[HN Gopher] Stop using Zoom, Hamburg's data protection agency wa...
___________________________________________________________________
Stop using Zoom, Hamburg's data protection agency warns state
government
Author : jrepinc
Score : 426 points
Date : 2021-08-17 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| cookiengineer wrote:
| For people from the EU that hate techcrunch due to its cookie
| banner spam fatigue - here's the source:
|
| https://datenschutz-hamburg.de/pressemitteilungen/2021/08/20...
|
| (Note that DPA means Deutsche Presse Agentur in German, so we
| don't use that term over here)
| swiley wrote:
| Wait, governments are still using zoom? WTF?
| rblatz wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > everyone uses Zoom
|
| Well, my org uses Teams and I don't know anyone who uses Zoom
| professionally.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Well that must mean nobody uses it then. Huh.
| el-salvador wrote:
| Teams 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.
| brewdad wrote:
| My 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.
| csydas wrote:
| For 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I 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.
| el-salvador wrote:
| Sounds 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.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Not surprised. Among the various solutions discussed in this
| thread, WebEx is the worst. Hangouts, Zoom, and Teams are way
| ahead.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| Maybe I am missing the point but what is the problem here? is
| there some major security flaw in zoom?
| mishafb wrote:
| Zoom is not end to end encrypted at all, and they can see
| every video stream. Also their clients had vulnerabilities in
| the past.
| djrogers wrote:
| For one thing, zoom does have E2EE
| (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 wrote:
| E2EE means just about nothing without open source
| clients.
| howaboutnope wrote:
| Well, for one, this happened:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25474372
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "This" being "Zoom executive charged with disrupting
| meetings commemorating Tiananmen Square".
| shakna wrote:
| Zoom 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=...
|
| [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/china-based-executive-us-
| tele...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58050391
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| Yup, just had some meetings with my city's local government as
| well as local nonprofits over Zoom. Concerning from a security
| standpoint.
| nsizx wrote:
| What should they use instead, some half assed open source
| solution subcontracted to the usual cronies of the consulting
| business?
| swiley wrote:
| Anything else, even something proprietary.
| saeergsergesrg wrote:
| Yes, there is version of zoom specifically for government.
| https://www.zoomgov.com/
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Zoom is used in some courts:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2020/06/19/880859109/zoom-call-eviction-...
| caseydm wrote:
| Anybody else prefer Google meet over zoom lately? I feel like
| it's a cleaner layout.
| kevincox wrote:
| Also 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| aendruk wrote:
| The actual announcement:
|
| - de https://datenschutz-
| hamburg.de/pressemitteilungen/2021/08/20...
|
| - en (auto)
| https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3...
| bjourne wrote:
| Zoom is an incredibly creepy company. I completely loathe that my
| company forces us to use it.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Offer 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.
| wsinks wrote:
| Dang, 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.
| oritron wrote:
| I found Webex to be quite a lot worse than Zoom in my limited
| experience. I attended a few IEEE presentations hosted on the
| platform. Audio didn't connect smoothly and needed a few
| restarts. The talk was constantly interrupted by a chiming
| noise whenever a person joined or left the meeting. I
| remember finding a configuration setting for this but the
| hosts didn't see my message (another bad feature), as this
| was a meeting-wide setting rather than a client one. Even if
| it were configurable per-user, that chime turned on is an
| unexpected and intrusive default setting.
|
| Beyond that, I couldn't see the presented content in full-
| screen. There was a lot of junk in the form of perpetual UI
| elements for the "fullscreen mode".
|
| These seemed like pretty fundamental misses for the platform
| to make.
| echlebek wrote:
| I attended a webex earlier this year and I found the
| experience was far better than Zoom. The audio and video
| quality was better, and also the presentation controls were
| much more sophisticated.
| bwship wrote:
| I never have issues with Hangouts. I think Zoom is a slightly
| better experience, but just making a Calendar invite in Google
| Calendar, and it automatically having the Hangout meeting is
| pretty nice.
|
| [Edit] Google Meet
| blululu wrote:
| As someone who runs Zoom via the browser (they do deploy a dark
| pattern to discourage this behavior but there is no good reason
| to trust them) I find that Hangouts and Teams are both solid
| alternatives in terms of AV quality. Would be happy to see some
| actual data on this claim.
