I have honestly lost track of the amount of software I've seen in the past 20 years, that people insist they absolutely must continue to use despite its well documented gaping security flaws. Because it has a better UI or makes their life very slightly more convenient in some way.

Versions of Microsoft Office from the early 2000s where an entire operating system could be pwned simply by opening an excel or word file with malicious vbscript in it were good examples. JPG parsing buffer overflows. People continued to not only not patch it, but use it in its out of the box configuration.

For reference, organizations that have now banned Zoom include google, NYC public schools, SpaceX and NASA.

I think you've missed the point completely. It's not a question of convenient UI. It's the reliability of the video call. I've tried numerous video conferencing tools, and the differentiating factor is literally just whether or not the video quality is consistently good, whether the call is dropped or not, and whether the audio is audible.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

They have this long long outstanding bug where if they deem the audio low-quality (despite the fact it's crystal clear) they gain the audio and it goes crackly and too loud. If you turn down the volume... they gain it again, and again, and again, till you need to restart the app. Only for it to happen again.

The challenges related to audio sucking are mostly individual end users' audio stepping on itself, such as feedback from speakerphone configurations into its own microphone. Easily solved by good quality bluetooth headsets, wired headsets, or simply using something as basic as holding an android or ios phone up to your ear.

And I do put "video quality is consistently good" in the category of "makes peoples' lives slightly more convenient". It's not essential.

Tone, emotion, and intent are incapable of being conveyed properly without facial expressions and audible cues.

<rant> We are supposed to be engineers here. I regularly see this attitude that one thing is always and inherently better than another. Life is (mostly) a zero sum game and it is our job to pick a solution for the problem at hand. And the more we can constrain that problem, the better, cheaper, more reliably we can deliver a solution. More information is not better. Maybe for interview body language is important but for deciding what story to pull or what commits you did? Not really.

</rant>

If you're one of the few people that don't have person-to-person interaction on a daily basis - congratulations. However, that places you firmly in the minority.

The problem with Office and Zoom is that they are _the best_ at what they do right now. And that has a massive impact on what people are willing to give up to use it (money, privacy, risk, etc).

I hope Zoom gets their act together because their competitors, with way more time and resources, suck a lot more. I don't think it's because of the difference in security--maybe it's because competitors were focusing on Enterprise or because it wasn't their core business?

I think each of those companies that have banned it make sense, even if that means the average person should continue using it. Zoombombing elementary school children because of a misconfiguration (or just because of the media reports) isn't a great idea and the security concerns warrant the rest. I still don't see much of an issue for other business and most personal use.

If the very slight productivity hit from having slightly-more-blocky video chat in a slightly-more-awkward GUI client (google hangouts meet for gsuite, for instance, or Teams) is the make-or-break line between a company's continuing success, or not, with everyone working remotely, something else is fundamentally wrong that has no relation to any software package.

I hope both Zoom improves their practices and other enterprise tools step up their game, too. It's been a joke that the first 15m of a meeting is spent getting things working for decades now.

Zoom seems to have spent time in some areas almost completely ignored by most others: Linux, more than a handful of simultaneous users, and poor connections (I feel like Zoom has other benefits, but these are egregiously bad with competitors). At my previous job it wasn't just slightly-more-blocky video chat in a slightly-more-awkward GUI client. We used our own equipment (and mostly used Linux in-house) and were spread all over the world (some countries had poor connectivity). We also had our company meetings via Zoom. We often tried other software and didn't bless any one of them, but I don't think any other single software would work. Without Zoom I imagine we'd do most meetings via voice--likely over POTS.

This is one of the places where FOSS has a great role to play, vendor neutral infrastructure code. Any thing from one of the FAANG companies or even a startup is constantly going to have to find a way to create value for the company and inevitably that leads to data harvesting and sales.

What I have observed is that FOSS folks like to pick poor names for things which limits their ability to penetrate into the world of the non-computer geeks. Case in point, Jitsi. WTF? My parents are never going to remember what something named "Jitsi" does, ever. Call it "GNU Video Conferencing System (GVCS)" or just "Video Conferences" please.

I've been using WebEx in enterprise/corporate environment for couple of years intensively, and it "just works". I can download desktop client, but I can also just run it on browser.

Zoom always wants to install weird clients that violate policies and cause my corporate laptops to refuse or bork.

I recognize my experience may be a minority one, but I'm surprised, genuinely, at this perception that it's "the one video conferencing software" that works.

What people struggle to understand is that Zoom made it easy accross ALL operating systems. While Webex might "just work" on a subset of Windows and Mac hosts.

I use Linux as my day to day OS and WebEx is a nightmare (which sticks well to the stereotypical enterprise tool from Cisco).

