Speaker 1: Welcome to Text Time, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And as we continue
Speaker 1: to try and maintain some sense of normalcy and regularity
Speaker 1: in our lives while simultaneously dealing with a pandemic, certain
Speaker 1: potential topics just seemed to beg to be addressed, including
Speaker 1: in the world of tech. Recently, I went on Twitter
Speaker 1: and I asked my followers if they had any suggestions
Speaker 1: for episode topics, and I got a whole bunch of different,
Speaker 1: you know, candidates, But the one that received the most
Speaker 1: independent submissions was the video conferencing service Zoom. For many,
Speaker 1: Zoom was something that just kind of popped up once
Speaker 1: millions of us had to shift to work from home.
Speaker 1: The company, as it turns out, has been around for
Speaker 1: a few years, but it was really when people were
Speaker 1: rushing to find conferencing solutions that it became mainstream news.
Speaker 1: A lot of you out there were probably using Zoom,
Speaker 1: possibly for years, because it was already a popular video
Speaker 1: conferencing tool, but it's just that a lot of folks
Speaker 1: never really had occasion to use it until current circumstances
Speaker 1: changed things. Add to that some pretty high profile controversies
Speaker 1: regarding everything from Internet security to privacy concerns, and you've
Speaker 1: got yourself a prime tech stuff topic. So today we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the Zoom service, where it came from,
Speaker 1: how it made its founder a billionaire, and we'll look
Speaker 1: into some of those controversies. But let's start with what
Speaker 1: Zoom is. Just in case you don't know, the basic
Speaker 1: idea behind Zoom is pretty easy to get your mind
Speaker 1: wrapped around. It's a conferencing service that uses the Internet,
Speaker 1: so you can do audio conferences, video conferences, you can
Speaker 1: do web conferences, including sharing screens so that multiple people
Speaker 1: can view the same documents simultaneously. It works on mobile
Speaker 1: devices as well as desktop or laptop computers. It can
Speaker 1: support meetings with as few as two people or as
Speaker 1: many as five hundred. There are also options to have
Speaker 1: a single presenter streamed to an unlimited audience. This would
Speaker 1: be one way communication like a lecture. Obviously, a lot
Speaker 1: has to happen in the back end for all of
Speaker 1: this to work, and it requires a persistent Internet connection.
Speaker 1: But we'll get into all of that later. Right now,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the company's history, and the story of
Speaker 1: Zoom really starts with a different company, and that company
Speaker 1: would be Cisco, which is an enormous technology conglomerate that
Speaker 1: does a whole lot of stuff, and among that stuff
Speaker 1: is a web conferencing service called WebEx. Now WebEx didn't
Speaker 1: come out of Cisco. Cisco actually acquired the company in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven. WebEx itself was founded in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. Originally it was called Active Touch, but quickly
Speaker 1: became WebEx. One Cisco executive named Eric Yuan found the
Speaker 1: WebEx service needed several improvements. Yuan was born in China.
Speaker 1: He grew up attended school and later college in China.
Speaker 1: As a kid, Yuan's first attempt at making money involved
Speaker 1: taking copper out of leftover material from construction sites and
Speaker 1: selling it. And he found out that the company he
Speaker 1: was selling these scraps to really just wanted the copper
Speaker 1: that was it. So he decided, you know, to streamline things,
Speaker 1: he would go a step further and attempt to extract
Speaker 1: copper from everything else by burning it, you know, burning
Speaker 1: the everything else away and leaving the copper behind. As
Speaker 1: a result, he accidentally burned down his neighbor's shack, which
Speaker 1: he was using to secretly conduct his business, and he
Speaker 1: was doing this d I y copper reclamation project. As
Speaker 1: a kid burned down his neighbor's shack, and you could
Speaker 1: say this first business venture was a failure. But unlike
Speaker 1: the shack, Yuan did not suffer from burnout but um bum.
Speaker 1: As a young adult, he was in a long distance
Speaker 1: relationship with a girlfriend and she lived so far away
Speaker 1: that he would have to take the train to see her,
Speaker 1: and it would take a ten hour trip by train
Speaker 1: to get there. Yuan frequently wished there was some easier
Speaker 1: way for him to see his girlfriend, and later said
Speaker 1: it was this desire that fueled his motivation for creating
Speaker 1: Zoom in the first place. He studied computer science at
Speaker 1: university and then married that long distance girlfriend when he
Speaker 1: was twenty two years old, and he was pursuing a
Speaker 1: master's degree at the time, and he was thinking about
Speaker 1: what was going to come next once he got out
Speaker 1: of school, what he was going to pursue as a career.
Speaker 1: Yuan learned of the Internet and felt that this technology
Speaker 1: would be truly transformative, but he lived in China, and
Speaker 1: the Chinese government hadn't rolled out internet infrastructure, and it
Speaker 1: was pretty obvious that the government was going to keep
Speaker 1: a tight control on what could come into China once
Speaker 1: it was connected to the rest of the world. This
Speaker 1: would be the Great Chinese Firewall. Yuan decided that he
Speaker 1: wanted to immigrate to the United States so that he
Speaker 1: could work on projects connected to the Internet and be
Speaker 1: free of that particular obstacle. The first time he applied
Speaker 1: for a visa to work in the United States, he
Speaker 1: received a rejection. He didn't let that get to him,
Speaker 1: so he applied again, and he was rejected again. So
Speaker 1: he applied again and again. In fact, it wasn't until
Speaker 1: his ninth try that he was accepted. Upon arriving in
Speaker 1: the United States in nine seven, at the age of
Speaker 1: twenty seven, Yuan secured a job with Webbex, which itself
Speaker 1: was just a couple of years old. In fact, a
Speaker 1: little less than two years old. It only had a
Speaker 1: few employees, but it was growing fairly quickly, and unlike
Speaker 1: many web based companies, WebEx was able to get through
Speaker 1: the dot com bubble burst of two thousand and two
Speaker 1: thousand one, when the economy stabilized WebEx began to grow again,
Speaker 1: and it held its own I p O. Several years later,
Speaker 1: a decade after you Want joined WebEx, Cisco came a colon.