|
| People prefer the interface they are used to. I personally find
| Zoom to be really frustrating from an interface angle but that
| is probably just familiarity. Of course Zoom could have avoided
| such issues had they been more conscious of ethics.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| Perhaps I am jaded, but as of yet I have never used a
| browser-based video chat that worked well. Invariably
| connection issues arise which I have only rarely experienced
| with Zoom. My best explanation is that a native app has more
| to work with in terms of codecs and connection management
| than a browser can offer.
|
| So to this end, that "dark" pattern is ultimately to a user's
| benefit and they are truly better off if they use the native
| app. If Zoom did not do this, they would pay the cost in
| terms of support and perceptions that the service is not
| reliable, in much the same way that Hangouts is unusable.
|
| Having said that, you should be able to acknowledge that you
| do want to use the browser and don't want to see the pattern
| again.
| blululu wrote:
| This dark pattern may benefit some users, however there is
| a trade-off between video quality and data security.
| Different users have different preferences/needs between
| these two aspects of a video call service. Tricking people
| into selecting one option is rarely done out of concern for
| the interests of the end user. I would personally be much
| more convinced that I am benefiting from installing an app
| that has a history of data security issues if they gave a
| clear and up front explanation of why this benefits me.
|
| FWIW, my work uses Google Meet running through Chrome and
| it gets the job done for remote collaboration. I would
| actually be curious to see some figures on the difference
| in performance between Browser and Desktop. I imagine that
| you can do a few tricks for compression and buffering on
| with a native app that would not be possible on a browser,
| but I haven't seen a big difference in terms of my ability
| to have a meeting.
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| That dark pattern drives me crazy. I use Zoom on Linux and
| prefer to use it in browser and I still almost always miss
| the link after having done it several times.
| kevincox wrote:
| If you use Firefox I recommend
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-
| redirect...
| lisper wrote:
| That must be a very dark pattern. I didn't even know it was
| possible to run Zoom in a browser, and even now that I know
| I can't figure out how to do it. What's the secret?
| scrollaway wrote:
| You need to click download zoom on the meeting launch and
| give it a second, it will show a "having trouble?"
| message and let you open in a browser.
| lisper wrote:
| Wow, that is evil. Thanks!
| throwaway192874 wrote:
| The web UI is severely limited compared to the desktop
| client which is why I suspect they do this (even though I
| disagree with it).
|
| I've had some very confusing meetings because I worked at
| a company that required us to use web, but the presenter
| wasn't and what she was seeing didn't match us which led
| to some confusing scenarios. Things like the grid view
| weren't there last I used it and some of the more
| advanced presenter features just don't do anything for
| web iirc
| el-salvador wrote:
| It can be enabled/disabled by your company's Zoom
| administrator.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Just replace the /j/ in the URL of the page with /wc/join/,
| and you should be in the zoom web client.
|
| You can even prepare your links this way so you're there to
| begin with.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't really get the religion around the video platforms. I
| use three (Zoom, Google Meet, and Bluejeans) on a regular
| basis and they all seem simultaneously decent enough and
| imperfect on my network on a given day. Teams is fine too but
| I rarely use it.
| el-salvador wrote:
| From my experience in Latin America, Zoom tolerates network
| problems better. I've connected from or have had attendants
| using DSL, Cable, 3G, 4G (Not LTE) and call in phone audio.
| mttddd wrote:
| yep I think alternatives have improved but pre covid i
| traveled all over the world for work and the big thing
| was Zoom worked the best on iffy connections and also
| played best with multiple companies IT systems
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Browser zoom drops my audio after several minutes making me
| disable and reenable audio to get a few more minutes of
| audio. Annoying when it happens mid sentence, but that's a
| price you have to pay for using Zoom.
| sofixa wrote:
| > As someone who runs Zoom via the browser (they do deploy a
| dark pattern to discourage this behavior but there is no good
| reason to trust them) I find that Hangouts and Teams are both
| solid alternatives in terms of AV quality. Would be happy to
| see some actual data on this claim
|
| Some anecdata, recently i had to switch from Teams to Zoom,
| with the same person, and the audio quality was drastically
| better on Zoom for both of us.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Hangouts is all but dead, and Chat/Meet suck by comparison...
| at one point, I loved Hangouts, one comms app to rule them
| all, SMS, chat, video conf, messaging, even google voice...
| then it all fell apart.
|
| Half the time, I can't join a meet with video, or the video
| works in the "test" window, but as soon as you join it's
| broken.
|
| I'm mostly okay with Teems though.
| jeppester wrote:
| I've seen this argument used many times against GDPR
| regulations.
|
| Who are obligated to provide an alternative? And why?
|
| It's not like the police is obligated to give drug abusers
| something in return for the drugs that they are confiscating.
