fartcannon 5y agoYes. https://jitsi.org/security/ https://jitsi.org/security/ Plus you can self-host it. So you're only limited by the machine you host it on.
- Ansil849 5y agoI've stress tested Jitsi's E2EE (both on the official server and on a self-hosted instance, with was a PITA to setup, by the way) and....it does not scale. After more than 20 clients joined, there were noticeable problems that made the meeting impossible to conduct (audio drop outs, frozen video, disparate lag times, etc), both on a self-hosted instance that had more than enough bandwidth/hardware kit to handle it (the same self-hosted setup is also used to host Zoom, which runs perfectly), and on their main server. I would like to hear real-world examples of people successfully conducting large-scale E2EE meetings over Jitsi. What setup did you use?
- swiley 5y agoE2EE is meaningless with a closed client downloaded by individuals from the service provider.
- Ansil849 5y agoIf the option is "not use any closed-source E2EE video conferencing platform because of ideological purity" or "conferencing platform which promises E2EE and has SLAs and legal contracts backing these claims with the client", for practical purposes the latter wins.
- 5y ago
- lrvick 5y agoI recommend almost anything else at all other than Zoom. As a security researcher that has reported a number of issues to Zoom, I can say without reservation they are one of the most security negligent companies I ever worked with. It was evident after multiple calls with their team they didn't employ anyone strong technically in their US offices and had no idea how to translate security issues, even obvious ones like DNS takeover, to their (I assume China based) eng teams. The software was designed without security as even a thought as many researchers have demonstrated. To this day the clients expect administrative access for no reason. I refuse to install them and tolerate the webapp when people insist on Zoom. A friend and I compiled this list to consider. https://gist.github.com/dacruz21/dd2480f195f5b48a9ab7af8b41c21404 https://gist.github.com/dacruz21/dd2480f195f5b48a9ab7af8b41c...
- sombremesa 5y agoZoom has fixed the UX in this business, which is the one thing that matters most™, and which is why they will continue to be successful. It's like a restaurant which has the absolute best food by a mile, so they remain in business despite the cockroaches and unfriendly waitstaff. Most customers don't really care about privacy and security, they just want to pretend, and as long as they can easily pretend they're happy.
- acdha 5y agoWhich UX problem do you think it fixed? If I had to rate by the ability to successfully start a call and not have technical issues interrupt it, I'd rank Zoom, Teams, Slack, and Google Meet roughly equivalent — the quality isn't as good or robust as Facetime but that's also not designed for meetings or cross-platform. I'd accept Google self-selecting out of the market with their incoherent messaging strategy but that has nothing do with UX other than not needing to tell people to uninstall the old apps and install the current one.
- justaguy88 5y ago> Which UX problem do you think it fixed? You can join a call without signing up
- cannabis_sam 5y agoI feel like I live in a bizzaro world... First, I’ve been working remotely over skype, audio-only, for over a decade. Yet in 2020 and with the emergence of zoom, it’s suddenly become an expectation that everyone is incessantly and awkwardly staring at each other through screens for the whole workday. Second, the few times I’ve used Zoom it’s been absolutely garbage, with video and sound dropping or just not there (this was a university paying for Zoom’s services). Yet I use teams everyday, and while I have plenty of complaints about it, at least I can get the sound and (screen-sharing) video that I actually need for my work.
- 8ytecoder 5y agoI don't know - my company/team (except for one or two instances of introductions) never expect us to turn on video. Some people do; other don't; just do your thing. Turning on the video is especially hard on women. From what I have heard from friends they have to get ready and put on makeup as if they're going to work simply because they're expected to be on zoom video all day long.
- lmm 5y agoAre you using an old version? Skype was good once but has gotten buggier and more bloated with each new release. > Second, the few times I’ve used Zoom it’s been absolutely garbage, with video and sound dropping or just not there (this was a university paying for Zoom’s services). Yeah that absolutely sounds like bizzaro world. Zoom somehow works a lot better than anything else, IME. (I wish it didn't, there are many things I don't like about it)
- cannabis_sam 5y agoI don’t really use skype anymore, but I never had that many issues with it even if I updated.. But yeah, I fully accept that other people have generally found Zoom to be better than the alternatives. Friends that teach (university in this case) says it’s been a godsend.
- detaro 5y agoThat's far from universal expectation. I use the camera almost exclusively in primarily social calls (and sometimes one-on-one calls). Even when talking to customers its rare.
- cookiengineer 5y agoFor people from the EU that hate techcrunch due to its cookie banner spam fatigue - here's the source: https://datenschutz-hamburg.de/pressemitteilungen/2021/08/2021-08-16-senatskanzlei-zoom https://datenschutz-hamburg.de/pressemitteilungen/2021/08/20... (Note that DPA means Deutsche Presse Agentur in German, so we don't use that term over here)
- rubyist5eva 5y agowhereby.com works great for me
- jlduan 5y agoAfter READING the article, it is about "U.S. surveillance law to be incompatible with EU privacy rights."
- ideamotor 5y agoShocking
- korginator 5y agoTalking not as a security researcher but as someone who has to work with large corporate IT departments none of the alternatives proposed in this thread will fly. With corporate IT, it's either MS Teams because it's installed "by default" on enterprise workstations and managed at the O365 level, or Zoom or Cisco WebEx, all managed centrally by IT. In our experience with these services, Zoom has been more reliable, and the quality of service for video and audio has been generally better than the rest, specially Teams. At the end of the day, this is all that our enterprise users care about. When running calls across organisations, it invariably ends up as a zoom meeting since Teams is flaky for someone, or WebEx doesn't allow someone to share their desktop. Another significant but underrated factor is the non-tech and non-enterprise market. Friends and family in their seventies and eighties default to zoom for their weekly or monthly catch-up sessions and get-togethers because "it just works". My neighbour who's in her late seventies is an editor for a small news magazine for the community, and zoom is her choice to collaborate with others on their articles. People don't want to bother with security until there's a massive breach somewhere, or it affects their business, or it's mandated by legislation or certification requirements.
- Jedd 5y agoSlightly tangential - I went to install Keybase on a new Debian build last night, and discovered the installation process is broken, evidently has been for some time, and upstream (on github) seems abandoned. Keybase, once a popular favourite on HN, lost a lot of street cred when Zoom bought them out in early 2020. Zoom and Keybase at the time insisted this was all very good news as it showed Zoom was deeply committed to improving their security posture. Apparently, not so much.