Stop using Zoom

[Anathema-]

 

[Mr.Vic20]

Cornell uses Zoom, so we won't be switching anytime soon! I'm sure the IT folks will be "evaluating" this issue for some time! 

[chakoo]

JC are those tweets written by a ResetEra user or something. It freaks out over everything with out explaining a single thing. Much of what is covered looks like standard cloud practices. The suit keeps saying PII without listing what PII. It looks like it’s just simply using a fb analytics platform that many apps/sites use.

[Ghost_MH]

This is dumb. Zoom offers cloud recording of meetings you can then share with folks that miss your meeting. It can't do end to end encryption if it also allows for recording meeting in the cloud.

[Signifyin(g)Monkey]

Facebook, Google and pretty much all of big data has been doing this for years.  That’s the ‘new’ model—give the end-user the platform for ‘free’, then record all their personal information and sell it to advertisers for booku bucks.  Advertisers plug it into their algorithms that enable them to customize what you see on the platform so that you’ll ‘click’ more, but always in a way that makes it more likely for you to buy the products they’re advertising—in the long run, it amounts to the mass manipulation of consumer preferences through a private spying/surveillance operation.  Almost a form of large-scale hypnosis.  It works with ruthless efficiency, but only so long as people are unaware of it.

 

OR so long as people aren’t compensated in some way for the value/money their data produces.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

For enterprise MS teams has been working fine, now that we're moving away from Skype.

[CitizenVectron]

Nothing is worse than Skype for Business.

[CayceG]

I prefer to use Whereby. 

 

It doesn't have the capacity that Zoom does, but for video chats, it can't be beat. 

https://whereby.com/

 

Although I did have a "date" on Zoom last night. Her idea. I'm sure the Chinese government are evaluating just how poorly I am as a potential mate. 

 

[mclumber1]

Heh, I just installed zoom on my daughter's iPad and my wife's Macbook so my daughter could attend her class remotely while the schools are shut down.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

14 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Nothing is worse than Skype for Business.

It hasn't been great for video chat, but setting up small conferences and screen sharing it's been fine. Teams is better for sure though

[Anathema-]

We started the 365 migration a couple months back and I am in LOVE with Teams.

[chakoo]

41 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Nothing is worse than Skype for Business.

Yes, The only thing worse is now dead (Lync, It's previous iteration).

[CitizenVectron]

7 minutes ago, chakoo said:

Yes, The only thing worse is now dead (Lync, It's previous iteration).

 

So now that we have 1,200+ teachers working from home, they are all using skype for the first time and it's horrible (we are an MS Enterprise environment). The worst issue so far is that an admin assistant wanted to be able to book skype meetings in her superintendent's calendar. That should be easy, right? She has full delegate control of the calendar and books meetings for her boss all the time. WRONG. First, we have to enable the ability on our back-end even though the service is in the cloud. Then, the SI needs to give the AA delegate access within skype as well. Then, both users need to be using the exact same build of Office, not even a single update off. After all of this and a dozen other errors...we are informed by Microsoft that both fucking users need to have their computers on at the same time, with both programs open (Outlook and Skype) for one person to book a skype meeting into the calendar of another. What the fuck is that!?!

 

So our solution was to have the admin assistant make her own skype calendar event and just copy the URL into her boss' event, and it works fine. But come on Microsoft, what the fuck.

EDIT - Oh, and there is almost no documentation for SfB on MS' support sites or forums. Their official guide for how to give delegate access for Skype links to a fucking page for Lync from 2013.

[SuperSpreader]

I use icq

[chakoo]

20 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

So now that we have 1,200+ teachers working from home, they are all using skype for the first time and it's horrible (we are an MS Enterprise environment). The worst issue so far is that an admin assistant wanted to be able to book skype meetings in her superintendent's calendar. That should be easy, right? She has full delegate control of the calendar and books meetings for her boss all the time. WRONG. First, we have to enable the ability on our back-end even though the service is in the cloud. Then, the SI needs to give the AA delegate access within skype as well. Then, both users need to be using the exact same build of Office, not even a single update off. After all of this and a dozen other errors...we are informed by Microsoft that both fucking users need to have their computers on at the same time, with both programs open (Outlook and Skype) for one person to book a skype meeting into the calendar of another. What the fuck is that!?!