| choeger wrote:
| Do you ask for a comparable alternative when a road gets closed
| or slowed down? Or when a particular, well working, herbicide
| gets banned? Or when carrying guns openly gets banned? Did you
| ask for a comparable alternative to leaded fuel?
| sharken wrote:
| Have not experienced this myself, but it could be due to poor
| network connectivity.
|
| What i find annoying about Teams, is the ability to use 100%
| CPU and 90% of the integrated graphics on a laptop.
|
| Thankfully disabling GPU hardware acceleration have helped
| quite a lot.
| duxup wrote:
| >Offer a comparable alternative, then.
|
| Maybe I am not doing a lot of meetings compared to others but I
| really haven't had more or less problems with Teams, Google
| products, or GoToMeeting (haven't used webex in a long time)
| ... compared to Zoom.
|
| It's all a wash for me among those experience wise.
|
| I constantly have various orgs tell me all about how they only
| use X video conferencing app because of Y experience. Most of
| those stories conflict ;)
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm in meetings typically 2+ hours a day. I'm on a decent but
| not great Internet connection. My experience is they all
| mostly work but none are guaranteed to have a video/audio
| glitch free call.
| duxup wrote:
| Same. I think a lot of people's experience with them is
| just happenstance.
| [deleted]
| badLiveware wrote:
| I believe that the government in Hamburg and the Bundeswehr are
| implementing(or has already) element and matrix.
|
| https://element.io/pro/federation-collaboration
| hef19898 wrote:
| The latter organisation is not necessarily a benchmark in IT,
| or organisation in general.
| iso1210 wrote:
| Webex is so shockingly bad. Zoom, Teams, Slack, all seem to
| work fairly well, all have clients (and can run in the browser)
|
| Webex - which I have to use as part of a university course I'm
| doing on the side - _requires_ you to run it in a browser on my
| OS, it has really awful options (like allowing the presenter to
| unmute people), half the claimed features just aren 't
| available (virtual whiteboard, no major loss as everyone uses a
| shared google doc instead), and if you disconnect for some
| reason (like sound stops working which happens fairly
| frequently) you are kicked out of a group and you can't get
| back in.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Must be your specific webex/connection settings/version then,
| we have it in our massive banking corps (90k+employees
| worldwide) and none of the things you describe are an issue.
| We have adopted it some 7 years ago.
|
| You don't need to run it in browser at all, there are desktop
| (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows
| that you are really not familiar with it.
|
| Now it is still a crappy system, but for different reasons
| than you describe. And other solutions have their own
| problems, as indicated by article and elsewhere.
| hobofan wrote:
| The 1000 slightly different versions of Webex that are all
| bundeled under the same brand are its biggest drawback.
|
| My university uses it as well, and the normal latest
| version of Webex is on par with Zoom. However for some
| courses the lecutrers use e.g. Webex Training which is
| barely usable garbage (but is the only version that has
| built-in quiz features).
| silurian wrote:
| > there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS
| out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with
|
| Now you sound as if you are not familiar with it. Looks
| like Webex added Linux(Deb & RHEL) on May 28, 2021. Before
| that, you had to use their legacy java applcation which
| also necessitated you to *manually* figure out, then hunt
| down & install the missing dependencies. And it was still
| shit.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I very much agree with this.
|
| Zoom may be terrible from a security point of view; I dislike
| the fact that I may well have installed spyware on my machines;
| and I have _absolutely no idea_ why in the nine hells the
| Android version _complains that my phone is rooted_ (it should
| exist in a chroot!) but --- despite all of that --- _it works_.
|
| Teams, in particular comparison, is like DIY dentistry with
| kitchen implements as surgical tools. It lags; it doesn't have
| a native client on any devices and turns them all into heaters;
| its codecs are nowhere near as good, and it can't display as
| many people on screen at one point in time -- and there's no
| private chat. I understand on one level why most organisations
| seem to want to force their staff to use Teams - it's "free"
| (if you already pay the microsoft tax) and comes with the
| corporation (+-NSA) being the spying overlord, rather than
| "E2EE" (+China). However, I _completely_ also understand why
| most users prefer Zoom. Frankly, I do too!
| tehnub wrote:
| When my company first started using Zoom, people were fumbling
| the controls constantly. In fact, people still do ("Can you see
| my screen?"), and no one knows what "Optimize for video clip"
| even means.
|
| I don't think those other platforms are inherently worse, we're
| just slightly more familiar with Zoom.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I've been a heavy user of GoToMeeting for over a decade. It
| works very, very well for us, and our use case is entirely
| multi-org meetings.
