Zoom had and continues to have a significant developer presence in China. Those individuals are subject to CCP coercion. There was also a time when they routed American calls through the mainland [1]. That has been fixed. But it remains excessive to cast all past criticism of Zoom as Microsoft's work.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/03/zoom-calls-routed-china/
For all my harsh criticism of both Microsoft and Google I wish them well: I want them to tidy up and become trustworthy.
Because the alternative where China becomes world leading is actually worse.
For all their warts Americans and American companies have done much good and gotten way more criticism for their faults compared to others.
That doesn't however mean that they should get off the hook easily, only that we should work to put them in an position were we can actually trust each other.
I figured that it was done by a big party that had a trusted relationship with tech journalists because they bigged up vulnerabilities that were relatively minor to journalists who didnt seem to be aware of it.
It's possible it wasnt Microsoft but the pattern of stories indicated Zoom was a public relations target of someone who freaked out after seeing how fast they were growing and MS certainly took full advantage.
I remember we knew about Zoom vulnerabilities in 2018 as well but I rarely used video conferencing and definitely not for "daily stand ups" however, I wouldn't discount Microsoft tried its best to "educate" reporters.
Zoom went from interesting tool to de facto worldwide standard in about two months. I'm pretty sure that in the offices of Microsoft, webex, goto meeting etc there was a collective WTF from leadership and people were instructed to find weaknesses. It doesn't follow that there was collusion or an evil conspiracy.
Security flaws in a product are part of the life cycle, unavoidable and might be accepted as long as proper and timely response is taken. That's due diligence. But lying about security? That's not even negligence.
So whats worse: a backdoor for China, or a giant hole for anyone interested?
I guess the latter gives us esual opportunity...
At work we were briefed in detail by spy from CSIS to avoid Zoom. I trust the Canadian spy before a trust I company with CCP ties.
The only thing I can add from that briefing is avoid Zoom, Huawei and product from Facebook, use Telegram if you can and Teams or Google current messaging solution if you can't.
also from CSIS briefing?
And vulnerabilities occur in all mainstream software.
what about zoom-calls in other countries?
It was not propaganda. There was no privacy protection. I work for a K-12 and there was literally no way to configure Zoom such that it wasn't a massive FERPA violation waiting to happen. There was originally no way to gatekeep entrants to a virtual Zoom classroom. It even earned it's own term: Zoombombing [0]. It was completely unsuitable for use. It's like it was designed for the Internet of the 1990s.
The only way we figure that so many districts were using it was:
1. It was free when basically nothing else was.
2. There was no time to evaluate alternatives when the pandemic started.
3. They were hoping nobody was looking too closely.
4. They didn't properly evaluate Zoom or they just didn't tell anyone how Zoom didn't ensure privacy.
Also Teams/SfB, despite years and years of their users complaining about the limit to concurrent video feeds, never progressed past about four until Zoom came on the scene. They didn't just exceed Teams by a few, but like an order of magnitude.
I use Teams every day but thank God for Zoom driving improvement. Just underscores the value of market competition.
The security issues like end-to-end encryption not actually being end-to-end encryption (unless you consider the man in the middle to be two ends, forwarding messages between the other two ends) were not propaganda - they really existed. It isn't even propaganda to say Zoom published very questionable statements (or if I allow myself to be slightly less charitable: the occasional outright lie) about those issues, because it is demonstrably true that this happened.
> that I'm almost certain was driven by Microsoft
You might need to present some evidence for that rather bold claim.
> [comparison with past MS security issues]
Teams is far from perfect, I am not a fan of it at all, and that security issue was real too IIRC, but you are using some very selective reasoning bringing it up at the same time as downplaying the serious flaws present in Zoom in the same period.
Assuming you are a US citizen and were using zoom from a US location at the time.
And it strongly indicated not just technical flaws, but a company and product that did not actually care about their users’ privacy.
And that’s even without bringing the China stuff into the picture.
The comment came from a banned account whose comments are dead by default and need to be vouched. Discussing that is as off-topic as discussing voting, and not surprisingly it’s just noise now.
HN is an anti-MS echo chamber, so comments like this become popular quickly. It's been this way for a few years now.
Which is probably why it’s so high up, because the HN algorithm probably can’t distinguish between replies agreeing with or disagreeing with a parent comment.
Another plausible explanation, at least in my humble opinion, but one without evidence either: Everybody and their kids (for school) were using some kind of video conferencing software for the first time in this kind of professional/educational setting and Zoom led the pack, which led to more interest by white hat researchers (and probably blackhats) as well as journalists. This newfound scrutiny lead to some first stories, and then people kept digging, because "Man exposes himself in virtual class room"[0] or "Does China spy on your business" or "New security problem uncovered. Is your kid safe in the virtual class room?" kind of stories generate a lot of impressions, and zoom had a lot of problems to uncover. Maybe it took some time to uncover the various problems, leading to a continuous stream of stories, maybe some outlets delayed publishing some stories, so they could milk a story at a time before coming out with the next one. Maybe Microsoft tried to capitalize on it, but that doesn't mean they were driving the news.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-55998557
Google Meet, and this may have changed recently, lacked basic features like being able to quickly identify what window you are sharing. I've also seen far more call issues with Google and Teams than I have Zoom.
As for Teams, I don't have a ton of quarrels with the video meeting system itself but it's desire to jam 20 other critical workflow pieces into the software made it a huge mess, at least from my experience with it on Mac:
1) The calendar sort of works, but not really, and most features you'd expect to accomplish with a calendar actually need to be done in Outlook and not teams.