Speaker 1: The mega company acquired WebEx for the princely sum of
Speaker 1: three point two billion dollars. At the time, WebEx was
Speaker 1: reporting three hundred eighty million dollars in revenue with a
Speaker 1: fifty million dollar profits, so the company was doing well.
Speaker 1: It was no wonder that a big company like Cisco,
Speaker 1: which is all about providing internet and text services mostly
Speaker 1: to other big companies, would be interested. Even at the
Speaker 1: time people were criticizing WebEx as being a bit too
Speaker 1: bloated and costly. Michael Arrington of tech Crunch posted about
Speaker 1: the acquisition announcement and mentioned that several startups were aiming
Speaker 1: at the same general suite of services that WebEx provided,
Speaker 1: and that these startups were on the rise, indicating that
Speaker 1: perhaps WebEx was already loaded with feature creep, that it
Speaker 1: was getting too unwieldy for its own good, and it
Speaker 1: was creating its own opportunities for competition to jump up
Speaker 1: and and take some of the pie u wan transition
Speaker 1: to Cisco, he became the company's VP of Engineering in
Speaker 1: charge of collaboration software. And Uan stated in interviews that
Speaker 1: he met with several Cisco customers over the course of
Speaker 1: his tenure with the company, and he heard from many
Speaker 1: of them that they found WebEx to be clunky, hard
Speaker 1: to use, and expensive. He could tell that these weren't
Speaker 1: outlying opinions, but rather indicated some real areas of opportunity
Speaker 1: to improve the service. One thing he felt very strongly
Speaker 1: about was that the service was anchored in a more
Speaker 1: traditional approach, a client a kind of approach, and Yuan
Speaker 1: felt that a cloud based service would be more suitable.
Speaker 1: He argued that Cisco should let him rebuild the WebEx
Speaker 1: product as a cloud based product, reinvigorating it, and his
Speaker 1: efforts to do so were met with resistance within Cisco.
Speaker 1: So by two thousand and eleven he had had enough.
Speaker 1: Yuan resigned from Cisco so that he could go and
Speaker 1: found his own web conferencing company, and around thirty to
Speaker 1: forty engineers from Cisco, some of them in China, would
Speaker 1: follow him and join his new venture, which would become Zoom.
Speaker 1: Between the time he left Cisco and the time Zoom
Speaker 1: actually launched, two years would pass. So what was going
Speaker 1: on in those two years, well pretty much what you'd expect.
Speaker 1: Yuan was meeting with investors raising money to fund his
Speaker 1: new company. At the same time, his team of engineers
Speaker 1: were building out the service with certain goals in mind.
Speaker 1: Two of the big ones were really key to Zoom's survival,
Speaker 1: and those were making sure the service would work on
Speaker 1: pretty much any platform, including mobile devices, and making sure
Speaker 1: latency was as low as possible. Latency is lag or delay,
Speaker 1: and it's an incredibly frustrating thing to encounter with technology.
Speaker 1: In communication, it makes things even more challenging. You have
Speaker 1: to ask was that a pause or is the person
Speaker 1: done speaking? Is it time for me to speak up?
Speaker 1: If you're video conferencing with me, I'm likely to think
Speaker 1: you have nothing to say, so I'll just keep on
Speaker 1: going because I'm a total chatterbox. This comes as news
Speaker 1: to nobody. I know that. But we humans are really
Speaker 1: good at picking up on latency, even unconsciously, and this
Speaker 1: makes developing certain technologies a real challenge, such as really
Speaker 1: good virtual reality. If you have noticeable latency with VR,
Speaker 1: it creates a sort of swimmy experience and it tends
Speaker 1: to lead to motion sickness, and while you might feel
Speaker 1: nauseated on some video calls. That's not really due to latency.