|
| If someone has shitty home internet (a COVID-era problem), then
| they should probably dial in separately and not use the meeting
| audio, but that's going to hurt you no matter what meeting tool
| you use.
| croes wrote:
| It's not their job to name alternatives, it's their job if a
| tool complies to the laws.
| geofft wrote:
| Technically yes, but practically, if someone can't get their
| job done without breaking rules, they're going to break the
| rules. If your goal is _actual compliance_ with rules, giving
| people a way to comply is much more effective.
| croes wrote:
| Tell that the software companies. You can't demand to
| change the maw just because software companies want to
| illegaly collect data from their users. Why are people
| always complaining about data protection officers but not
| the shitty software companies. They have the tracking and
| the bugs which endanger their users and most of the time
| they won't even get punished.
| [deleted]
| dcow wrote:
| Tandem is still new and has bugs but it's never been a meeting
| killer. It doesn't really have a guest access feature yet,
| though (at least to my knowledge).
| fukmbas wrote:
| Teams is superior to Zoom... I don't understand why anyone uses
| Zoom, it's trash and compromised
| reedlaw wrote:
| Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/)
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Easy to self-host and probably less expensive to host than
| all the MS Office licenses used for MS Teams or paid Zoom
| licenses. I set up Jitsi Meet months ago and all I ever had
| to do was to add user accounts using prosody on the server
| (which should be improved imo). I've not needed to touch
| anything since first setup, except for user accounts. It just
| works. What's more is, that some solutions like MS Teams
| still is not able to properly work on all browsers. While
| Discord has solved this problem for ages and Jitsi Meet
| simply works in all modern browsers. I have a hunch, that
| with MS Teams there is active unwillingness to make it work
| properly. How else can this be explained?
| da_chicken wrote:
| > _I have a hunch, that with MS Teams there is active
| unwillingness to make it work properly. How else can this
| be explained?_
|
| As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which
| can adequately be explained by stupidity.
| fartcannon wrote:
| There's an update to that saying:
|
| Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be
| explained by stupidity, unless it's Microsoft. Then it's
| definitely malice.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Used it once, host shared the screen, never seen anything
| what they have shared.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Yup. We use this for every meeting at my local hackerspace
| and it's been great.
|
| Bonus: it tells you when connectivity issues are on your end
| or someone else's end, everyone's network stats are visible.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Offer a comparable alternative, then
|
| Here's a few: - https://meet.jit.si/ which you
| can also self host https://github.com/jitsi -
| https://bigbluebutton.org/ which you can also self host
| https://github.com/bigbluebutton
|
| I've found that they're especially useful, when integrated with
| Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ which you can also self host
| https://github.com/RocketChat
|
| That way you have an experience that's a lot like Slack/Teams,
| with pretty good support for chat, reactions, file uploads,
| discussions, making quotes etc., while also being able to start
| video/audio calls with the press of a single button.
|
| Of course, if that's too many platforms, Rocket.Chat also
| supports WebRTC, albeit the UX was a bit less stellar when i
| last tried it.
|
| Alternatively, there is also Nextcloud Talk, which can
| integrate with your instance of Nextcloud and allow for file
| sharing, chatting etc., though personally i found Rocket.Chat
| to be more usable: https://nextcloud.com/talk/
|
| Regardless, those are some very competent options which allow
| all the data to remain on your own servers.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Yes, there are many self-hosted options out there.
| https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway works well for
| multi-party video with up to about 15 users in a room
| assuming everyone has a reasonably reliable connection.
| saurik wrote:
| AdmiralAsshat's point was that all of the alternatives sucked
| because they were difficult or flakey to use: they weren't
| "comparable". Notably, the alternatives being mentioned as
| non-comparable weren't even trying to be local: they were
| remote service/ (which if you think Zoom is particularly bad,
| is still an improvement) built by giant companies that have
| tons of resources to have an army working on just these
| tools... and they all still sucked.
|
| You then responded to this comment by just matter-of-factly
| asserting that you had the list of missing alternatives...
| but, really, you are simply hijacking the thread to point out
| that alternatives exist "which allows all the data to remain
| on your own servers"; but, you provide no evidence or
| argument to address whether these products are actually
| "comparable" (to the point where it just feels like you
| didn't even understand the point being made) in a way that,
| say, Google Hangouts--which is the product Google created
| WebRTC for!--isn't.
