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Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

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Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#231

Post by fphhotchips »

softwaredoug wrote: post #44
softwaredoug wrote: post #30

God please don't make me use a non-zoom video conferencing tool! I have used about a dozen over the years in my role as a consultant, and Zoom has been by far the most reliable. I’m hopeful lots of good can come from the scrutiny, but please Zoom get your act together so I don’t have to use some other buggy thing that doesn’t actually work.

I knew I would get downvoted. But folks seriously don’t remember the pain before Zoom. And the current pain anytime we have to use a GoToMeeting, Google Meet, Webex or other tool that barely functions. Human interaction that actually works right now is so important. And I simply have a hard time trusting another product to actually do the call reliably

As someone who demos software frequently, GoToMeeting is the only one that ever held a candle to Zoom for me. Webex does weird shit to screen shares on Windows, and don't even get me started on Teams/Skype. The rest are pretty obviously not designed to be used for screensharing.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#232

Post by jdashg »

closeparen wrote: post #109
mulmen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems perfectly sensible to ban all software that is not pre-approved by IT, InfoSec and Legal. You can't safely assume all your employees are properly assessing the risks unless that is their actual job. If you only allow what you know then you can reason about your risk.

Google’s reputation as an employer stems in large part from rejecting that belief, and more generally the enterprise bureaucratic culture it lives in. Engineers aren’t clamoring to get into the kinds of companies where IT needs to pre-approve software for their workstations.

Most Google engineers don't have root on their own machines anymore.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#233

Post by bvandewalle »

randunel wrote: post #152
softwaredoug wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew I would get downvoted. But folks seriously don’t remember the pain before Zoom. And the current pain anytime we have to use a GoToMeeting, Google Meet, Webex or other tool that barely functions. Human interaction that actually works right now is so important. And I simply have a hard time trusting another product to actually do the call reliably

I'm baffled by the amount of people claiming zoom to be painless or working, even. Don't you know any linux users? Zoom is utterly broken beyond comprehension on any variant or flavour, even when `sudo`ing everything: installer, running, audio setup (pavucontrol) to try to figure out why it refuses to work, etc

Linux user here. I have tried them all and Zoom is not perfect but is multiple levels above any of the competitors. Don't even get me started with WebEx.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#234

Post by gwd »

arrty88 wrote: post #116

Zoom's issues are fixable... unlike a hardware defect like the macbook pro keyboard and the iphone antenna that didn't work well... Zoom is clearly better than the alternatives and has my 80 year old uncle talking about it. This too shall pass.

I uninstalled zoom and refused to use it after they did that skanky "start up a local webserver to avoid Safari's user-safety questions". Then everyone was using Zoom, so I gave them another chance and installed the native client. Turns out the native client install also contains skanky hacks to avoid user-safety questions. So I uninstalled it again, and now my company has told us all not to use the native app.

Once may have been an honest mistake. Twice (and now more) is definitely a culture problem that's not going to be fixed without massive turnover.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#235

Post by contravariant »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #101
tazjin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Meet is the only one of these that has always worked reliably for me. Doesn't require any strange clients, works in most browsers, never randomly fails to move just some person's audio and so on. Disclaimer: I work for Alphabet, but already held this opinion before I did.

> worked reliably for me Every second time I’m using it, I either don’t hear the other people, or people do not hear me. YMMV.

In my case this is usually caused by a conflict with firefox's anti-fingerprinting. Which I think is fair enough.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#236

Post by mikekij »

I'm seeing references to Zoom "getting over these security issues". Some of the issues (e.g. not requiring passwords) can be relatively easily addressed. Others, like transmitting symmetric encryption keys over the wire and storing them in databases in China, are more fundamental to Zoom's corporate strategy. I doubt Zoom would change the most jarring of their security gaffes in a way that would satisfy security-focused companies like Google.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#237

Post by gwd »

jmcnulty wrote: post #216
milkthefat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Code execution vulns for both OSX and Win10 probably. In windows clicking a UNC path link would pass hashs. I believe for OSX there was an installer trick that allowed any code to run if triggered.

Those vulnerabilities are fixed in current versions: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2159... There is nothing new/outstanding.

But those vulnerabilities were there, at least on OSX, because they were trying to avoid OSX's security warnings. And this is not the first time they've done something skanky like that.

Once may have been an honest mistake; 2+ times is now a pattern.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#238

Post by dougmany »

berdon wrote: post #175
walrus01 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal opinion, you don't need video or talking heads to have a conference. Some combination of text chat to share documents with simultaneous good quality audio is sufficient. The challenges related to audio sucking are mostly individual end users' audio stepping on itself, such as feedback from speakerphone configurations into its own microphone. Easily solved by good quality bluetooth headsets, wired headsets, o…

VC > Audio > Text Tone, emotion, and intent are incapable of being conveyed properly without facial expressions and audible cues.

Audio We are supposed to be engineers here. I regularly see this attitude that one thing is always and inherently better than another. Life is (mostly) a zero sum game and it is our job to pick a solution for the problem at hand. And the more we can constrain that problem, the better, cheaper, more reliably we can deliver a solution. More information is not better. Maybe for interview body language is important but for deciding what story to pull or what commits you did? Not really.

Re: Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

#240

Post by tsss »

ColanR wrote: post #156
walrus01 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> God please don't make me use a non-zoom video conferencing tool! I have honestly lost track of the amount of software I've seen in the past 20 years, that people insist they absolutely must continue to use despite its well documented gaping security flaws. Because it has a better UI or makes their life very slightly more convenient in some way. Versions of Microsoft Office from the early 2000s where an entire opera…

> Because it has a better UI or makes their life very slightly more convenient in some way. I think you've missed the point completely. It's not a question of convenient UI. It's the reliability of the video call. I've tried numerous video conferencing tools, and the differentiating factor is literally just whether or not the video quality is consistently good, whether the call is dropped or not, and whether the audi…

WebRTC is much better at having "consistently good video quality" as this benchmark convincingly shows: https://jitsi.org/news/a-simple-congestion-test-for-zoom/
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