Speaker 1: Most times it's usually just due to the content of
Speaker 1: the call, But it's still difficult to have a natural
Speaker 1: conversation if there's latency involved. Over on the website protocol,
Speaker 1: David Pierce wrote that when he asked about latency and communication,
Speaker 1: he found that a lag of just one hundred fifty
Speaker 1: milliseconds or point one five seconds, is long enough for
Speaker 1: us to pick up on it. So the service needed
Speaker 1: to deliver video and audio at a lower latency than
Speaker 1: point one five seconds. Combining these two goals created a
Speaker 1: real engineering challenge. The team needed to come up with
Speaker 1: solutions that would work on multiple devices and not contribute
Speaker 1: to latency. Some services that cater to multiple platforms take
Speaker 1: a pretty straightforward route. The service will cater to whichever
Speaker 1: device or connection is the slowest. So this you could
Speaker 1: call the weakest link strategy. You deliver the experience at
Speaker 1: the fastest speed that the slowest connection can handle, and
Speaker 1: everybody has to deal with that. But that means everyone
Speaker 1: and gets a pretty lousy experience, or at least not
Speaker 1: as good as what it could be. The team instead
Speaker 1: wanted to create an approach in which their service would
Speaker 1: be adaptable. It would be able to deliver an optimized
Speaker 1: experience for each and every participant in a session. This
Speaker 1: would require a flexible approach in which the service could
Speaker 1: do things like downscale video quality or audio quality in
Speaker 1: order to stay synchronized with people on more capable devices
Speaker 1: and faster connections. It required a lot more programming on
Speaker 1: the back end for the service to identify what people
Speaker 1: were using and how to best serve them. By the
Speaker 1: end of two thousand twelve, Yuan's group had a beta
Speaker 1: version of the Zoom service and it could host around
Speaker 1: a dozen or so people at once. It was only
Speaker 1: a hint of what the service would become, but it
Speaker 1: was a handy tool when meeting with potential investors. So
Speaker 1: for two years, Un and his team build out Zoom
Speaker 1: and secure funding with rounds of investment. It must have
Speaker 1: been pretty challenging, since, as I mentioned earlier, there was
Speaker 1: already a host of video conferencing services using the internet
Speaker 1: back in those days, but he managed it. Yuan boared
Speaker 1: a lot of his own money into the venture himself.
Speaker 1: CBS Insights reports that Yuan held an estimated eighteen point
Speaker 1: five percent steak in the company, so nearly twenty percent steak,
Speaker 1: and that was when it would go public just in
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, so the company wouldn't hold its Series
Speaker 1: A round of funding until two thousand thirteen when it
Speaker 1: would first launch. As part of this fundraising approach, Uan
Speaker 1: had investors used the Zoom product and he would hold
Speaker 1: meetings in Zoom. He reportedly would only show up in
Speaker 1: person for the first time to make sure investors had
Speaker 1: access to the service and had signed up for it,
Speaker 1: and then he held all other meetings on the service itself.
Speaker 1: It's reported that over the course of five years he
Speaker 1: had fewer than ten work related trips, so averaging out
Speaker 1: to two work trips per year. Man I envy that schedule,
Speaker 1: But he was using this product that his company was
Speaker 1: providing to hold virtual meetings instead. He was practicing what
Speaker 1: he was preaching, and it was an effective way to
Speaker 1: get buy in from investors and later on customers. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's a story that he would personally contact customers who
Speaker 1: were canceling subscription services and he would reach out to
Speaker 1: them himself. People thought there was an automated service, but no,
Speaker 1: it was actually Yuan himself. The founder of the company
Speaker 1: writing to them to say, hey, would you reconsider, which
Speaker 1: is kind of a crazy level of dedication. He could
Speaker 1: only keep that up for so long, because, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, it would get pretty popular. See the product
Speaker 1: launched in two thousand thirteen and by the end of
Speaker 1: the first month had nearly half a million users, so
Speaker 1: keeping up with that many as a little tricky. By
Speaker 1: half a year, it was hitting a million users, and
Speaker 1: growth just exploded from there. Was Zoom making strategic partnerships
Speaker 1: both to enhance the services features and to become the
Speaker 1: preferred video conferencing an online meeting solution for several companies.
Speaker 1: Skipping ahead to two thousand nine team that's when Zoom
Speaker 1: would hold its initial public offering and it became a
Speaker 1: publicly traded company. At the market's open, the price per
Speaker 1: share of stock was thirty six dollars. By the end
Speaker 1: of the day, the price had climbed to a whopping
Speaker 1: sixty two dollars per share, And with Yuan's steak in
Speaker 1: the company, that would mean that his personal wealth would
Speaker 1: be pushed somewhere between two point nine and three point
Speaker 1: to billion dollars billion with a B. So yeah, that
Speaker 1: I p o made him a billionaire. Now when we
Speaker 1: come back, I'll talk a little bit more about what
Speaker 1: actually makes Zoom tick in the background, and then we'll
Speaker 1: conclude with some stories about some trouble waters for Zoom.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little about the tech that makes
Speaker 1: a service like Zoom possible. At the heart of this
Speaker 1: is the cloud infrastructure. And I've been doing this long
Speaker 1: enough to remember a time when cloud computing was a
Speaker 1: term that was just starting to make its way into
Speaker 1: the mainstream. And typically you get pretty high level explanations
Speaker 1: for what cloud computing is, and they can range from
Speaker 1: their services that exist online, which that's not terribly helpful,
Speaker 1: or the stuff you are accessing, whether it's storage or
Speaker 1: a program or whatever, lives on someone else's computer, which
Speaker 1: is more accurate but not very satisfying. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about cloud computing, and we'll start with that second definition
Speaker 1: we're gonna build on that. Cloud computing refers to a
Speaker 1: system in which a computer, or really a network of computers,
Speaker 1: sometimes a network of computers that can dynamically add more
Speaker 1: machines to support a service in times need. This network
Speaker 1: hosts something that remote users can access. Uh in the
Speaker 1: case of cloud storage. You're talking about a computer a
Speaker 1: network that serves as a kind of you know, file
Speaker 1: repository for users. People can access it through some online portal.
Speaker 1: Cloud computing usually refers to systems in which applications themselves
Speaker 1: are running on a network of machines, and end users
Speaker 1: access those applications through some sort of client interface or portal.