| ratww wrote:
| I disagree that alternatives are flakey or difficult to
| use. If anything it's the opposite. I use BBB daily (and
| sometimes Jitsi) with a very varied group (including people
| who never had a computer before) and the results are _much_
| better than with Zoom. Maybe Zoom is intuitive if you grew
| up with computers and with bad software, but honestly the
| quasi-requirement of installation (it 's non-trivial to use
| the web version) and the dark patterns galore are hard to
| navigate for non-techy people.
| lrvick wrote:
| I use https://meet.jit.si/ daily and can confirm it is
| easier to use than Zoom or Hangouts.
|
| No nag screens trying to get me to install desktop clients
| or trying to get me to create an account or give up
| personal information.
|
| It just works.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Like all apps that are "just" WebRTC, jitsi doesn't work
| well on networks with persistently high packet loss. A VC
| app needs to work reliably 99.99% of the time, not just
| 99% of the time.
| [deleted]
| okprod wrote:
| I think the OP meant options that are as "easy" as click on a
| link and join a meeting. I use BBB and Mumble but there are
| others I know who would never know how to set up their own
| instance or even what github is.
| lrvick wrote:
| This is why multiple companies exist to sell you one-click
| hosted instances of these without lock-in.
| yorwba wrote:
| Yeah, the press release https://datenschutz-
| hamburg.de/pressemitteilungen/2021/08/20... mentions that
| (in addition to a nameless internal videoconferencing
| tool) Hamburg uses Dataport as a vendor, which seems to
| imply Jitsi Meet: https://video.openws.de/
| FiReaNG3L wrote:
| jitsi is exactly that, been using it for the whole pandemic
| for meetings for my team of 10 ppl, never had an issue.
| taf2 wrote:
| I like your line reasoning... but the problem with video
| conferencing isn't really technical- IMO it's all about the
| User experience (UX). Zoom by far beats the competition in
| this regard. It's UI could be better but compared the mess of
| competitors it's far more straightforward ... just my
| opinion...
| ratww wrote:
| I don't think Zoom "beats" anyone in UX, especially with
| the dark patterns. They're just popular. I've seen
| countless times hundreds of people unable to activate the
| "Computer Audio" option on company-wide meetings because
| it's in a secondary tab with zero-affordance. Recently they
| made it very hard to find the "gallery mode" icon (you have
| to hover a dark area). They also make it borderline
| impossible to open it on the browser, forcing multiple
| reloads or whatnot (the method it changes all the time).
| Honestly Jitsi, BBB and even Teams are all better IMO.
| cycomanic wrote:
| One of my pet-peeves with the zoom UX is that it always
| switches to full-screen mode if someone is sharing the
| screen. This is particularly annoying if you are also
| using the participant or chat windows (because there's
| voting or chat messages etc.) and if you are switching
| between different presenters (meaning it switches again
| and again to full screen). Why can't it respect my
| decision to not have a full-screen window?!
| schmorptron wrote:
| Element, too!
| Akronymus wrote:
| Element actually uses jitsi.
| schmorptron wrote:
| Oh right, they're just planning to get voice and video
| working over matrix natively in the semi near future
| geraneum wrote:
| Other big services sometimes solve this problem by creating a
| data center in EU for European customers (DataDog, 1password,
| etc.). I don't know how feasible could that be in Zoom's case
| technically, but if they see a threat of losing customers
| because of GDPR they might dedicate such resources.
| baja_blast wrote:
| As someone how uses both Zoom and Google Hangouts, there is
| nothing Zoom offers that Google hangouts does not provide. The
| quality is the same for both, but at least Hangouts does not
| install a sketchy client on my machine that constantly runs in
| the background.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| you can disable said client on startup...
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| Google hangouts is garbage. I have never had a hangout call
| that didn't freeze or have someone dropout. The audio on
| hangouts is beyond bad and makes people sound completely
| different than they do in person. The video quality is always
| grainy on my fiber connection. Zoom doesn't have these
| problems for me.
| el-salvador wrote:
| Same issue here. If the link is too slow screen shares
| become grainy and text is hard to read.
|
| While Zoom usually only slows the frame rate, but not the
| resolution.
| remus wrote:
| I find it interesting that people have such different
| experiences with the same tool. I tend to have 2 or 3
| hangouts meetings a day and I can't remember the last time
| there was an issue.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| How are you okay with the audio compression? It makes
| everyone sound flat, monotone. It's hard to tell who's
| who if people have their cameras off.