 

So our solution was to have the admin assistant make her own skype calendar event and just copy the URL into her boss' event, and it works fine. But come on Microsoft, what the fuck.

EDIT - Oh, and there is almost no documentation for SfB on MS' support sites or forums. Their official guide for how to give delegate access for Skype links to a fucking page for Lync from 2013.

Yep. That sounds about right. There was a reason why Slack took off so quickly (so many people at the first office I worked at that was Lync->Skype for Business were pretty much demanding we swap to slack or half the devs would quit since the devs already had a slack server running and the company was debating on forcing all back to skype or moving the company as a whole to slack. Luckily slack won. All business calls were Webex or Zoom because skype would fail 50% of the time).

[TwinIon]

4 hours ago, chakoo said:

JC are those tweets written by a ResetEra user or something. It freaks out over everything with out explaining a single thing. Much of what is covered looks like standard cloud practices. The suit keeps saying PII without listing what PII. It looks like it’s just simply using a fb analytics platform that many apps/sites use.

 

2 hours ago, Ghost_MH said:

This is dumb. Zoom offers cloud recording of meetings you can then share with folks that miss your meeting. It can't do end to end encryption if it also allows for recording meeting in the cloud.

So much this.

 

If you're cloud recording, it can't be end to end encrypted, and it's not as if Zoom is just sending all your meeting info to FB, they're using an analytics platform by FB. 

 

There are actually real concerns about Zoom's privacy dealings, and the whole "web server you can't remove" fiasco a while back remains the best example of why you should be wary of trusting them, but most of the concerns I've seen outlined lately have been a whole lot of nothing.

[chakoo]

6 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

 

So much this.

 

If you're cloud recording, it can't be end to end encrypted, and it's not as if Zoom is just sending all your meeting info to FB, they're using an analytics platform by FB. 

 

There are actually real concerns about Zoom's privacy dealings, and the whole "web server you can't remove" fiasco a while back remains the best example of why you should be wary of trusting them, but most of the concerns I've seen outlined lately have been a whole lot of nothing.

I'd add reading from some of the other issues that have been pointed out, If you're going to not secure your meeting it's going to be the same regardless of what solution you use. Using other solutions are only giving you a false sense of security if you're still not using any proper protection. Zoom isn't perfect but it does a better job than most when used correctly. 

 

-edit-

In regards to the localhost. I agree that was a bad call but they're not the only to do stuff like that. They billed themselves on being a simple solution to join a meeting and with that easy of entry requires solutions that don't require effort on the end user. It's not like they're doing it to run a crypto mining server on your pc. 

[TwinIon]

2 minutes ago, chakoo said:

I'd add reading from some of the other issues that have been pointed out, If you're going to not secure your meeting it's going to be the same regardless of what solution you use. Using other solutions are only giving you a false sense of security if you're still not using any proper protection. Zoom isn't perfect but it does a better job than most when used correctly. 

I'm not personally terrified of meeting security, my company has been using Teams, but I think that Facetime is at least end-to-end encrypted.

[chakoo]

Just now, TwinIon said:

I'm not personally terrified of meeting security, my company has been using Teams, but I think that Facetime is at least end-to-end encrypted.

Most video streams are sent in some form of encrypted format, be it end-to-end or user-to-server. If anybody is going to hack/tap into a stream you're on they're either just going to hack themselves into the meeting or stream what your device is showing. The general concern with it going through a server is if there is recordings they can be pulled by 3rd parties without authorization. If that is someone's concern then they should pick a solution that does not offer it. 

[CayceG]

Teams is legit very good. There are almost too many capabilities it has. 

[finaljedi]

My company has teams because of its office 365 setup but not everyone uses it.  Everyone does use Zoom though.

[johnny]

My school district has been using Google Meet. Seems capable enough so far. 