Speaker 1: And it might be a dedicated app that exists on
Speaker 1: top of a desktop computer or a smartphone or something,
Speaker 1: or it might just be a web client that exists
Speaker 1: in a special web page or whatever. The programs are
Speaker 1: running on this computer network, and usually it's designed for
Speaker 1: that purpose, and therefore it does a really good job,
Speaker 1: like a better job at running that application than a
Speaker 1: more general purpose computing machine would be able to do,
Speaker 1: you know, like a personal computer. The real beauty of
Speaker 1: cloud computing is that it shifts the burden of the
Speaker 1: work off the end users machine, whether that's a laptop,
Speaker 1: a desktop, a table computer, or a smartphone, and it
Speaker 1: moves it to these dedicated computer systems or servers. Users
Speaker 1: don't have to upgrade their devices or by the latest
Speaker 1: and greatest computers in order to use these services, because
Speaker 1: the hard work is really happening elsewhere. We say that
Speaker 1: the hard work is happening in the cloud, but really
Speaker 1: what we mean is that the work is going on
Speaker 1: in some data centers filled with servers, and a person
Speaker 1: with a state of the art system and a person
Speaker 1: using a smartphone could have a fairly comparable experience with
Speaker 1: the same cloud based service, assuming that both users also
Speaker 1: have a decent Internet connection, and the Internet connection can
Speaker 1: become the new bottleneck with this model of computing. So
Speaker 1: a couple of decades ago, the limiting factor was the
Speaker 1: end users hardware, like was the machine that the end
Speaker 1: user had good enough to run the program. Well, that
Speaker 1: was where the concern was. These days now we tend
Speaker 1: to worry about the end users internet connection. Folks who
Speaker 1: have fiber connect ativity and high speeds tend to have
Speaker 1: a better experience than those who have tighter bandwidth restrictions.
Speaker 1: In addition to being cloud based, Zoom can create and
Speaker 1: leverage peer to peer networks. This particular network strategy got
Speaker 1: a really bad rap abound a decade ago or so
Speaker 1: when some people were using peer to peer networks to
Speaker 1: pass around pirated copies of stuff like music and TV
Speaker 1: shows and movies and pretty much anything else that could
Speaker 1: be copied digitally, But the actual concept of a peer
Speaker 1: to peer network is agnostic towards anything that is shared
Speaker 1: on top of that network. P two P structures are
Speaker 1: a legitimate way to distribute files or services to multiple users.
Speaker 1: So what is it? Well, basically, it's a decentralized network
Speaker 1: in which all the machines, which can be called peers
Speaker 1: or nodes join the network play a pivotal role within
Speaker 1: that network. This is in contrast with the traditional client
Speaker 1: server model and which numerous clients all connect to one
Speaker 1: centralized server. These peers or nodes have special software running
Speaker 1: on them that allow them to connect to other nodes
Speaker 1: on that network, and they also share some portion of
Speaker 1: their own capabilities with the other nodes on the network.
Speaker 1: That might be storage, so you might have computers on
Speaker 1: the network storing files on behalf of other computers on
Speaker 1: the network, or it might be processing power or bandwidth,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. So why does Zoom make use
Speaker 1: of P twop networks? In some cases, the local P
Speaker 1: two P structure might work just as well to facilitate
Speaker 1: an online meeting as a Zoom server proxy. So in
Speaker 1: those cases, the computers that connect to the meeting make
Speaker 1: up this network and they share some resources, and Zooms
Speaker 1: cloud servers don't really have to do very much outside
Speaker 1: of initiating the meeting, keeping track of who is in there,
Speaker 1: and some other load demand basic tasks and the mainstream
Speaker 1: tasks are offloaded onto the Zoom users computers. But in
Speaker 1: other cases, the Zoom server figures out that p TP
Speaker 1: network really isn't a viable option, and so it will
Speaker 1: shift all those online meeting functions to a more conventional
Speaker 1: cloud server based approach. To determine which way it's gonna go,
Speaker 1: Zoom goes through a very technical process, but I can
Speaker 1: simplify it a little bit, and it does become important
Speaker 1: later on the host of the meeting launches the app
Speaker 1: and starts the meeting within it or within the web
Speaker 1: client or whatever. But the host chooses to start a
Speaker 1: meeting that sends a message to Zooms servers over t
Speaker 1: c P or Transmission Control Protocol. This is one of
Speaker 1: the basic Internet standard communication protocols, and a protocol is
Speaker 1: essentially a set of rules or instructions. The Zoom server
Speaker 1: notifies the invitees to the meeting also through TCP, and
Speaker 1: that manifests itself to users as a message that's says, hey,
Speaker 1: your meeting is starting, you need to join it, and
Speaker 1: it allows those users to join the meeting. The server
Speaker 1: then does a P two P check among the host
Speaker 1: and all the invitees of this meeting, and it evaluates
Speaker 1: the peered connections between these different computers. If that evaluation
Speaker 1: passes a threshold of acceptable performance, then the server says,
Speaker 1: all right, you guys are good to go. I'm going
Speaker 1: to hand over the streaming duties to this peer to
Speaker 1: peer network and I'll just keep an eye on what's
Speaker 1: going on. But if it doesn't meet that threshold, then
Speaker 1: the Zoom server steps in and says, all right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna have a Zoom proxy server step in and handle
Speaker 1: all those duties because the peer to peer network wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to do it otherwise. And the streaming is
Speaker 1: sent over a different protocol, not TCP. Instead, it's a
Speaker 1: protocol called User Data Gram Protocol or u d P.
