News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by SamWhited on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:10PM (#23554659)
You forgot "5. Zoom gets praised for developing features in response to criticism that already existed in other products that work better."

Jokes aside, with Zoom's track record, it's not worth using anymore regardless of what features they implement. Not having E2E encryption is no where near as much of a red flag as lying about it is to me.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by vmception on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @06:13PM (#23557440)
> it's not worth using anymore regardless of what features they implement.

Not to me. I would just assume they don't have E2E encryption and wouldn't base my calls around the idea of needing that. The claim is never worth it without an independent review and then thinking about the attack surface you actually want to shield against.

I mean, in another market, if you have ever investigated VPN providers you would see 100% conflicts of interest with affiliate marketing everywhere and the articles never acknowledge that the business of reselling internet access has inherent trust and unverifiable claims involved. A government can always tap the source with a legal order and there will always be information available to them.

For a video chat service, them merely saying E2E doesn't mean anything without a way to verify it, or host the whole stack myself and this is incompatible with being a company.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by DelTaco on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:26PM (#23554865)
Just curious - what other product that works better do you recommend? Webex, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Teams all pale in comparison when it comes to quality and ease-of-use.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by jszymborski on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @04:04PM (#23556064)
jitsi works wonderfully.

I've also have been using Discord for voice almost daily for a little over a year and it just works 99% of the time. Unfortunately, it suffers from "gamer" branding that makes it awkward suggesting for work. They should try offering a "business skin" that interops with discord.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by hunter2_ on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @11:08PM (#23559402)
It bothers me a bit that such branding/skin influences the situations in which people use good products. I tried to get my friends to switch from Facebook Messenger to Slack, and plenty of them use Slack at work (as do I), and a large amount of pushback was along the lines of "I don't want to feel like I'm working."

It's just a means of communicating, people. Maybe a few Discord features aren't useful outside of gaming and a few Slack features aren't useful outside of the workplace. I find that to be a stupid reason not to generalize the use of these products. Skinning (and filtering away those specific features) just might be the ticket.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by CarbyAu on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @07:13PM (#23557963)
I second Jitsi. For me, the value is in hosting your own Jitsi server. Really not that hard to do.

Mind you, I only host it at home on a VM for personal use. Have had sessions with 6 people with one of them a Europe-Australia connection. All fine on default 720p.

If I were looking for 20+ meeting software though I'd consider something else. I would consider it a case for streaming to faceless attendees. I have never had a meeting with useful input from more than 10 people.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by hellcow on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:31PM (#23554934)
Honestly, Meet has had huge updates in the past month or so that make it much better than Zoom. The image quality no longer looks like crap with more than 2 people in the room.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by cocoa19 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:53PM (#23555211)
If I had to decide the official comms app for my employer, I'd be wary of Google, due to their poor track record with comms apps.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by kinkrtyavimoodh on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @06:01PM (#23557303)
Meet is a GSuite product, and the only video-conferencing app in GSuite. Google doesn't fuck with GSuite.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by BrandoElFollito on Thursday June 18, 2020 @02:54PM (#23566344)
I have to remind this to myself when I see features available for free which are not ported to GSuite (parental control, google assistant for home users, reminders, inbox in the past (it took I think a year to port it)
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by kinkrtyavimoodh on Friday June 19, 2020 @01:23PM (#23576704)
And the reasons it takes time to port those features is because Google respects GSuite's privacy promises.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by BrandoElFollito on Saturday June 20, 2020 @03:33AM (#23582440)
What do you mean? How porting, say, Inbox has anything to do with privacy? This is the same codebase.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by kinkrtyavimoodh on Monday June 22, 2020 @08:51PM (#23608816)
There were other examples in the list too. "Parental controls, google assistant for home users, reminders"... a lot of these are difficult to do because GSuite data is extremely siloed and almost designed to be not easily interoperable with other Google products. This is entirely for privacy reasons.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by potatoketchup on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @09:27PM (#23558826)
except AppMaker
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by ericlewis on Thursday June 18, 2020 @12:57AM (#23559921)
And all of Gsuite
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by amiga_500 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @07:10PM (#23557930)
So one month. Not long.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by SamWhited on Saturday June 20, 2020 @10:12AM (#23584036)
I use Jitsi Meet. It's easier to use, the audio is generally better (although my only evidence for this is anecdotal, I'm taking piano lessons over video chat right now and meet was the only one that provided consistently good audio for my teacher), and it's web interface "Just works" whereas Zooms hates to be launched and tries to make you install the app constantly (although their launcher is so weird it behaves differently for me depending on the day).
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by gtk40 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:34PM (#23554969)
BlueJeans and RingCentral might as well be clones of Zoom. Amazon Chime and Microsoft Teams are fine for me too, but I'm not picky.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by reaperducer on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:41PM (#23555062)
After the disastrous experience I had with BlueJeans this morning, I wouldn't include it as a quality or reliability match for Zoom.