2) The chat UI is really cumbersome compared to Slack and it quickly becomes difficult to find anything if you interact with a lot of people
3) The document file system is a total cluster. Let's say someone chats me a file to look at. I click the link and the file opens in my Teams window. I review it partially and have a question for the person who sent it. I go back to chat, send a message, and then try and go back to my document. Guess what? It's gone and I have to load it again. What fun! You just have to get into the habit of forcing the files to open in their native app or load them in a browser. I'm sure there is a way to prevent this from happening but what I've found with Microsoft applications (at least on Mac) is that basic functionality like this is completely unintuitive compared to any other productivity software I've seen.
Zoom did it right and that's why it's popular.
It's a stretch to attribute to malice what can be attributable to other environmental factors. Could it be that Zoom was/is the dominant player in the video conferencing space in 2020/2021, so media outlets were keen to cover stories around Zoom? WebEx and Google Hangouts vulnerabilities have also not received as much coverage as Zoom.
You’re literally describing a thing that exists which is called public relations. I’ll admit it is unlikely for the call to be coming from inside the house, but this would be the exact kind of thing done by an agency contracted by Microsoft — for among other reasons, plausible deniability should anything become public. “Microsoft would never badmouth Zoom.”
> media outlets were keen to cover stories around Zoom
Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a field of professionals who make media outlets more keen to cover stories around a certain topic?
The logic appears to be: I saw a lot of news stories about X, therefore X was caused by Y, without recognizing that Z is just as likely a cause for X.
MS is really aggressive with Teams marketing (specially for large bureaucratic enterprise) and I could totally see them doing what you mention.
I'm sure Google Meet is used in most of K-12, I don't know about higher ed. The university I work for licensed Zoom pre-pandemic because it was superior to other videoconferencing systems like WebEx and GoToMeeting.
The city council uses Zoom and my impression online is a lot of other local government functions that are now at least partially online do too.
Don't Teams and Google Meet both require everyone to have an account just to join a meeting? Being able to join a Zoom meeting just by clicking a link, no account needed, is very good for user experience.
Teams was half baked at best, and lacked a vast majority of the features that made Zoom useful. For example, it was only well into the pandemic that Teams gained the ability to have virtual backgrounds. You couldn’t have meetings with more than 10 or so people until very recently. Pretty much none of the features that made Zoom popular were even possible on Teams.
The real beneficiary should have been Google Hangouts, but Google moved too slowly (actually, it would probably be more accurate to say that Google didn’t move at all…or if they did they moved backwards).
Zoom put a backdoor (like, a full web server) in their Mac version and didn't even remove it when outed until Apple pushed an update that killed it for them. Which was a big unprecedented step.
Mistakes happen. Total lack of action when it happens shows at the very least a total disinterest. They definitely did lack a focus on security and privacy at that time.
I agree Microsoft is pretty aggressive and teams is a pig of an app in my opinion (slow and bloated) but zoom really dug their own grave too IMO.
For what it's worth I find Jitsi delightful and super performant. I use teams a lot with work and Jitsi with our makerspace and it's just so much better at the video conferencing role.
As a firm their ethics seem to have improved since the 90s but a few bad apples…
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...
Perhaps it was driven by Zoom's poor security and privacy record?
Zoom banned from New York City schools due to privacy and security flaws https://www.fastcompany.com/90486586/zoom-banned-from-new-yo...
Google Told Its Workers That They Can’t Use Zoom On Their Laptops Anymore https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/google-bans...
Elon Musk's SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-zoom-video-commn/e...
Apple pushes silent macOS update to remove web server secretly installed by Zoom https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/10/zoom-apple-macos-update/
Taiwan joins Canada in banning Zoom for government video conferencing https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/taiwan-zoom-video-conference...
Is Zoom the Next Huawei? ‘Puppet of Chinese,’ Say Critics https://securityboulevard.com/2020/06/is-zoom-the-next-huawe...
Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/zoom-lied-to-use...
DOJ charges highlight Zoom's China problem https://www.axios.com/china-zoom-charges-influence-1906e8e5-...
Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2020/03/27/zoom/
Zoom security issues: Here's everything that's gone wrong (so far) https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes
Mass move to work from home in coronavirus crisis creates opening for hackers: cyber experts https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-cyber/...
Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/security_and_...
‘Zoom is malware’: why experts worry about the video conferencing platform https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-tech...
Ex-NSA hacker drops new zero-day doom for Zoom https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-nsa-hacker-drops-zero-1400...
Maybe we shouldn’t use Zoom after all https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/31/zoom-at-your-own-risk/
Attackers can use Zoom to steal users’ Windows credentials with no warning https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/unpat...
The Zoom Privacy Backlash Is Only Getting Started https://www.wired.com/story/zoom-backlash-zero-days/
Hackers Are Selling a Critical Zoom Zero-Day Exploit for $500,000 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdqgv/hackers-selling-cr...
Researchers found and bought more than 500,000 Zoom passwords on the dark web for less than a cent each https://www.businessinsider.com/500000-zoom-accounts-sale-da...
Beware of ‘ZoomBombing:’ screensharing filth to video calls https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/17/zoombombing/
Would you happen to have any actual evidence to back this up with?
This was, I am almost certain, inspired by Microsoft corporate sales getting their hooks into management.
This was largely because of news stories like "end to end encryption doesnt really work as advertised" and "if you leave a room password unprotected bad people will enter". The level of press coverage was off the scale compared to what Teams got for far worse issues.
The vulnerabilities werent nothing but they werent even in the same ballpark as the MS teams vulnerabilities foisted on us for "security reasons" like this howler they tried to cover up https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-may-have-downplayed...