| vosper wrote:
| Likewise - we switched from Gotomeeting to Google Meet
| (which is the same as hangouts, right?) mostly because
| the experience for staff in Latin America was so much
| better.
|
| That said, Gotomeeting is the worst of the bunch. They
| haven't added a useful feature in years, the CPU usage is
| terrible, their parasitic launcher is very difficult to
| get rid of, ugh... I'm surprised they're still around.
| rand_r wrote:
| I'm sorry, but Hangouts is terrible. It sucks on every level.
| The UI is so bad it's hard to believe. I wish I could sit
| down with their product team to get an explanation for how
| badly Hangouts is designed. Takes about 10s to see all the
| problems with it compared to Zoom.
| john_yaya wrote:
| I used to agree with you, until I discovered that
| (surprise, surprise) Hangouts works great on Chrome, not so
| much on other browsers.
| robrenaud wrote:
| My 94 year old grandpa would constantly struggle with zoom,
| to the point that we'd schedule him 15 minutes early to
| avoid half the meeting being about zoom problems. Hangouts
| worked well for him first try. The auto captioning also
| works quite a bit better with hangouts, which is good for
| people with hearing loss.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Can you be more specific about the UI problems? It seems
| pretty equivalent to Zoom to me.
| rand_r wrote:
| Two words: Gallery view.
|
| Like what in the actual fuck. How are they unable to do a
| simple grid properly? It's just rectangles. The UI is
| there to copy from Zoom even.
| SahAssar wrote:
| I don't think having the gallery view grid less
| gracefully handling non-even numbers of participants
| justifies saying "The UI is so bad it's hard to believe".
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Appart from not having a linux client.
| azornathogron wrote:
| The client is a web browser. There are web browsers on
| Linux. I use hangouts in both Chrome and Firefox, and
| haven't had a problem with either of them.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| While hangouts is a dumpster fire, Google Meet seems to work
| pretty well for those who aren't willing to jump through some
| self-hosted hurdles to run their own.
| yibg wrote:
| Screen sharing on hangout (a year or so ago) has been
| terrible for me, especially for text dense screens like code.
| Pair programming on hangouts I can't even read the other
| person's code a lot of the time. Also hangout quality for
| video and audio drops really fast on relatively poor quality
| network. I've had a few cases where the quality on hangout
| was too poor so we switch over to zoom.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| Hangouts has zoom-level annotation or 5k screen share where
| texts are crisp?
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| How often do you use those features, and how useful are
| they to all participants?
| godot wrote:
| Although I mainly use zoom for work, I've also used Google Meet
| occasionally and have found the quality to be on par with Zoom.
|
| I notice you mentioned Google Hangouts instead of Google Meet,
| I'm not sure if they are the same now (too hard to keep track
| of these) but a brief google search seems to suggest they are
| not the same. If so, my past experience with Google Hangouts
| with friends would suggest it is indeed terrible. If so, you
| could give Google Meet a try.
| e40 wrote:
| Yeah, it's amazing to me the hate people have for Zoom.
|
| I feel about Zoom like Garp felt about the plane that hit the
| house he was looking at buying. When the real estate agent said
| he wouldn't want to buy it now, he said _The odds of another
| plane hitting this house are astronomical!_ and bought the
| house. I think it 's unlikely Zoom will jeopardize their
| leadership by not taking security and privacy seriously.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| I use whereby and it's always been without issue. They used to
| have a very good privacy policy too, but since they updated it
| I can't make sense out of it
| el-salvador wrote:
| I have to do many online meetings, with attendants from
| developing countries (like mine) or unstable links. From our
| experience it seemsthat Zoom tolerates our unstable internet
| links better. I guess it has better error correction.
|
| There's also the annotate feature is super useful, which is
| missing in Teams and Webex. And also offers dial-in phone
| numbers in more countries then the rest.
|
| Zoom's audio design is nicer too, compared to Webex has some
| very annoying beeps that are a pain in large meetings.
|
| Regarding Teams, I have a computer with plenty of RAM, SSD
| disks and a high end work provided smartphone. Teams is super
| slow in both of them. I haven't been able to use the Exe
| version for weeks now because it's too slow. There is also no
| way to quote a chat using the Windows and Web version, so in
| order to quote chats I have to do it from my phone.
|
| Every once in a while I have buggy Teams or Webex meeting, that
| ends with a "Hey you know, I'll just send you a Zoom link".
| comeonseriously wrote:
| I hate Teams because of other issues[0], but the video and
| screen sharing are really good.