The company my wife works for can't get a reliable Teams conference going with anyone in France.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by disgruntledphd2 on Thursday June 18, 2020 @02:26PM (#23566051)
Zoom is a really great product.

The company lied about their encryption.

Both of these statements can be true, it's just a question of trade offs.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by Wheaties466 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:58PM (#23555997)
Ring Central uses Zoom for the backend.

I know they just announced their own "Ring central video" But im weary of that for the time being.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by hunter2_ on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @11:15PM (#23559446)
You say backend, but the frontend also has tons of overlap. The first time I saw RingCentral was after much Zoom experience, and I was thoroughly confused (based on nothing but the frontend) by the similarity until reading up about it. As a one-time invitee rather than a frequent user, RC was absurdly identical to Zoom other than the title bar and icon.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by Wheaties466 on Thursday June 18, 2020 @11:18AM (#23563860)
Ring central has used zoom on the backend for a while even before zoom went public. But just recently they added a powered by zoom watermark. And yes the applications do look very similar but RC meetings hasn't changed the UI in the 3+ years i've been using it.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by PeterCorless on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @04:01PM (#23556034)
*wary
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by Wheaties466 on Thursday June 18, 2020 @11:15AM (#23563831)
ah, my bad. I just googled and educated myself on the difference.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by andrepd on Thursday June 18, 2020 @11:29AM (#23563988)
Jitsi worked fine for me every time.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by depr on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:37PM (#23555001)
More to the point: which of those has true e2e encryption?
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by boogies on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:22PM (#23555580)
I don't think any of them do, but more relevant to security none of them has auditable source code. Jitsi Meet (the easiest to use out of the services I've tried, namely Zoom and Google Meet) has experimental E2EE. But if you want real security you probably want something more like GNU Jami, which is not grandma-friendly easy to use and is a native application only.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by neodymiumphish on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:32PM (#23555693)
The beauty of Jitsi is that you can run the software yourself (especially with the free Google Cloud credit) and then the E2E is hardly relevant because it's still server-to-client encrypted and you own the server...
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by hunter2_ on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @11:23PM (#23559502)
Good point. Are there any use cases for E2E when the server isn't potentially adversarial to any clients?

Separately: affordable servers likely are accessible to infrastructure providers (whether a VPS, or bare metal at a colo, etc.) so it's tough to say that "my own server" is usable exclusively by me and therefore not adversarial. Plus, maybe people want to use my server and consider me adversarial for whatever reason; they should use their own server instead, but might not have the skills.

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by Shared404 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @04:35PM (#23556408)
My understanding is that Jitsi does actually have E2E at this point, at least in an experimental form.

It's in here somewhere: https://jitsi.org/security/

Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by vntok on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:08PM (#23555417)
Can't speak for others but Microsoft Teams & Skype do not have E2E, and neither does Google Hangout/Meet.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by tsycho on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:46PM (#23555853)
Meet seems to be improving rapidly.
Re:Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, includi... by tbdenney on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:59PM (#23555295)
For ease of use I recommend Whereby.