[Ghost_MH]

47 minutes ago, chakoo said:

Most video streams are sent in some form of encrypted format, be it end-to-end or user-to-server. If anybody is going to hack/tap into a stream you're on they're either just going to hack themselves into the meeting or stream what your device is showing. The general concern with it going through a server is if there is recordings they can be pulled by 3rd parties without authorization. If that is someone's concern then they should pick a solution that does not offer it. 

 

You also wouldn't want end to end encryption on a service like Zoom. That would suck, regardless of cloud recordings. Anyone have experience with Polycom's teleconferencing solution from like 10/15 years ago? That one was end to end encrypted and it sucked up ALL the bandwidth and it was awful. If you connected to four other people, that was four two-way video streams running at once for everyone calling in. If you had a video chat with ten people that was ten two-way video streams. Good luck getting anything more than that on anything but the fastest Internet connections. The solution most video conferencing providers have found since then is to just stream everything to their cloud and then out to everyone else from there. If not, then they have to either really quickly lower the quality or cap the number of people that can call in or provide video.

[Chris-]

We made the switch from Skype and join.me to Teams, and after a week or two it’s worked really well. Teams was fucking us up initially because we didn’t realize that, unlike join.me, your numbers aren’t static, so people were getting messages saying meetings weren’t in session if they called in. 

[osxmatt]

My company primarily uses Slack and WebEx, and I've never really had issues with either.

 

I like to think of myself as tech savvy, but up until the coronavirus outbreak, I had never even heard of Zoom. That's concerning and this doesn't surprise me.

[Jason]

Attackers can use Zoom to steal users’ Windows credentials with no warning

[Ghost_MH]

5 minutes ago, Jason said:

Attackers can use Zoom to steal users’ Windows credentials with no warning

 

Are people using Zoom outside of corporate settings?

[Anathema-]

22 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Are people using Zoom outside of corporate settings?

 

Lots of corporations provide notebooks with basically no enterprise security or centralized administration on them.

[mclumber1]

21 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Are people using Zoom outside of corporate settings?

 

Yeah.  Daughter's school is. 

[Ghost_MH]

10 minutes ago, Anathema- said:

Lots of corporations provide notebooks with basically no enterprise security or centralized administration on them.

 

I mean, yeah. Still, who are people having Zoom meetings with that they have to worry about malicious UNC paths? Even if you're using your company's Zoom account to video chat with a bunch of friends and family, it's still friends and family. Eh...I guess it's more a theoretical worry than something we're actually seeing in the wild.

 

7 minutes ago, mclumber1 said:

Yeah.  Daughter's school is. 

 

That doesn't really count. Schools are still just using enterprise software at educational license pricing.

[Firewithin]

38 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Are people using Zoom outside of corporate settings?

lol some of my friends have been trying to set this up so we can have a beer together since we cant really meet up or go anywhere 

[Kal-El814]

39 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

Are people using Zoom outside of corporate settings?

Yes. 

[Dodger]

20 minutes ago, Anathema- said:

 

Lots of corporations provide notebooks with basically no enterprise security or centralized administration on them.

 

 

Hey man, we have to use a passphrase instead of password now. So we're super strict on security for the laptops everyone has. 

[Ghost_MH]

2 minutes ago, Firewithin said:

lol some of my friends have been trying to set this up so we can have a beer together since we cant really meet up or go anywhere 

 

That's the kind of thing I was wondering about. I know Zoom is incredibly popular on the corporate/nonprofit/educational side of things, but I didn't know if people are actually trying to set up Zoom accounts for their own personal use. Go figure. I actually didn't realize there was a free tier of Zoom that supported 100 damn participants.

[Anathema-]

24 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

I mean, yeah. Still, who are people having Zoom meetings with that they have to worry about malicious UNC paths? Even if you're using your company's Zoom account to video chat with a bunch of friends and family, it's still friends and family. Eh...I guess it's more a theoretical worry than something we're actually seeing in the wild.

 

 

Nothing to do with friends and family. I mean work laptops that have as much security as an off the shelf product.