There's a difference between a couple of honest mistakes and a history of shadiness (MacOS hidden server to prevent uninstallation), outright lies (E2EE), and attacking the pillars of democracy (censoring Chinese Americans discussing Tienanmen Square).

And routing interceptable call encryption keys through China even for calls that do not originate or terminate in China... https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...

This is overly charitable.

Zoom isn't learning from mistakes and making improvements that the market demands. It's providing a feature it said it already had.

Zoom knew E2EE was something the market demanded, so it lied about having E2EE. This was a blatant lie to get more people to use its platform. Then Zoom got caught. Now it's actually trying to provide what it said it provided in the first place.

> people on HN are always so eager to crucify a company for its past

Perhaps. In my case it's less crucifying a company despite intentions to fix and more crucifying a company because I'm tired of hearing the same PR nonsense and not seeing real improvement to the industry as a whole.

What you're seeing is the flip side of the whole "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission" nonsense.

I feel like the mistakes you are referring to were actually lies and there is a sort of a pattern emerging with a company that is not merely making innocuous mistakes

I'd be tempted to agree if their "mistakes" ended with the E2E debacle and Zoom was quick to admit wrongdoing and take responsability.

Unfortunately, it didn't end there. Rather than earning back their reputation, they have continued to burn through it with blunder after blunder.

The company has proven itself ethically corrupt and that's not something that can be made up for with apologies and product improvements. It will take time, demonstrations of humility, and a healthy dose of transparency to restore their reputation with me.

A generalization like “people on HN are always...” coming from a 3yr old HN user with 20k+ karma points looks like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Criticisms of large corporations is a healthy part of the HN community IMO. In fact, if we didn’t criticize Zoom they might still be lying about their E2EE capabilities.

A majority of the alternatives put up vs Zoom here outside Jitsi come from Verizon, Microsoft, and Google. Seems more like the routine of being super anti something specific. Like Facebook before and now. Among others.

That's a fairly new account.

Lying about a feature isn’t just a “mistake”.

Lying about a feature is exactly what Silicon Valley's "fake it till you make it" culture encourages.

Crucifying Zoom over this while letting virtually every other company in the space (inc. Hangout/Meet and MS Teams/Skype) go free seems quite hypocritical from an HN community that's comprised of many startupers and startup wannabees who spend their professional lives working for entities with similar practices.

That’s not what the expression means. If you are a tiny company and a big customer comes to you and says “can you scale to support us”, you answer yes even if you are not 100% sure you are ready. If however you claim to have feature X and you don’t, that’s just a lie.

I think I agree with you, but this argument seems like a pretty arbitrary line.

How is saying "yes we can scale" when you're not sure if you can, aren't you essentially implying that you have the infrastructure to deliver on that promise? And if you don't actually have that infrastructure yet/built/proven, then you're essentially selling a feature that doesn't exist.

It's shades of grey from lying about E2EE, but seems pretty similar imo

Because with presumably feasible level of efforts and resources, you can make a claim that's not yet true, but has a reasonable probability of becoming true by the time you need to deliver your product/service. So you can make that claim in good faith, even if you're not 100% certain it will hold true.

That's very different than making a specific claim that you already have a feature right now, that you in fact don't. That claim cannot possibly be made in good faith, as it's currently outright false, and you can never retroactively apply end to end encryption on conversations that have already happened.

/like a pretty arbitrary line/

Really? Do you think they would/could lie on the features of a product that they deliver to a client. If they did, do you think they should get away with that?

'We have that capability' claim is totally not the same.

And perhaps instead of being lenient with Zoom because "well everyone else lies about features", we should instead be consistent about holding companies accountable for dishonest business practices.

(I think I'm preaching to the choir here; just clarifying for anyone else reading your comment)

Did Meet/Teams/Skype claim E2E encryption?

The only alternative I ever looked into was Jitsi (because it was the first alternative I started doing research on, and by the time I'd finished researching it there was no doubt that it was more than good enough -- and super easy to build our own cloud instance so that, even though it wasn't E2E, we had total control of the server that managed the encryption), but I don't recall hearing arguments that any of the other major competitors were actually E2E encrypted.

There's no reason to think they'll change their ways anytime soon. Every time they're caught lying or doing something shady they use some bullshit explanation and 'fix' the issue only insofar it stops journalists from writing articles, but doesn't fix the underlying problems.

I'm fine with companies making mistakes and working to fix them, but Zoom has been bad not just because of E2E encryption, but because of their questionable ties to the CCP.

This is not right. As a responsible company, they should know better. Regarding China, they have always been sidestepping the main question. They knew from the start that CCP will be intercepting calls. As an american company, this is a blatant disregard for people's trust. and its not an american thing to do. If you had friends or family who are routinely subdued in China, you will know what I am saying.

What is weing with Zoom that you’d use blue jeans before?