Speaker 1: And now we need to talk about packets because this
Speaker 1: is also important. So the NATE sure the Internet means
Speaker 1: the machines are popping on and off the Internet all
Speaker 1: the time, right, So if you think about the Internet
Speaker 1: as being this interconnected web of UH servers that allow
Speaker 1: information to pass from point A to point B. Some
Speaker 1: of those servers are coming online, some of them servers
Speaker 1: are going offline, which means you cannot predict which pathway
Speaker 1: is going to be reliable, right, So that makes communication
Speaker 1: really tricky. It means that sometimes a pathway that existed
Speaker 1: at the beginning of a transfer may go offline in
Speaker 1: the middle of a transfer, So you need a backup
Speaker 1: plan if something goes wrong, and the protocols and packets
Speaker 1: are meant to deal with this. They are the style
Speaker 1: of backup plan. So packets are bundles of data. Rather
Speaker 1: than sending a file through the Internet entirely whole, computers
Speaker 1: will divide files up into more manageable packets or bundles.
Speaker 1: And this is easy to under stand if you think
Speaker 1: about what could happen if you were to try and
Speaker 1: send a file and it's a huge file. Let's say
Speaker 1: it's like a two hour high resolution video file. Well,
Speaker 1: you're trying to send this from one machine to another.
Speaker 1: Now imagine that some server along that pathway goes offline
Speaker 1: in the middle of that transfer. Maybe you're halfway through
Speaker 1: sending this file. And that server goes offline, you'd be
Speaker 1: back at square one, because now you have a useless file.
Speaker 1: You only got half of it to its destination. And
Speaker 1: it's even possible you wouldn't even know that something wrong
Speaker 1: had happened and that the file didn't go through, and
Speaker 1: that would be even worse than being at square one.
Speaker 1: So instead, what computers do is they divide those big
Speaker 1: files into packets, and those packets have information in them
Speaker 1: about what file they belong to, where they're supposed to go,
Speaker 1: how they fit in with all the other packets, kind
Speaker 1: of like a puzzle, and they all go across the Internet,
Speaker 1: and they don't necessarily all take the same pathway from
Speaker 1: point A to point B. They may take very different
Speaker 1: pathways in order to get to point B. Information that's
Speaker 1: sent over t c P means that that that protocol,
Speaker 1: that set of rules requires stuff like error correction, and
Speaker 1: it accounts for all packets in order to process a
Speaker 1: file on the other end, So it's a little slower,
Speaker 1: a little more painstaking, a little more concerned with precision
Speaker 1: and accuracy. It's really all about being confident that your
Speaker 1: file is getting to where it needs to go. Now,
Speaker 1: Someday I'm going to have to go through all the
Speaker 1: various Internet protocols and explain what each one does. But
Speaker 1: the important thing to know in this case is that
Speaker 1: while TCP is a reliable means of delivering information over
Speaker 1: the Internet, u d P is faster. And this is
Speaker 1: because u d P does a weigh with some of
Speaker 1: those pesky error checking processes, and it doesn't worry about
Speaker 1: dropped data packets. In fact, according to Zoom, you could
Speaker 1: drop as much as the data packets and you would
Speaker 1: still get video and audio quality that would be decent.
Speaker 1: So u DP gets stuff done fast, even if not
Speaker 1: everything goes as planned, if it's a little on the
Speaker 1: sloppy side, you could say, but stuff like streaming video,
Speaker 1: streaming audio, and streaming applications like gaming typically rely pretty
Speaker 1: heavily on u d P because of that speed. Now,
Speaker 1: some of you might be wondering why even bother talking
Speaker 1: about this, and the answer is because all of this
Speaker 1: is going to come back to play a part when
Speaker 1: I talk about Zoom and security and privacy issues later
Speaker 1: on that right, there's what we call foreshadow. And now
Speaker 1: computer services in general, not just Zoom, also have to
Speaker 1: work with end devices to get permission to use certain peripherals,
Speaker 1: namely stuff like webcams and microphones. And because Zoom is
Speaker 1: a service that aims to be available on pretty much
Speaker 1: any platform, it means that the developers had to account
Speaker 1: for the various permissions the service would need to accommodate.
Speaker 1: Defining permissions is something that typically falls to the companies
Speaker 1: that create operating systems. There are Android permissions, Windows permissions,
Speaker 1: iOS permissions, etcetera. And understanding what this means requires us
Speaker 1: to take a little step back and consider the dreaded
Speaker 1: layers of computing. You can think of layers as a
Speaker 1: way to envision the various operational components required for a
Speaker 1: computer to work. It's pretty clear that when you strip
Speaker 1: everything away, when you take everything away from the computer
Speaker 1: that is running on top of stuff. At its core,
Speaker 1: computers are running on electricity that passes through circuits. This
Speaker 1: is a layer of hardware, and we can think of
Speaker 1: it as being concrete in the sense that it has
Speaker 1: a form, and that form doesn't change, at least not
Speaker 1: without you adding in or swapping out components. The hardware
Speaker 1: is like the concrete slab for a building. It's the
Speaker 1: layer on top of which everything else has to exist now.
Speaker 1: In the olden days of programming, like the earliest computers,
Speaker 1: computer programmers would actually have to change the hardware layout
Speaker 1: of a machine every time they wanted to run a
Speaker 1: different operation. And I'm talking about physically unplugging cables from
Speaker 1: one part of the machine, plugging them into another part,
Speaker 1: or toggling switches, that kind of thing. In modern terms,
Speaker 1: this would be like requiring you to open up your
Speaker 1: computer or your smartphone and physically change the circuitry every
Speaker 1: time you needed it to run a different operation. And
Speaker 1: keep in mind, I'm saying an operation, not a process.
