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Re: undefined

#21

Post by martin_a »

stri8ed wrote: post #15
mistersquid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know more than a few elementary school teachers who are now hosting zoom classes with 15+ 5 year olds on a call. Given the ease of setup of Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL which displayed email and other information about participants, this is one reason Zoom is rightly being scrutinized and criticized for poor security.

> Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL Was there any rational for them doing this?

Ease of use, probably.

Now every private room is by default secured with a password, I think.

Re: undefined

#23

Post by organsnyder »

stri8ed wrote: post #15
mistersquid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know more than a few elementary school teachers who are now hosting zoom classes with 15+ 5 year olds on a call. Given the ease of setup of Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL which displayed email and other information about participants, this is one reason Zoom is rightly being scrutinized and criticized for poor security.

> Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL Was there any rational for them doing this?

Zoom has clearly focused on UX above all else. This explains both their popularity and the security issues that have recently been uncovered.

Re: undefined

#24

Post by crazygringo »

I'm legitimately curious if anyone has any clues as to how they handled this with cloud providers.

Technically it doesn't seem that hard -- just spin up a ton more servers. Unlike Facebook or Twitter or Reddit there isn't massive communication between all users at all times -- just one-off video calls that are "relatively" trivial to distribute among servers. (Sure there's cloud recording and stuff too, but the point still stands that this is certainly among the way easier products to scale.)

But assuming they're using cloud providers, I'm curious what percentage of spare cloud capacity they've wound up taking? If they've had to split up traffic between multiple major providers just to handle it?

Or if the increase is well within the capacity of any single cloud provider to handle easily, e.g. massive daytime spikes are essentially just using the same servers Netflix uses at night?

Re: undefined

#25

Post by throwaway98797 »

fermienrico wrote: post #17
throwaway98797 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t stand seeing success

Perhaps I can't stand seeing the entire world having to bend down to an authoritarian regime (or any regime for that matter). Perhaps I can't stand the chilling effect current actions would create in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

Virtue signaling does nothing. Build something.

Re: undefined

#26

Post by StandardFuture »

crazygringo wrote: post #24

I'm legitimately curious if anyone has any clues as to how they handled this with cloud providers. Technically it doesn't seem that hard -- just spin up a ton more servers. Unlike Facebook or Twitter or Reddit there isn't massive communication between all users at all times -- just one-off video calls that are "relatively" trivial to distribute among servers. (Sure there's cloud recording and stuff too, but the point…

Maybe we can assume if people are on Zoom then they are also not on Netflix? But yes, would be very interesting to get a post-survival writeup.

Re: undefined

#27

Post by jabart »

crazygringo wrote: post #24

I'm legitimately curious if anyone has any clues as to how they handled this with cloud providers. Technically it doesn't seem that hard -- just spin up a ton more servers. Unlike Facebook or Twitter or Reddit there isn't massive communication between all users at all times -- just one-off video calls that are "relatively" trivial to distribute among servers. (Sure there's cloud recording and stuff too, but the point…

The public zoom filling showed Zoom had a lot of co-located servers. From their SEC filing.

"We currently serve our users from 13 co-located data centers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands and the United States. We also utilize Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for the hosting of certain critical aspects of our business. "

Re: undefined

#28

Post by ModernMech »

captaincole wrote: post #5

While zoom has faced many privacy concerns in the last few weeks, it is incredible how reliable the service has been given the massive spike in demand. Most services would have buckled (examples abound like robinhoods recent outage) and part of their stack would have not been able to handle the load. On top of that they are in new customer segments that I bet they didn’t see as their user base. I know more than a few…

> While zoom has faced many privacy concerns...I bet they didn’t see as their user base. I know more than a few elementary school teachers

They better get on those security concerns quickly if they want to retain these new customer segments:

"New York City bans Zoom in schools, citing security concerns" https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/05/zoom-new-york-city-schools...

"Instead, the city’s Dept. of Education is transitioning schools to Microsoft Teams, which the spokesperson said has the “same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place.”"

Re: undefined

#29

Post by onemoresoop »

That's an interesting number and wonder whether this could be traced back to meeting participants. If so, is it possible to statistically derive the number of meetings held on average on any day?

Re: undefined

#30

Post by jkachmar »

throwaway98797 wrote: post #25
fermienrico wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I can't stand seeing the entire world having to bend down to an authoritarian regime (or any regime for that matter). Perhaps I can't stand the chilling effect current actions would create in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

Virtue signaling does nothing. Build something.

Informing others and providing an explanation for why people should be discouraged from using a malicious tool is not virtue signaling.

Trying to discourage people from disseminating this information under the auspices of “virtue signaling” is unhelpful.

Some people build technology, some people research and critique it.

Would you tell researchers who demonstrate critical vulnerabilities in technology that they should build something better instead of just talking about it?

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