Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 235 posts

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#51

Post by saiya-jin »

iso1210 wrote: post #38
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Offer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts/WebEx/GotoMeeting because their company bans Zoom, it's a recipe for a fruitless meeting. Someone will fumble the sharing controls; screens will take forever to present; at least one person's microphone will become inaudible, st…

Webex is so shockingly bad. Zoom, Teams, Slack, all seem to work fairly well, all have clients (and can run in the browser) Webex - which I have to use as part of a university course I'm doing on the side - requires you to run it in a browser on my OS, it has really awful options (like allowing the presenter to unmute people), half the claimed features just aren't available (virtual whiteboard, no major loss as every…

Must be your specific webex/connection settings/version then, we have it in our massive banking corps (90k+employees worldwide) and none of the things you describe are an issue. We have adopted it some 7 years ago.

You don't need to run it in browser at all, there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with it.

Now it is still a crappy system, but for different reasons than you describe. And other solutions have their own problems, as indicated by article and elsewhere.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#52

Post by lisper »

scrollaway wrote: post #48
lisper wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must be a very dark pattern. I didn't even know it was possible to run Zoom in a browser, and even now that I know I can't figure out how to do it. What's the secret?

You need to click download zoom on the meeting launch and give it a second, it will show a “having trouble?” message and let you open in a browser.

Wow, that is evil. Thanks!

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#53

Post by badLiveware »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Offer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts/WebEx/GotoMeeting because their company bans Zoom, it's a recipe for a fruitless meeting. Someone will fumble the sharing controls; screens will take forever to present; at least one person's microphone will become inaudible, st…

I believe that the government in Hamburg and the Bundeswehr are implementing(or has already) element and matrix.

https://element.io/pro/federation-collaboration

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#54

Post by mttddd »

el-salvador wrote: post #46
ghaff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get the religion around the video platforms. I use three (Zoom, Google Meet, and Bluejeans) on a regular basis and they all seem simultaneously decent enough and imperfect on my network on a given day. Teams is fine too but I rarely use it.

From my experience in Latin America, Zoom tolerates network problems better. I've connected from or have had attendants using DSL, Cable, 3G, 4G (Not LTE) and call in phone audio.

yep I think alternatives have improved but pre covid i traveled all over the world for work and the big thing was Zoom worked the best on iffy connections and also played best with multiple companies IT systems

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#56

Post by el-salvador »

lisper wrote: post #45
cupcake-unicorn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That dark pattern drives me crazy. I use Zoom on Linux and prefer to use it in browser and I still almost always miss the link after having done it several times.

That must be a very dark pattern. I didn't even know it was possible to run Zoom in a browser, and even now that I know I can't figure out how to do it. What's the secret?

It can be enabled/disabled by your company's Zoom administrator.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#57

Post by csydas »

baal80spam wrote: post #20
rblatz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what rock you are living under but everyone uses Zoom. Even Cisco sales reps use it for sales meetings and they own WebEx.

> everyone uses Zoom Well, my org uses Teams and I don't know anyone who uses Zoom professionally.

For a time in 2020, Zoom for whatever reason had a significant boom of popularity (I suppose they had some freemium option for group calls? I really don't know).

As a result, a lot of companies bought licenses because Zoom was the cool tech at the time. My company did this, despite there being an official mandate that all official communication/calls must go through Teams the year prior†.

I think the persistence of Zoom is just whatever the tech equivalent of a hangover is. Everyone binged on Zoom in 2020, and now that we're far more comfortable with work from home and have more stable setups, a lot of places are stuck with Zoom licenses. Embarrassingly, our company's periodic all-hand-calls still are on Zoom when every other operation is done on Teams. I think our brand team also decided to host a few presentations on Zoom when we presented in the US for the sole reason of "well, it's cool."

† I have no love for Teams to be clear, it's awful software. I do understand IT's mandate though, since the entire point of the mandate was to get people to stop installing random stuff on their work computers, which turned out to be a great idea when it comes to Zoom.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#58

Post by sombremesa »

cupcake-unicorn wrote: post #22
blululu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who runs Zoom via the browser (they do deploy a dark pattern to discourage this behavior but there is no good reason to trust them) I find that Hangouts and Teams are both solid alternatives in terms of AV quality. Would be happy to see some actual data on this claim. People prefer the interface they are used to. I personally find Zoom to be really frustrating from an interface angle but that is probably j…

That dark pattern drives me crazy. I use Zoom on Linux and prefer to use it in browser and I still almost always miss the link after having done it several times.

Just replace the /j/ in the URL of the page with /wc/join/, and you should be in the zoom web client.

You can even prepare your links this way so you're there to begin with.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#60

Post by el-salvador »

jbluepolarbear wrote: post #17
baja_blast wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone how uses both Zoom and Google Hangouts, there is nothing Zoom offers that Google hangouts does not provide. The quality is the same for both, but at least Hangouts does not install a sketchy client on my machine that constantly runs in the background.

Google hangouts is garbage. I have never had a hangout call that didn’t freeze or have someone dropout. The audio on hangouts is beyond bad and makes people sound completely different than they do in person. The video quality is always grainy on my fiber connection. Zoom doesn’t have these problems for me.

Same issue here. If the link is too slow screen shares become grainy and text is hard to read.

While Zoom usually only slows the frame rate, but not the resolution.

Post reply on HN