Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#251

Post by GekkePrutser » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:55 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #123

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a rash of anti-zoom propaganda that I'm almost certain was driven by Microsoft Zoom had and continues to have a significant developer presence in China. Those individuals are subject to CCP coercion. There was also a time when they routed American calls through the mainland [1]. That has been fixed. But it remains excessive to cast all past criticism of Zoom as Microsoft's work. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/0…

"Zoom had and continues to have a significant developer presence in China." So whats worse: a backdoor for China, or a giant hole for anyone interested? I guess the latter gives us esual opportunity...

A vulnerability tends to get fixed quickly. A government backdoor not so much.

And vulnerabilities occur in all mainstream software.

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#252

Post by GekkePrutser » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 3:08 AM UTC

ncann wrote: post #213

artificialLimbs wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you discover the joys of Teams search.

The pros of Teams search is it is pretty good at finding things, like random chat message from someone who has left the company years ago. The cons of Teams search is it is almost useless when you can only view the single message in the result list, e.g. a single chat message without any surrounding messages for context, and also no possible way to jump to the conversation for that message.

For me it always finds everything but the thing I was looking for. I might type someone's name and it comes up with a bunch of other messages from other people that don't even mention the name I looked for.

Unless you have a very specific detail keyword I find it useless. And indeed not being able to jump to the timeline makes it even size.

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#253

Post by GekkePrutser » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

2ion wrote: post #33

wjnc wrote: post #13

One in this temperament: try accidently pasting a very large amount of data in the chatbox in Teams. Then spend the next 40 minutes re-starting Teams to try to remove the data from said box while your laptop tries to fly away and Teams keeps many processors and gigs of memory lit trying to parse your data. Microsoft should (but won't) reconsider the idea that one chatbox to rule many underlying types of software is a…

Even a very large amount of data pasted should not blow up a text box in 2021. I mean, on Windows you can paste an object referring to a data blob pretty sure, macOS surely has something similar and on X/Wayland you could sniff and size of data pasted in advance and do something useful. If it's plain text like JSON even 5G of plain text should not bring a text box to its knees when the memory is available, it's not b…

> Even a very large amount of data pasted should not blow up a text box in 2021. I mean, on Windows you can paste an object referring to a data blob pretty sure, macOS surely has something similar and on X/Wayland you could sniff and size of data pasted in advance and do something useful.

You can do so for sure. But can you do all these platform specific optimisations in Electron?

And even if you could, the reason companies go for electron is that they don't want to bother with platform specific stuff so they're really likely not to bother.

A agree a mere few megabytes of text should not bother any computer made this decade by the way and that teams is a pig of an app.

But the problem is not what's possible, it's them prioritising new features over performance and with that all the technology decisions they made.

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#254

Post by Jedd » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 3:32 AM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #207

lokedhs wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it does not respect standard system titlebar / borders, which puts it as the only app in my KDE environment that works in a non-standard manner. This also makes it impossible to resize the window. Well, sometimes. There are times when it works, and I have no idea what makes it work. Thankfully, I usually use Qubes OS which doesn't let programs do these user-hostile things.

> This also makes it impossible to resize the window. As a workaround, I'm pretty sure that KDE supports Alt (or meta) + right click for resizing.

KDE lets you resize compliant windows in this way, but Microsoft Teams for GNU/Linux is not compliant -- and consequently this does not work.

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#255

Post by kyriakos » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 6:11 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #140

IiydAbITMvJkqKf wrote: post #34

MS Teams is the worst software I've ever used. This is not hyperbole. A room full of monkeys on a typewriter would never create something as bad as teams.

The audio/video part of Teams is almost flawless for me up to, say, 20 people. I was actually impressed with how well they handle multiple devices - joining a meeting from a phone and laptop at the same time, or moving from one to the other is done in the best possible way. Everything else is horrible - note taking is useless, the chat is full of visual noise and slow, the calendar is mostly useless and takes too lon…

To me teams appears that only one person can be heard talking at a time (bit hard to describe, someone can interrupt but it seems like there's some kind of limitation as to who is being heard). On the other hand on Google meet I noticed that conversation sounds closer to a normal meeting.