Speaker 1: I mean some processes, like a like a program might
Speaker 1: consist of multiple operations. Fortunately, in the years since those
Speaker 1: early computers, some very smart people were able to develop
Speaker 1: additional layers to interface directly with the hardware that was
Speaker 1: at the foundation, but also allow programmers to run applications
Speaker 1: higher up a level of abstraction. So these middle layers
Speaker 1: can send commands lower down so that the hardware can
Speaker 1: run the programs and and provide the sets that are needed,
Speaker 1: and the layers on top, the application layers let you
Speaker 1: do the stuff that you actually want to do with
Speaker 1: your computer. Permissions are part of this picture. Permissions are
Speaker 1: part of operating systems. Developers build applications for various operating
Speaker 1: systems and they communicate with the OS through what's called
Speaker 1: an application programming interface or a p I. The a
Speaker 1: p I sort of sets the rules for developers. The
Speaker 1: API defines how applications can call for the assets they
Speaker 1: need in order to run, kind of like the rules
Speaker 1: of how to requisition computer processing power and stuff, and
Speaker 1: it includes things not just like processing power, but also
Speaker 1: access to computer memory, to storage, and how the program
Speaker 1: can tap into stuff like peripherals, including webcams and microphones. Typically,
Speaker 1: modern operating systems include a requirement in a p I
Speaker 1: s that will send an alert to an end user
Speaker 1: whenever an app wants to, at least for the first time,
Speaker 1: make use of stuff like microphones and cameras. This is
Speaker 1: meant to help protect security and privacy. Clearly, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: want some random program to be able to activate your
Speaker 1: computer or smartphones camera without your permission. Once the user
Speaker 1: grants permission, the app can make use of those assets,
Speaker 1: and typically the app assumes permission continues for subsequent uses,
Speaker 1: which in turn can be a little problematic, but that's
Speaker 1: neither here nor there. The Zoom team developed apps for
Speaker 1: Windows based machines, Linux machines, Max, Android and iOS devices.
Speaker 1: In addition, Zoom has a web based client and that
Speaker 1: does not require users to download any sort of app
Speaker 1: to their desktop or computer. They could access it straight
Speaker 1: through the web. However, the feature set on the web
Speaker 1: client is a bit threadbare when compared to the app versions,
Speaker 1: and it's not even the same across all browsers. For example,
Speaker 1: if you're in the web client version of Zoom and
Speaker 1: you want to share video, you better not be using
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer because it doesn't have that capable ability. But
Speaker 1: let's be honest, you shouldn't be using Internet Explorer anyway,
Speaker 1: as that browser is essentially obsolete and all versions apart
Speaker 1: from the latest one, which I believe is Internet Explorer eleven,
Speaker 1: no longer even received support from Microsoft. If you wanted
Speaker 1: to share your computer's screen with a group, then you'd
Speaker 1: best not be using Safari, as that browser lacks that function. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go through every feature and call
Speaker 1: out each browser, but i will say, according to Zoom itself,
Speaker 1: the browser with the greatest compatibility with Zoom's features is
Speaker 1: Google Chrome and I'm not gonna go through all the
Speaker 1: different features because this isn't an ad for Zoom. Suffice
Speaker 1: it to say the app versions give more options. And
Speaker 1: when I come back, I'll talk about Zoom's revenue model
Speaker 1: and then get into some of the problems that the
Speaker 1: company has run into recently. But first let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break. Okay, so the basic Zoom service is free,
Speaker 1: but it has some limitations. In fact, Zoom falls into
Speaker 1: a category of services typically called freemium. You get a
Speaker 1: base level of services without having to pay anything, but
Speaker 1: to gain access to more robust features, you have to subscribe.
Speaker 1: With a free account, you can have unlimited one on
Speaker 1: one meetings. If you hold a group meeting, you're limited
Speaker 1: to forty minutes or less. You can hold a meeting
Speaker 1: with up to one participants in it. And then you've
Speaker 1: got three levels of paid membership. You've got the Pro
Speaker 1: level that's at fourteen dollars a month here in the US,
Speaker 1: that allows for longer meetings and more user features in general.
Speaker 1: But you've also got Business and Enterprise level memberships. Those
Speaker 1: offer larger capacity meetings and of course more features. Both
Speaker 1: of those are priced at nineteen dollars and nine cents
Speaker 1: per month here in the US, but the business level
Speaker 1: has a minimum requirement of ten hosts, so you multiply
Speaker 1: that by ten. The enterprise level requires a minimum of
Speaker 1: one hundred hosts, and so you multiply that price by
Speaker 1: a hundred per month. There's also plans for mobile users.
Speaker 1: It's called Zoom Phone. There are more recent editions such
Speaker 1: as a conference room Zoom set up Zoom Rooms, that's
Speaker 1: what they're called. They're cloud storage add on so that
Speaker 1: you can record meeting proceedings for future reference. So it
Speaker 1: records everything involved in the meeting, the entire uh audio
Speaker 1: and video, plus any notes that were shared. And there
Speaker 1: are other services as well, all based around these same concepts.