|
| [0] It will occasionally leave artifacts on the screen if I put
| my laptop to sleep and wake it up. Just an empty rectangle in
| the notification area. I had to write a powershell script to
| cycle teams. And that's just one of the annoyances.
| IncRnd wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Teams manages to reboot Macintosh M1 machines after a few
| minutes in a call.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Given 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 wrote:
| I'm not surprised. It can runs super slow on my computer
| with plenty of RAM and lots of CPU.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Hangouts would surely have the same problem since I doubt
| Google can rule out the possibility that your video streams are
| being relayed through frontend servers outside the EU. The only
| way you could really control it is to use the old school
| approach to video conferencing: legacy standards like SIP or
| h.323 with all of the usability problems that implies, or
| WebRTC with your own STUN/TURN services ... and all of the
| usability problems that implies.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| It would be nice if Teams weren't yet another Electron disaster.
| foepys wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| WebView2 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/
| foepys wrote:
| Since 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.
| ezconnect wrote:
| Economic competition has now become who can control state
| government.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://jitsi.org/security/
|
| Plus you can self-host it. So you're only limited by the
| machine you host it on.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| I'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?
| intel_brain wrote:
| Telegram?
| Ansil849 wrote:
| Telegram does not support E2EE for group chats.
|
| It's also not a video conferencing platform.
| fsflover wrote:
| > It's also not a video conferencing platform.
|
| Yes, it is: https://telegram.org/blog/group-video-calls.
| swiley wrote:
| E2EE is meaningless with a closed client downloaded by
| individuals from the service provider.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| If 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.
| rrdharan wrote:
| > it provides end to end encryption
|
| (After lying about it for years)
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-...
|
| Theranos-level of "fake it til you make it" and they actually
| did make it...
| rblatz wrote:
| So 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.
| superkuh wrote:
| In addition, Zoom developement is largely based in China which
| has an even less stellar record and definitely does not respect
| GDPR.
| d0mine wrote:
| who doesn't send data to US? (google, apple, facebook?)
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| lrvick wrote:
| I 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/dd2480f195f5b48a9ab7af8b41c...
| ramimac wrote:
| Disclaimer: Have worked with many smart folks who now work at
| Zoom.
|
| I agree that Zoom has had numerous security and privacy
| failings. I think it is important to color the characterization
| of their security teams with a timeline however.
|
| Looking at that gist - the majority of the content predates the
| conclusion of the "90 day security plan" [1]. The team, and
| product no doubt, has changed immensely in the past year. That
| doesn't wallpaper over the history here, but there is
| completely different security leadership (e.g the current CISO
| didn't start until late June 2020 [2]) and staffing in place at
| this point that means your statements on their team likely
| aren't reflective of Zoom today.
|
| [1] https://blog.zoom.us/ceo-report-90-days-done-whats-next-
| for-... [2] https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-hires-jason-lee-as-chief-
| informati...
| toiletaccount wrote:
| and yet i still dont trust their shitware. there's a lesson
| to be learned there.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Zoom has fixed the UX in this business, which is the one thing
| that matters most(tm), 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.
| version_five wrote:
| Many of the replies to your comment have the "No wireless,
| less space than a nomad" vibe" People seem to nitpick or
| claim equivalence between individual features, but like you
| say, Zoom was the sea change toward mass videoconferencing.
| acdha wrote:
| Which 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.
| artursapek wrote:
| The reason Zoom won is their meeting URLs which open their
| app, combined with no registration requirement. It's just a
| very viral product.
| justaguy88 wrote:
| > Which UX problem do you think it fixed?
|
| You can join a call without signing up
| sombremesa wrote:
| When Zoom first came onto the scene, the other technologies
| you've listed had more friction than coarse grained
| sandpaper. Zoom was the very first to let people join
| meetings without a) signing up; and b) downloading
| anything. I don't know about all the solutions you've
| listed, but Google Meet for example still requires an
| account whereas Zoom still does not.
|
| As more and more people use Zoom, the friction of using it
| decreases as well, since you can more safely assume that
| people have used it before and are familiar with it - if
| not, they can still use it without making an account, and
| without downloading anything (though this has become a bit
| harder now).
|
| Furthermore, Zoom was also one of the first solutions to
| let you simply call in with your phone (and put that option
| front and center), which also does not require accounts or
| any downloads.
|
| There are probably many other things I'm glossing over here
| - UX is a holistic phenomenon after all, and requires many
| small things to feel right. I'm not sure whether you're
| arguing that Zoom did not have 10x better UX than anything
| out there when it launched, but if you are, I can't help
| but think you're being willfully ignorant.