Both have great sound quality other than that.

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#256

Post by rPlayer6554 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 6:58 AM UTC

pydry wrote: post #17

In 2020 a rash of anti-zoom propaganda that I'm almost certain was driven by Microsoft led to a company-wide prohibition on using anything other than Teams "for security reasons" where i worked. This was, I am almost certain, inspired by Microsoft corporate sales getting their hooks into management. This was largely because of news stories like "end to end encryption doesnt really work as advertised" and "if you leav…

To be fair, Zoom had some issues even before it came to the spotlight. At one point when you installed the desktop client it also installed a hidden webserver for some reason. [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#257

Post by fnord123 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

trevorishere wrote: post #236

fnord123 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom has a free version and the UI isn't that bad - and it scales to quite large groups. It's not nearly as confusing as Webex. And the video and audio quality are better than Teams. And no one knows what Google is offering this week (I think it's Meet, but maybe Hangouts or Duo or are they all the same now?)

Audio quality on Zoom is downright worse with a hallow, distant sound -- Zoom is/was using the same codec as Skype (Silk) which Teams replaced earlier this year (Satin) which is much more robust and capable.

I don't know about the algorithms, and I don't care about broadcast quality. When I am on zoom I understand people. When I am on Teams I have to close my eyes and concentrate to figure out what the robot is trying to say.

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#258

Post by addicted » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #17

In 2020 a rash of anti-zoom propaganda that I'm almost certain was driven by Microsoft led to a company-wide prohibition on using anything other than Teams "for security reasons" where i worked. This was, I am almost certain, inspired by Microsoft corporate sales getting their hooks into management. This was largely because of news stories like "end to end encryption doesnt really work as advertised" and "if you leav…

The idea that it was MS Teams’s sales team behind the anti Zoom “propaganda” (lets accept that it was propaganda for now) doesn’t make much sense because it was never obvious that MS would be the beneficiary of people moving away from Zoom.

Teams was half baked at best, and lacked a vast majority of the features that made Zoom useful. For example, it was only well into the pandemic that Teams gained the ability to have virtual backgrounds. You couldn’t have meetings with more than 10 or so people until very recently. Pretty much none of the features that made Zoom popular were even possible on Teams.

The real beneficiary should have been Google Hangouts, but Google moved too slowly (actually, it would probably be more accurate to say that Google didn’t move at all…or if they did they moved backwards).

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#259

Post by addicted » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #165

pydry wrote: post #17

In 2020 a rash of anti-zoom propaganda that I'm almost certain was driven by Microsoft led to a company-wide prohibition on using anything other than Teams "for security reasons" where i worked. This was, I am almost certain, inspired by Microsoft corporate sales getting their hooks into management. This was largely because of news stories like "end to end encryption doesnt really work as advertised" and "if you leav…

> In 2020 a rash of anti-zoom propaganda The security issues like end-to-end encryption not actually being end-to-end encryption (unless you consider the man in the middle to be two ends, forwarding messages between the other two ends) were not propaganda - they really existed. It isn't even propaganda to say Zoom published very questionable statements (or if I allow myself to be slightly less charitable: the occasio…

Zoom bombing was a thing.

And it strongly indicated not just technical flaws, but a company and product that did not actually care about their users’ privacy.

And that’s even without bringing the China stuff into the picture.

Re: Microsoft Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities

#260

Post by addicted » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

ziddoap wrote: post #186

vanviegen wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is generally also critical of Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. And rightly so. We should be pointing out ethical issues, urging companies to improve. Especially the large and powerful ones. It's just Apple that somehow seems to gets a pass on some occasions.

Accusing MS of a coordinated PR smear campaign against Zoom, with zero evidence other then "it feels like it", is a far cry away from pointing out ethical issues.

It’s like 1 comment with a whole bunch refuting it.

Which is probably why it’s so high up, because the HN algorithm probably can’t distinguish between replies agreeing with or disagreeing with a parent comment.