Speaker 1: Recent articles like the one I mentioned earlier by David
Speaker 1: Pierce that actually has the title Zoom Conquered Video Chat
Speaker 1: Now it has even bigger plans in the quote anyway,
Speaker 1: That article lays out that the long term strategy for
Speaker 1: Zoom is to create a full suite of services that
Speaker 1: empower companies to work in a more decentralized way, essentially
Speaker 1: eliminating the need for a physical office space. Right now,
Speaker 1: millions of people have to do this out of necessity
Speaker 1: but Zoom is banking on this being more than just
Speaker 1: a temporary change and how we do things, and it
Speaker 1: will be more of a sign of how things will
Speaker 1: be in days to come. Perhaps the offices of the
Speaker 1: future will really be fully decentralized, with more and more
Speaker 1: people working from their homes. Zoom is building out the
Speaker 1: services that are meant to meet that kind of future. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: there's some other things I really want to talk about
Speaker 1: before I close out this episode, and one of those
Speaker 1: is that Zoom has become a sort of meme generator
Speaker 1: all by itself. For example, Zoom has a feature called
Speaker 1: virtual background, and that allows users to replace whatever is
Speaker 1: behind them, you know, like an office wall or something
Speaker 1: with an image or even a video. It works best
Speaker 1: if the user has a green screen. I actually tried
Speaker 1: this with my setup at home, but I don't have
Speaker 1: a green screen, and I can tell you the results
Speaker 1: were horrifying because the wall color behind me and the
Speaker 1: color of my face are close enough that I got
Speaker 1: some weird video artifacts that will haunt me to the
Speaker 1: end of my days. But my favorite version of the
Speaker 1: virtual background was a guy who used the distracted boyfriend
Speaker 1: meme as his Zoom background. Which mean, man, it looked
Speaker 1: like the distracted boyfriend was looking back at the zoom user.
Speaker 1: I thought that was pretty clever. But there's been a
Speaker 1: flood of creative backgrounds that have popped up due to
Speaker 1: more people using Zoom. Then there are the numerous examples
Speaker 1: of zoom meetings gone wrong. And I'm gonna be honest
Speaker 1: with you, guys, I can't watch these videos. I know
Speaker 1: about the woman who apparently didn't think about the fact
Speaker 1: that her camera was on while she went to the
Speaker 1: restroom while also on a call. Um, haven't watched it,
Speaker 1: can't do it? Uh? They these these videos almost always
Speaker 1: feature one or more participants being caught in some sort
Speaker 1: of compromising way, and it's all because they were unaware
Speaker 1: of how zoom arked, or they weren't paying enough attention.
Speaker 1: And that's hard to live down. But then so many
Speaker 1: of these are making their way into compilations and YouTube
Speaker 1: videos and articles and stuff that they're going to live
Speaker 1: on forever. And I guess it's a sign of my
Speaker 1: age because I grew up in a time where you
Speaker 1: could do something really dumb, but typically there wasn't a public,
Speaker 1: permanent record of the dumb thing you did. That the
Speaker 1: world could witness at any time, at least not in
Speaker 1: most cases, so yikes. I've also seen clever stories about Zoom,
Speaker 1: such as a young student, an elementary school student, and
Speaker 1: she figured out how to fool her teacher into thinking
Speaker 1: she was paying attention by replacing her video feed with
Speaker 1: just a still picture of her sitting at her computer.
Speaker 1: And because her teacher was actually looking at a full
Speaker 1: classroom of participants, not just one student, it was easy
Speaker 1: to overlook that one of those students had not blinked
Speaker 1: for like hours. And here I thought drawing eyeballs on
Speaker 1: your eyelids was brilliant so you could snooze in class.
Speaker 1: This young lady has definitely surpassed my clever ability to
Speaker 1: avoid schoolwork. But beyond the memes, there are more serious
Speaker 1: matters that we need to discuss, and some of that
Speaker 1: falls into the realm of privacy. For example, Zoom has
Speaker 1: a chat feature, and this allows users within a session
Speaker 1: to instant message one another. This is useful if you're
Speaker 1: setting up the next speaker at a meeting. Let's say
Speaker 1: there's multiple people who are going to present, and you
Speaker 1: might have an administrator who is coordinating behind the scenes
Speaker 1: and chatting with people privately to prep prep them so
Speaker 1: that they're ready to be the next person to step
Speaker 1: forward and take on the microphone essentially, but it's also
Speaker 1: a useful feature if users want to talk some serious
Speaker 1: smack with one another privately during a Zoom session, such
Speaker 1: as I don't know, critically evaluating their boss is attire
Speaker 1: when said bosses on camera. But beware Zoom users, you see,
Speaker 1: hosts can record Zoom sessions. I mentioned this earlier, and
Speaker 1: those recordings can either be sent to the cloud or
Speaker 1: they could be recorded locally on the host's own computer.
Speaker 1: So the air settings for the host to opt for
Speaker 1: whichever feature they want to use. And as part of
Speaker 1: this process, messages that are sent during the Zoom session
Speaker 1: are saved within the meetings minutes. Now the host is
Speaker 1: recording to the cloud, only public messages are retained. No
Speaker 1: private messages will be included, But if the host is
Speaker 1: recording locally to their own machine, all messages public and
Speaker 1: private get saved. So those private messages where you are
Speaker 1: snarking on the boss might come back to haunt you. Now.