| rrdharan wrote:
| Google Meet does not require an account to join a
| meeting.
|
| https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9303069
| vitus wrote:
| Um, it does...?
|
| Under "Personal account users":
|
| "Anyone who isn't signed into a Google account can't join
| your meetings."
|
| This is a feature, not a bug: https://workspaceupdates.go
| ogleblog.com/2020/07/anonymous-us...
|
| Although: "Note, this does not prevent users from dialing
| in by phone."
| ethelward wrote:
| > Zoom was the very first to let people join meetings
| without a) signing up; and b) downloading anything
|
| E.g. BigBlueButton and Jitsi were doing it for much
| longer.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Which is irrelevant because those who knew about those
| are not the significant majority which is responsible for
| the success of zoom
| cycomanic wrote:
| So the point is not that zoom was better UX wise, but
| simply had better marketing, or not?
| nwienert wrote:
| Both.
|
| Honestly - there's huge, massive room for better UX that
| would really revolutionize online communication:
|
| - Presence indicator/avatar in your toolbar of close
| contacts or team
|
| - Push-to-talk to send audio to anyone from toolbar with
| non-disruptive indicator
|
| - Instant screen/mouse share from there with audio and
| floating video optional
|
| - Just so many fluidity improvements if you do a more
| minimal video window that can add/remove people without
| friction
|
| I really wish someone would build it.
| acdha wrote:
| > Zoom was the very first to let people join meetings
| without a) signing up; and b) downloading anything
|
| I find your second part interesting because for years
| Zoom has tried to force you to download their client --
| you have to learn how to construct the web URL to
| generate links to use it in a browser since they removed
| the option from their web UI.
|
| > I'm not sure whether you're arguing that Zoom did not
| have 10x better UX than anything out there when it
| launched, but if you are, I can't help but think you're
| being willfully ignorant.
|
| I'm not sure why you're inclined to take such an
| uncharitable view but I'm coming at it from the
| perspective of someone who was relatively late to using
| Zoom (2020) and found it pretty similar to the
| competition. I used Skype, WebEx, Teams, Hangouts/Meet,
| and Chime professionally first and Facetime / Hangouts
| personally prior to that and the only one I'd say is 10x
| worse is Skype.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| It's tight integration with calendar systems and Slack
| definitely help. Their browser extension makes Google
| Calendar event creation have a Zoom Meeting link that is
| seamless, and /zoom is irresistible. For a time they had
| the best free tier on the market, and people appreciated
| the 45 minute time limit that came along with it.
|
| FWIW the competition was terrible for a time. I've never
| been on a BlueJeans call that wasn't painful, Google
| Meet/Hangouts had terrible quality, GoToMeeting was
| neglected post-acquisition, slack killed their meeting
| product for a while, and WebEx was bloated. Join.me was my
| goto for a while, but now I use Jitsi when I get to choose,
| but usually end up on Zoom calls.
| biztos wrote:
| I think a lot of it is that everyone has heard of Zoom, and
| Zoom works pretty well for calls with a lot of people, so
| it became the default for group video calls.
|
| The "UX" in this case was "fixed" by being less crashy than
| the competition for long enough to earn a reputation.
|
| As someone with a security background myself, I really hope
| organizations use it less and less, because the competition
| by now works just fine. But as a human living in the world,
| I don't refuse to use Zoom, I just use it on my iPad and
| assume the conversation is intercepted somewhere.
| CabSauce wrote:
| Really? Their UI/UX within a call is the worst of the major
| video conferencing tools, IMO.
| netr0ute wrote:
| I think it's because we power users want more from a UI,
| but to Average Joe, Zoom is great because all the simple
| stuff is easy to understand.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I've got to agree with the GP on this. I would argue Zoom
| is one of the least simple to understand UIs.
|
| - It's multi-window (like WebEx). Whereas Teams and Meets
| is a single window interface
|
| - It has a great many options and not all of them are
| immediately obvious. Like how filters are hidden behind
| then stop cam button
|
| I'm not saying I'm a fan of MS Teams nor Google Meets
| either. But they do have a much slicker UI.
| [deleted]
| cycomanic wrote:
| I can tell you that this is pretty much everyone. I've
| just experienced this in some interviews and conferences
| where people were using Zoom and Teams for the first
| time.
|
| There was definitely much more confusion when using Zoom
| than teams. How do I share my screen? How do I open the
| participants/chat when sharing the screen ... The
| interface especially when sharing a screen is absolutely
| horrible.
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