Right! No one likes Teams.
Why not use Zoom?
So Grandma can chat with the gran-kids? Sure… otherwise…
Online services such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams know who is meeting with whom, when, where, and what they’re saying because users’ devices are sending all video and audio data to the cloud, which can decrypt video streams internally and see participants’ IP addresses and identities.
Teams is okay-ish. But a lot of people I need to communicate with aren’t on it.
I do so that, as well as other meeting platforms (too many effin’ apps). But for me and the people I communicate with on it, it is like WhatsApp, without having to expose your telephone number or convos with FecesBook. Especially when I need to deal with confidential whistleblower communications.
Fuck, fuck, a thousand times fuck.
So Skype had better security? Ugh, I did not know that!
Yes and no. Skype conversations have been the subject surveillance by default for well over a decade.
What’s sad is that it’s not only possible to create a point to point, server-free communication channel on the internet, the net was designed that way from the outset and it used to be the default. I can point to one or two minor technical changes to how the internet is deployed that would get us back to that, would be “trivial” to deploy, and a game changer for privacy and security. Those changes also would be anathema to the Internet Protocol-based entertainment industry (who, in 
, are also your ISP’s), the cloud provision industry, and all national security services.
So we all know how that is going to shake out.
I hate zoom with a passion. I use Teams and honestly I think it works pretty well for my needs, though I’m not native enough to think that it’s going to fit other’s needs
We use Teams at work. Most of us hate it and it’s pretty buggy at times, but most of us also hate it less than a lot of other things.
(Skype was always buggy as hell too for me anyway.)
Duck duck go is a decent browser … for now …
We used to use Teams at work and disliked it, then we moved to Slack and realised how much better Teams was.
Malfunctioning fog sensor
Yeah, Teams is crap, but everything else seems like worse crap.
I’d be interested in those few details…
Very humble opinion here, likely to get me rebuked by true network engineers, but my little wish list for solving my usual use case problems, within the limits of our current installed base, is…
-
IPv6 everywhere, static /56 (which my ISP won’t do
), fix SLAAC so there’s a secure protocol to map the random address-to-DNS so we may make machines DNS-addressable when they wake up (yes, you can make the addresses static, and DNS can store a host key, that’s extra work). -
Rewire browsers so they can talk to UNIX domain sockets and you can rely on the OS authentication (SSH).
Point 1 stems from an IP address being, in effect, the “name” of the machine as well as the routing address. I attended a good talk by David Cheriton 20 years ago where he had a revised proposal to replace numbers with, in effect, text names on the IP level of the network, removing the DNS/IP address split in favour of human-readability. I thought it was a great idea, but it never went anywhere. (If anything, IPv6 made that problem worse by making IP addresses harder to type in.)
I realize that a lot goes on in cloud service setups behind both the DNS address and IP range. I think there’s (probably?) nothing stopping an IPv6 range being statically assigned to a service and behind that implementing some magic. I don’t have to think about “mobile” so I won’t.
Point 2; browsers have become the default “Universal UI” (I was roundly rebuked by a CS prof in 1995 for saying this would be the case). I can’t, for example, use SSH -L from:to to use my OS authentication to connect to a service. I must implement a second authentication channel, which is ~3x to 4x the work. X11 over an SSH connection used to work well, but the effort is all in HTML+CSS now. There are some browser/Javascript security issues that would need to be snugged down.
Facetime, anyone?
Great if everyone on the call happens to be in the iOS ecosystem. Impossible otherwise.
Everything seems to rely on text messages, which seem to require cell pains, or at least cell pain numbers.
How the fuck am I supposed to read a text message when 1. I’ve just been blasted by a cell pain ringing, 2. I’m being blinded by a cell pain screen, and 3. the signal keeps dropping, because of what it is?
I’ve look up Google Messages, but it requires an Android pain. I’ve got a Nokia with its own system.