Trolls break into meetings on Zoom • Hacker News Board

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#261

Post by viraptor » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 11:35 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #224

viraptor wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to send all available qualities of the stream yourself. Normally the server does the recompression for lower qualities. That means: more processing power and more bandwidth needed. Where normally you'd be able to send 720p, now your device may not be able to handle doing both that and lower quality (2-3 streams) at the same time. This multiplies again with screen sharing. Basically it's doable, but if you ca…

H.264 has a spec for 'scalable video coding' [1] where one stream can contain multiple quality levels, allowing a video's quality to be reduced by just selectively dropping packets. (No idea how widespread encoder/decoder support is compared to vanilla h264 though) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Video_Coding

That's pretty cool. I wonder how well does it work with bidirectional communication. It sounds like for just sending/receiving where you can saturate the link, that would be awesome.

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#262

Post by yoda222 » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 11:41 AM UTC

Several people in other comments explain that you could have a password protected session, or a session in which users must be waiting in a lobby until someone approves their admission. This seems pretty normal, and I think here Zoom may not be able to do much more.

But I have the feeling that this is difficult in pratice to use for a AA meeting. I'm actually lucky enough to not to have the need to participate to such a meeting, but from what I understand from it, the anonymous part is important, as well as the possibility for newcomers to participate. I doubt for these reasons that AA meeting groups have a list of participant clearly identified, to whom they can send a password protected link, or that they could use such a list to check that people are someone part of the group.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this kind of problem can be fixed (technologicaly. On the non-technology side, we could hope for a world without asshole, but that's only a dream)

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#263

Post by jedieaston » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 11:44 AM UTC

_-___________-_ wrote: post #167

softwaredoug wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe covid-19 will get them actually grok e2e encryption

e2e encryption for multi-party videoconferencing that works well enough to use for something like this is basically an unsolved problem at this point.

Was it not solved in FaceTime group chats? I can’t see the Apple Security Guide right now, but I know they claim that FaceTime 1-to-1 is e2e, and with their whole marketing thing being privacy, I bet they did it for group conversations too (not that it’s Enterprise ready since there’s no user management or SSO or whatever).

I’ve noticed over the years that FaceTime is much more likely than other video chat software to drop the video connection and move to audio only in case the connection is unstable whereas most others will hitch and lag for 30 seconds before looking into it, so maybe they got around it by only shipping the video in one or two resolutions?

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#264

Post by nutshell89 » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 11:49 AM UTC

Linkd wrote: post #118

pmoriarty wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on this? In what way is it superior?

From experience with many options, and having used zoom for over a year now: Video quality is better, audio quality is better, video and audio are streamed separately and during low bandwidth situations audio takes priority over video (video starts lagging but audio remains as perfect as possible), seamless to join meetings even when youre not a 'user' of their ecosystem, and has neat UX like informing you that your…

Whenever I've used Zoom from my home connection during the last few weeks, I've experienced laggy, blocky video, occasional audio dropouts (with frequent alert messages within the app to restart the Zoom client's audio), disturbingly high CPU usage, and meetings which take minutes for everyone to join.

Honestly in my experience, there's no real benefit when compared with Skype, Hangouts, or Discord except for the frequently mentioned large 50 person+ video streaming.

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#265

Post by tsimionescu » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

flir wrote: post #235

distances wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can join Zoom meetings on your browser too. It's behind these twelve easy steps: 1. Go to zoom.com 2. Click "Join a meeting" 3. Enter meeting id and click Join 4. Ignore the automatic app download 5. Go back 6. Click "Join a meeting" again 7. Enter meeting id and click Join again 8. Ignore the app download again 9. Click at "If nothing prompts, click here" 10. Click "Join from your browser" 11. Agree to terms of…

That's.... a thing of beauty. Honestly, it brings a tear to my eye.

If you are in awe of that, take a look at the official article about doing find and replace in MS OneNote:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-...

