First thing I hear about Zoom is security breaches and lawsuits. So why then is Hollywood endorsing this so much? Zoom software is being used by celebrities like it's been this wonderful part of our digital lives all along, when in fact nobody's even heard of it until recently. Why don't people use Discord, or something at least more secure? Hollywood is trying to make a freaking VERB out of Zoom and I won't have it. I'd prefer the traditional term "video conferencing", mouthful that it may be, over freaking ZOOM. Let's all avoid use of this fatally substandard product in the future, yes?
Without even asking who it is that is "Hollywood promoting" any product, but I have the 99% true answer for you: money. They're paid to do advertisement... they are, after all, influencers to some degree. No mystery there...
Good thing it's not the Hollywood people who decide what people use for video conferencing in companies. Zoom is likely getting better.
Even my German classes were asked to be held in Zoom. Send my teacher all security links and all and offering alternatives. Just denial and let's use it, what harm can this app do to us, we have nothing to worry. Not related to this issue, but I've put my German education on hold, being forced to work and not be able to study.
My association with Zoom is this: And yeah...just couldn't post it as a thumbnail, I just couldn't...I unleashed the f@cking fury...
The only reason people use zoom for video conferencing is because it is free and the connectivity, audio and video quality is better than most free alternatives. GoToMeeting and others have bad audio and video quality, some of them even lag or disconnected during demonstration, the connectivity is really important especially when you need it for software demonstration. We've been using it way before covid-19.
Discord will never be viable for business due its UI. It's intended for gamers with memes popups and texts all over it. I would love to have discord for business. The ease to switch between audio/video rooms without changing application is major strength. But yeah, take any application and make it mainstream, there will be lots of bugs popping out. At least Zoom does the job of fixing it. Same will happen with discord if people will take it seriously and start using it for business applications.
All kind of people try to invite me to Zoom lately. Nice to see another one with the same issues. My daughter's school required us to get in WhatsApp just to be part of a group full of spamming parents "liking" a post from the school. At 10pm. On a weekend. About notifying the school if their kids catch COVID. Am I the only one thinking this is crazy? Meanwhile some script kiddies found out how to access the publicly available database to some online learning system and pwn about 100 schools at once. Names, emails, phone numbers of kids between 6 and 16 and their parents and teachers, including even the name of the school each kids attends to. Thumbs up, security up my a**. BTW. : the best excuse I EVER heard from officials: "That's because the software is open source. It is intended that way." Let's do a facepalm together.
The previous two major companies I did IT for used it. Razer & Williams-Sonoma. Despite the security exploits being known. Now; people speak of Zoom having better quality, yes an app whose own developers don't understand what actual E2E encryption really is thus don't enforce it on most of the connections will deliver a platform with better quality than most other alternatives. Lots of factors go into that other than compression for one. UI is the least big issue, there are many alternatives with great UIs. The main issue for Enterprise is compliance. Simply put; Zoom stated to its Enterprise customers; that it was compliant with their securities policies outright lying when in fact it was not. Then in some very bizarre and embarrassing press releases argued its platform was compliant and tried to explain the specifics of E2E encryption; when the result was they themselves didn't know what the hell it was as they never pushed it on anything but instant messaging. It's not so simple to enforce E2E on realtime video conferencing; I gather this is why Zoom avoided it and acted like their platform's crap was gold and sold their snake oil as fast as they could.
If lately we laughed at iliterate people with so many public libraries available, how can we not laugh (or cry) at digital iliterate people? Worst of it all, some are in high political places where decisions are taken. To German people, does Linux and Munich rings any bells?
I'm American, but I do remember reading about this (I think). Back in what, 2006? They replaced Windows with Linux on all government computers? It sounded like a great idea to me. Did it go sour? Maybe I'm thinking of Firefox, now that I've had a minute. But I was happy to read that they turned away from M$ and went open source, but of course that only works if you have people who understand the OS and the underlying code, I suppose. As far as Zoom goes, I'm guessing the reason they have broken encryption is that once they got a semi-working product, they sacked most of the software team, and used the money saved to pay off Hollywood / government insiders to promote their sh!tty software to the unsuspecting masses. It's the Windows model of business: Make a lot of money, then take 30 years to make your product secure. Except it isn't secure, because you've put in a bunch of routines and applications that leak your customer's data back to you and your business partners (and the gov't and hackers of course), which customers now have to opt-out of in a complex series of steps requiring them to read articles all over the internet and hunt down all of the places they have to go to do this (assuming documentation even exists at all), and even then they'll probably fail because at this stage it's just too complex for even fairly knowledgeable people to be 100 percent certain they didn't miss anything. And if they miraculously didn't, the software now won't work with half of the things they try to use it for. But of course, even if we were only capable of building and selling you a leaky, insecure product, you can trust US with your personal data, we promise!