Many solutions don't require a local software. That's an onboarding hurdle. Zoom's dial-in system also requires host approval, which lead to mayhem across every Zoom call I've been forced to join today. Most importantly, someone inviting me to a Zoom call says something about how they value security.

Zoom's audio quality is better. But it's not irreplaceably better. In terms of UX and reliability, it's been a mixed bag. In terms of security and branding, it's awful.

- Overall webex UI is very slow/laggy, subjective - yes, but I think it'd be obvious to any regular person.

- It makes my self-view a tiny floating box (this drives me crazy, I want it to be the same size as the others).

- Gallery view doesn't work well, sometimes the speaker is duplicated in sharing content speaker view and again in gallery view.

- Audio switching doesn't work as well between putting airpods on and off.

- More video/audio failures than Zoom in general (enough to be annoying).

I'm not sure why Zoom is the only one that does Gallery view right - the others all seem to mess this interface up (maybe because they can't handle the traffic?)

Also, when I was evaluating conferencing systems for my micro-ISV, I tried several - the screen sharing on Zoom was laggy as hell, moreso than I saw with anything else. It was 1-2 years ago, so things might have changed since then.

And every so often by virtue of being open in the background, WebEx manages to somehow crash my BT headphones.

Other than that, no real complaints.

The default behavior of Webex is to grab the microphone and keep it always-open looking for audio signals from Webex-compatible hardware.

I found this because I was bothered that even though I wasn't on a call Windows was telling me that Webex was actively using the Microphone, so I dug in. IIRC the post that guided me to this, on Apple devices with their earbuds it apparently also significantly degrades the sound due to some codec issue (or did in the past).

I also have a B2B micro-ISV, and chose Webex for that too, largely because it just works, but also because it's almost expected in corporate circles.

Human interaction that actually works right now is so important. And I simply have a hard time trusting another product to actually do the call reliably

Disclaimer: I work for Alphabet, but already held this opinion before I did.

Every second time I’m using it, I either don’t hear the other people, or people do not hear me. YMMV.

Jitsi and Google Meet worked by following a link and clicking one popup. Much easier UX

Edit: Maybe if I could receive some support from Google to find out what my problem is, I’d be able to fix it. But that ain’t going to happen.

I wish Google would just provide the internal tool and sell that. It’s the opposite of dogfooding their product. They eat the good stuff and product a lesser product to their customers.

I tried looking up the features on the Wikipedia page [0] and didn’t see a really comprehensive list. I reviewed Wikipedia because when I searched for google meet, Google’s top result (that seems like their product page) [1] just had an “open” button that linked out to the App Store to install “Hangouts Meet by Google.”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hangouts [1] https://meet.google.com/

It seems to work only in Chrome and Safari.

My pet peeve with Meet by the way is the absence of a native grid view in big rooms.

Teams is awful. Skype is worse. WebEx is just fine. So is Zoom.

Perhaps I'm just used to them as a remote worker, but they were never all that janky to begin with. Or, rather, more janky than the other tools available at the time.

I hadn't used Jitsi until this current situation meant friends wanted to "meet up" drunkenly on Friday evenings but it's the same.

The main obstacles are hardware. The cheapest correct working solution for a single individual participant is a headset and a webcam. Can you use lapel microphones, or (as two of my Youtube creator friends do for Friday evenings) sit in front of a huge professional microphone with filters? Yes, yes you can but that's not for most users. Can you plug a high-end SLR that's focused dead on you into a converter and stream that instead of a webcam? Yup, but again most people either don't own an SLR or don't want to set it up just so they can be a bit clearer and brighter when drunk.

And the thing about hardware is that we abstracted this away entirely. Zoom doesn't have different hardware support from Hangouts or Skype or any other tool.

"Which VC tool should we use for this meeting?" is a bike shed discussion at the best of times. Chances are good either you didn't need a video conference at all, or any of the tools would have been fine.

My experience with Google Meet matches yours with Zoom.

Nothing else comes close on Linux for me.

We use it internally at Xero, more than ever currently with working from home, and it's been solid from what I've experienced.

Given we also use Google Calendar, joining a meeting is pretty straight forward, as a Meet link is populated in each event, and shows up on the home screen for meet.google.com

Usually the only mic issues that occur are people using their own headsets with audio gain set too high or flaky bluetooth connections

Running in Firefox, it works great for the most part although sadly it breaks every few months. It'll tend to drop me from the lobby a few seconds in with "Network Error" or something along those lines. I would get frustrated but given it's a work tool, a few days to a week using Chrome (just for calls) and Firefox is back in action again.

