Zoom is an incredibly creepy company. I completely loathe that my company forces us to use it.
Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
81–90 of 235 posts
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zoom is not end to end encrypted at all, and they can see every video stream. Also their clients had vulnerabilities in the past.
For one thing, zoom does have E2EE ( https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-enable-zoom-encryption/ ) and secondly - if we're talking about public meetings (like city council meetings) why would it matter?
E2EE means just about nothing without open source clients.
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#83I use Zoom for the simple reason that it provides end to end encryption and can seamlessly support large (50+) team meetings.
Other than WebEx, which is more cost-prohibitive and has a clunkier UI/UX to boot, I believe there are no other video conferencing apps that can provide the service I'm looking for (which is 1. E2EE, and 2. support for 50+ attendees).
_Is_ there anything else that can provide this, besides Zoom or WebEx?
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#84Offer 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 hate Teams because of other issues[0], but the video and screen sharing are really good.
[0] It will occasionally leave artifacts on the screen if I put my laptop to sleep and wake it up. Just an empty rectangle in the notification area. I had to write a powershell script to cycle teams. And that's just one of the annoyances.
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Offer a comparable alternative, then Here's a few: - https://meet.jit.si/ which you can also self host https://github.com/jitsi - https://bigbluebutton.org/ which you can also self host https://github.com/bigbluebutton I've found that they're especially useful, when integrated with Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ which you can also self host https://github.com/RocketChat That way you have an experience that's a lo…
Element, too!
Element actually uses jitsi.
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#86Earlier 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.
I'm sorry, but Hangouts is terrible. It sucks on every level. The UI is so bad it's hard to believe. I wish I could sit down with their product team to get an explanation for how badly Hangouts is designed. Takes about 10s to see all the problems with it compared to Zoom.
My 94 year old grandpa would constantly struggle with zoom, to the point that we'd schedule him 15 minutes early to avoid half the meeting being about zoom problems. Hangouts worked well for him first try. The auto captioning also works quite a bit better with hangouts, which is good for people with hearing loss.
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#87I use Zoom for the simple reason that it provides end to end encryption and can seamlessly support large (50+) team meetings. Other than WebEx, which is more cost-prohibitive and has a clunkier UI/UX to boot, I believe there are no other video conferencing apps that can provide the service I'm looking for (which is 1. E2EE, and 2. support for 50+ attendees). _Is_ there anything else that can provide this, besides Zoo…
Yes.
Plus you can self-host it. So you're only limited by the machine you host it on.
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#88I use Zoom for the simple reason that it provides end to end encryption and can seamlessly support large (50+) team meetings. Other than WebEx, which is more cost-prohibitive and has a clunkier UI/UX to boot, I believe there are no other video conferencing apps that can provide the service I'm looking for (which is 1. E2EE, and 2. support for 50+ attendees). _Is_ there anything else that can provide this, besides Zoo…
E2EE is meaningless with a closed client downloaded by individuals from the service provider.
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#89I use Zoom for the simple reason that it provides end to end encryption and can seamlessly support large (50+) team meetings. Other than WebEx, which is more cost-prohibitive and has a clunkier UI/UX to boot, I believe there are no other video conferencing apps that can provide the service I'm looking for (which is 1. E2EE, and 2. support for 50+ attendees). _Is_ there anything else that can provide this, besides Zoo…
Yes. https://jitsi.org/security/ Plus you can self-host it. So you're only limited by the machine you host it on.
I've stress tested Jitsi's E2EE (both on the official server and on a self-hosted instance, with was a PITA to setup, by the way) and....it does not scale. After more than 20 clients joined, there were noticeable problems that made the meeting impossible to conduct (audio drop outs, frozen video, disparate lag times, etc), both on a self-hosted instance that had more than enough bandwidth/hardware kit to handle it (the same self-hosted setup is also used to host Zoom, which runs perfectly), and on their main server.
I would like to hear real-world examples of people successfully conducting large-scale E2EE meetings over Jitsi. What setup did you use?
Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government
#90Offer 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…
> Offer a comparable alternative, then Here's a few: - https://meet.jit.si/ which you can also self host https://github.com/jitsi - https://bigbluebutton.org/ which you can also self host https://github.com/bigbluebutton I've found that they're especially useful, when integrated with Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ which you can also self host https://github.com/RocketChat That way you have an experience that's a lo…
AdmiralAsshat's point was that all of the alternatives sucked because they were difficult or flakey to use: they weren't "comparable". Notably, the alternatives being mentioned as non-comparable weren't even trying to be local: they were remote service/ (which if you think Zoom is particularly bad, is still an improvement) built by giant companies that have tons of resources to have an army working on just these tools... and they all still sucked.
You then responded to this comment by just matter-of-factly asserting that you had the list of missing alternatives... but, really, you are simply hijacking the thread to point out that alternatives exist "which allows all the data to remain on your own servers"; but, you provide no evidence or argument to address whether these products are actually "comparable" (to the point where it just feels like you didn't even understand the point being made) in a way that, say, Google Hangouts--which is the product Google created WebRTC for!--isn't.