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How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

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Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#171

Post by basch »

lukevp wrote: post #32
aequitas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just had a corporate presentation with around 250 people. Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication, this was also stated by management, that Zoom should only be used for 'big' meetings like this. I think they know the other solutions will not work as well for bigger groups. I've not had issues with using either solution for small group meetings. Actually I have to go out of my way to run Zoom in t…

Why not use Teams Live for this? We have been using zoom and Teams alternately and Teams performance and ease of use has been much better in my experience, but we have yet to do a 200+ all hands so I was curious if there were some footguns with teams live that you may know about. Teams live works on a lot of platforms and also has a web version.

The predecessor, Skype Broadcast allowed completely anonymous viewing, basically a twitch or youtube stream. In the name of growth hacking, the Teams team decided to force people to the app, you couldnt watch the video stream from a mobile device without the teams app. Which is a huge amount of friction for a mobile workforce that isnt using teams.

Maybe this has changed since I last talked to Microsoft, but even their own team was unhappy with it. But if you still have access to broadcast.skype.com, it still works, until they decide it shouldnt.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#172

Post by twodayslate »

pehtis wrote: post #87
pottertheotter wrote: post #17

I installed Zoom on macOS yesterday and I thought that the install was crashing because this is not the expected behavior. I would double click the download, try to install, and then the installation program would "crash", so I'd try it again. Did that a few times before I realized it was installed. Until now I thought it had somehow gotten far enough in the installation process before crashing that I could at least…

I would highly recommend checking all installers on macOS through Suspicious Package. It will give you a complete picture of all the installer scripts that will be run and all the files that will be written. I did just that for zoom and decided against installing it.

https://mothersruin.com/software/SuspiciousPackage/ for those curious

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#173

Post by tambourine_man »

Zoom's got a tradition of being, let's put it like this, way too clever for everyone's own good.

See previous “lets install a server on this Mac that is not removed when you uninstall the app and leaves your camera open to the entire internet” for more examples.

I use it on a VM, I suggest you do it too.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#174

Post by pjkundert »

t0mas88 wrote: post #10
aequitas wrote: post #6

Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™. Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now. When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective dis…

I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?

I've been working remotely for years.

In my experience, every other solution I've tried is a train-wreck, compared to Zoom (MacBook Pro w/ external Apple monitors). And, as far as I remember, I've tried them all, repeatedly.

Even first-class platform-specific solutions like FaceTime are, basically, unusable vs. Zoom. Its amazing, actually. I'm not quite sure how Apple managed to make FaceTime's audio just not work (almost ever), and Zoom just works, every time, on every platform.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#175

Post by tardo99 »

capableweb wrote: post #12
t0mas88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?

Well, I have a feeling that the praise for zoom going around is not from people working in enterprises, it's people working for everything-but enterprises, who just want a solution that works. In my experience (also not enterprise), Zoom is the simplest solution with the best quality and latency, compared to the alternatives. The UX could be better, but the performance of Zoom for all platforms makes you survive the…

My company has used Hangouts for years with zero problems. Zoom is mostly just hype.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#176

Post by enedil »

aequitas wrote: post #26
t0mas88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?

We just had a corporate presentation with around 250 people. Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication, this was also stated by management, that Zoom should only be used for 'big' meetings like this. I think they know the other solutions will not work as well for bigger groups. I've not had issues with using either solution for small group meetings. Actually I have to go out of my way to run Zoom in t…

In fact, if you change URL from /j/CONFERENCE_NUMBER to /wc/join/CONFERENCE_NUMBER you won't be needing to wait for that link.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#177

Post by manigandham »

bruckie wrote: post #124
manigandham wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "bundles malware"? What else is it doing besides teleconferencing?

https://daringfireball.net/2020/03/regarding_zoom https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-... https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...

To be clear, that's a security issue with their software but not malware. It's not intended or designed to harm your device.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#178

Post by kiliancs »

t0mas88 wrote: post #10
aequitas wrote: post #6

Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™. Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now. When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective dis…

I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?

From my perspective, working in the browser is not necessarily "just working", because for many combinations of OS/hardware, the performance is terrible and not only eats battery and will slow down other programs, but also affects the quality of the call (audio and video).

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#179

Post by [deleted] »

fermienrico wrote: post #118

Also, Zoom's entire engineering team is based in China [1]. China and Chinese companies have no real culture of user centric privacy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707528 Edit: Why downvote me? I am not trying to stir up flame wars. Saying anything against China has become impossible to do on HN. Voices get drowned despite of raising real legitimate concerns about privacy, especially for a tool used by m…

[deleted]

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#180

Post by Wowfunhappy »

aequitas wrote: post #26
t0mas88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?

We just had a corporate presentation with around 250 people. Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication, this was also stated by management, that Zoom should only be used for 'big' meetings like this. I think they know the other solutions will not work as well for bigger groups. I've not had issues with using either solution for small group meetings. Actually I have to go out of my way to run Zoom in t…

> Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication

> to run Zoom in the browser [...] I have to use Chrome instead of Firefox.

Just a note, Slack and Teams calls also won't work in Firefox. It's really annoying.

Hangouts works fine in Firefox though, somewhat unexpectedly.

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