We also conduct our postmortems via Google Meet and it generally seems to support 50+ person calls fairly well. That said, we use Hangouts Streaming for All Hands type of stuff so I couldn't speak on performance with hundreds of users at once

Purely anecdotal but my coworker has an older HP laptop (specs are still a respectable 8GB ram, presumably quad core CPU) and finds that he can't be on a Google Meet call while also doing development as his fans will flare up too much.

I would actually quite appreciate a Google Meet desktop app (that's not electron) but I guess the premium userbase tend to have enough specs to throw at web-based products

Oh yeah, I do appreciate that Zoom presumably doesn't require any fancy logins because running Google Meet on a phone requires a device policy in order to connect to a call.

I can either install it on my device plainly (requiring a pin to login going forward vs say, a fingerprint) or I could install it in a work profile. The latter is cleaner but then I have an entire second set of apps just to join a call on my phone once in a blue moon :(

At least you can dial into meetings but I find the audio is kinda wonky at times.

Having said all this, I can respect the product but I'm always happy for a non-Google entity to win in any given space ;)

These two remove from one-another other.

Zoom just showcased this back to back to back to back in a few weeks time). They played tricks with the words. "we wrote ABC but what we really meant is XYZ" is a shitty response to any type of audit/scrutiny.

This is a public company. They have an Internal Audit. What the hell were these guys been auditing in security audits??? The color of the background????

We have this or skype for b as approved. 10% of all meetings in skype bugs out and at least one person can not hear the rest or gets kicked out or can not see the others in the meeting. Or someone is presenting and a mandatory update is being rolled out and computer restarts but this is more related to the OS.

Zoom just works and you hear each others so much better. Stable and working. Lets hope all these new features makes it more secure.

not that we save anything from zoom that I need to be concerned about key storage for, but concerning nonetheless.

"The AES-128 keys, which we verified are sufficient to decrypt Zoom packets intercepted in Internet traffic, appear to be generated by Zoom servers, and in some cases, are delivered to participants in a Zoom meeting through servers in China, even when all meeting participants, and the Zoom subscriber’s company, are outside of China."

https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/03/response-to-resear...

>There is the thing that all Zoom keys are kept and maintained in China

Their complaint was about zoom's encryption key generation and distribution practices. The post you linked has nothing about the key distribution scheme zoom needs to implement so they actually have end-to-end encryption.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/04/03/does-zoo...

Without proper encryption, it doesn't matter if all participants in a meeting only connect to zoom servers since you don't know what zoom could be doing inside their network. Are they actually routing data without any storage, or any they storing the data and sending a stream out the back door to interested parties? But with true end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter what zoom does with the meeting data since only the participants can decrypt it.

Not to mention that for a sufficiently interested actor, they don't need to access zoom's network to intercept a copy of a meeting as it makes its way through the internet to a zoom server. End-to-end encryption also ensures they only get junk.

OP: all Zoom keys are kept and maintained in China

me: got a source for that claim?

you: quote citizen lab, sometimes zoom keys are sent to china

me: i didn't ask if keys were sometimes sent to china and that's not what OP said

you: not what the original poster stated.

this is where you lost me

> But with true end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter

i never said it mattered. i don't care if zoom is e2e encrypted or not, which is why i didn't bring it up.

> Not to mention that for a sufficiently interested actor, they don't need to access zoom's network

people get away with this internet boogeyman argument because its technically true, but what percentage of internet traffic inside the continental US is actually being monitored and exfiltrated to APTs? compromises happen internally. i cant remember any stories of a data breach occurring with data in transit, as opposed to data at rest.

We need more details about this, ideally from Zoom, as this is not really a lot of detail, and includes a lot of "apparently", "we suspect", etc.

A number of our hospital customers were diving in head first with Zoom, but are now backing off. I am curious to hear if there is any legal fallout from any of this.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-...

The phone application had a few updates between the failures and the success, so perhaps everything's sorted out. I also need to give the desktop native application a try.

I'm rooting for them, I really hope we get a viable free software option. But we should be honest about the state of things right now.

Considering your alternatives with zoom clients being banned it's not that far of a stretch.

* We run into so many issues screen sharing, usually it's just that the persons screen doesn't show up, but it's also often way to compressed to read

* Even just 1 on 1 it makes my laptop cry, with 5 or 6 people in a conference I have to minimize the application or I cannot use my laptop at all because of the CPU load, and at 12+ people even with the application minimized it was maxing out my 2017 Macbook Pro CPU

* For comparison, I recently was in a 230 person Zoom conference, laptop hardly noticed

* I often have audio issues and it requires restarting the application or chrome before it fixes itself

* Really the performance of it is the biggest reason I hate it, we tried having a "lounge" where people join it and just chill while working, but we stopped because once a few of us got on it our computers just became unusable

If you are using firefox you will encounter issues