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#266

Post by lmm » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

blondin wrote: post #152

syockit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am out of the loop as to why Zoom is suddenly "blowing up". Even my workplace is using it now. Previously, we were using either Skype, Webex, or Jitsi. What does Zoom offer that the other three doesn't?

same. known zoom for a while... the "it just works" and "it has better quality" comments are very surprising to me and got me skeptical. are skype, slack, gotomeeting, hangouts, meet, webex, &c. all really crashing on people now? in a huge conspiracy? things i thought could be the real reason: novelty (for some/most people), popularity (someone online famous/influencer mentioned it), shadow marketing, luck. but wikip…

> are skype, slack, gotomeeting, hangouts, meet, webex, &c. all really crashing on people now? in a huge conspiracy?

It's astonishing how so much low-quality software gets distributed, but: yes. Hangouts and Slack are a pain to get everyone logged in / invited to. Everything else on your list just breaks a lot.

> but wikipedia told me is actually going on: schools have decided that zoom will be the de-facto remote schooling platform. a bunch of young people appropriated the platform it seems.

That's a non-explanation. Zoom is popular with young people, sure. Why? The same reason it's popular with everyone else, because it works better.

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#267

Post by lmm » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 11:56 AM UTC

aledthemathguy wrote: post #192

api wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works, the quality is decent, and it doesn't max out 4-8 cores for a simple video call. The others don't work, are Microsoft UI dumpster fires (Skype), or consume vast amounts of CPU (anything WebRTC for some reason).

-->it doesn't max out 4-8 cores for a simple video call Why did no one else crack this issue? Google has some smart people and so does MSFT. Perhaps just lack of caring? I don't get it.

> Why did no one else crack this issue? Google has some smart people and so does MSFT. Perhaps just lack of caring?

They're probably not huge revenue drivers (if at all). Why would they be a priority for either of those companies? And I can't imagine they're particularly inspiring projects to work on, which can be a self-reinforcing cycle if the best people don't want to work on them.

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#268

Post by wil421 » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 12:03 PM UTC

blahedo wrote: post #107

verytrivial wrote: post #17

https://mobile.twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1244985949534... Yes, shared by the Prime Minister, number and all. What a time to be alive.

Also interesting about that photo: Five of the 25 have portrait-oriented video feeds. Tbh this may make more sense for this kind of thing (shows more of the person rather than more of the space they're in) but I'm thinking about the hardware—am I correct in inferring that those five are zooming from their mobile? Do high-level UK cabinet ministers not have laptops?

Could they be using iPads? I can’t see why a high level executive or politician couldn’t get away with one.

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#269

Post by _-___________-_ » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 12:14 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #224

viraptor wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to send all available qualities of the stream yourself. Normally the server does the recompression for lower qualities. That means: more processing power and more bandwidth needed. Where normally you'd be able to send 720p, now your device may not be able to handle doing both that and lower quality (2-3 streams) at the same time. This multiplies again with screen sharing. Basically it's doable, but if you ca…

H.264 has a spec for 'scalable video coding' [1] where one stream can contain multiple quality levels, allowing a video's quality to be reduced by just selectively dropping packets. (No idea how widespread encoder/decoder support is compared to vanilla h264 though) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Video_Coding

Wow, that is awesome. I know what I'll be spending some coronatime doing!

Re: Trolls break into meetings on Zoom

#270

Post by gonzo41 » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 12:21 PM UTC

mcny wrote: post #256

barrkel wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever the government doles out money, the incentives are to do it in return for political favours. To counter that, various processes and institutions enforce checks and balances and accountability. In practice, that takes the form of grant applications, tendering, and the like. That then attracts a bunch of grifters who want to effectively steal the government's money, so the grant process get longer and more com…

> If a government anointed any given handful of OS organizations as preferred benefactors of donations, I'd expect grifters to infiltrate those organizations and parasitically siphon off the funds one way or another. I’d expect companies like Raytheon, Cerner, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and HPE/CSC/DXC to win a supermajority of those contracts.

No way if those companies had to OS their code. You could pump money into OS slowly by making government departments pay a royalty to the maintainers/projects they work with. Things such as Drupal, Tomcat etc.