Speaker 1: I gave a pretty tame version of what could happen,
Speaker 1: but you can imagine much worse outcomes, such as someone
Speaker 1: sharing stuff that the host shouldn't see due to corporate
Speaker 1: policies or whatever. Let's say it's a meeting with multiple
Speaker 1: division heads and one division head isn't supposed to see
Speaker 1: a specific report for whatever reason. That could be a
Speaker 1: real issue with this way that messages can ultimately be
Speaker 1: shared in meeting minutes, So this is something to be
Speaker 1: aware of. In addition, Zoom's privacy policy raised some eyebrows
Speaker 1: once people really looked at those policies more closely, because,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned many times before on this show, most
Speaker 1: of us never bothered to read the darned things. We
Speaker 1: just scroll past and clicked the little box that says
Speaker 1: we read it, but we didn't really. Kato Flaherty of
Speaker 1: Forbes actually wrote about this a few times and has
Speaker 1: some great articles on the subject. So, according to the
Speaker 1: previous policy, users would give Zoom permission to collect user
Speaker 1: info and potentially share it with third parties, you know,
Speaker 1: like advertisers. The privacy policy seemed to indicate that the
Speaker 1: data could even include stuff like the contents of meetings themselves,
Speaker 1: not just user data, but the content of user meetings.
Speaker 1: So not only would the typical information like your email
Speaker 1: address or your name get put on a market. Potentially
Speaker 1: you could see more targeted data show up about your
Speaker 1: business or your interests, perhaps even stuff that you know
Speaker 1: shouldn't be shared outside a specific group because of corporate
Speaker 1: security concerns. When asked to comment, Zoom reps said the
Speaker 1: company was not selling any user data, but experts were
Speaker 1: wary because the policy as written was giving Zoom an
Speaker 1: awful lot of permission to do stuff with that data
Speaker 1: going across its service, and while the company might not
Speaker 1: currently be pursuing any actions that would be questionable, it's
Speaker 1: looked like they had the permission to do it in
Speaker 1: the future. The company has since revised its privacy policy
Speaker 1: in order to make things a little more transparent, but
Speaker 1: the concern was enough to get some folks in government
Speaker 1: interested in learning more about Zoom's practices, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of like how the US government got interested in Facebook,
Speaker 1: the bad kind of interest did. Zoom also has some
Speaker 1: nanny features that people might find irritating, such as an
Speaker 1: attention tracking feature. This alerts the host of a meeting
Speaker 1: of a participant has clicked away from the meeting session
Speaker 1: for more than thirty seconds, So if that little student
Speaker 1: was actually using her computer to do other stuff, then
Speaker 1: her teacher might notice. Even if it looks like the
Speaker 1: young lady is staring into the camera, she's really you know,
Speaker 1: playing a game or or watching a video or something
Speaker 1: that could end up giving the whole gigaway. And then
Speaker 1: there's zoom bombing. Zoom Bombing also has made the news,
Speaker 1: and as the name suggests, this describes the practice of
Speaker 1: an uninvited attendee or someone at a public Zoom meeting
Speaker 1: essentially taking it over, being disruptive, making sure that the
Speaker 1: meeting can't actually continue as planned. Sharing a Zoom meeting
Speaker 1: link publicly tends to be the main way that the
Speaker 1: uninvited find their way into a meeting, which makes some sense,
Speaker 1: and some features on Zoom make it way easier for
Speaker 1: people to really be disruptive. For example, there is a
Speaker 1: join before host option, which allows guests to join into
Speaker 1: a meeting session before the host has actually started the meeting.
Speaker 1: That's not a great one to have on and you
Speaker 1: should probably turn it off. Uh Disabling the ability for
Speaker 1: anyone but the host to screen share is a good idea.
Speaker 1: There have been stories about people who jumped into a
Speaker 1: Zoom meeting turned on screen sharing because the host had
Speaker 1: not enabled it just for themselves and then shared incredibly
Speaker 1: offensive material into a public meeting. So that's a good
Speaker 1: one to check off. Another one is disabling the option
Speaker 1: that allows removed participants to rejoin, because if that option
Speaker 1: is clicked on, then if you boot someone that could
Speaker 1: just bounce right back in, and then you're just constantly
Speaker 1: booting them, So turning that option off is also important.
Speaker 1: And of course a host can choose to set up
Speaker 1: private meetings and not do a public meeting at all,
Speaker 1: and thus require every single participant to include a password
Speaker 1: and then distribute that password in a way that's more responsible,
Speaker 1: so people can't just join that meeting willy nilly. But
Speaker 1: that's not ideal for every situation. A lot of people
Speaker 1: want to hold public meetings for various reasons, so it's
Speaker 1: not always a practical solution, but it is definitely one
Speaker 1: you want to use if you are wanting to hold
Speaker 1: a private meeting, you don't want to switch that over
Speaker 1: to public and then invite this kind of mischief. One
Speaker 1: other vulnerability I do want to mention was covered in
Speaker 1: a medium post by David Wells. This one was titled
Speaker 1: remotely hijacking Zoom clients. And this goes back to the
Speaker 1: t c P and U d P stuff I mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier and said it was going to come back into play.
Speaker 1: So Zoom uses TCP for important stuff like verifying hosts
Speaker 1: and things and bringing in commands and stuff. Remember t
Speaker 1: c P is the more methodical one, the more secure
Speaker 1: and reliable approach to sending data. It uses u DP
Speaker 1: for streaming video and audio because u DP is fast,
Speaker 1: but the trade off is it's not as reliable. But
Speaker 1: Wells found out that the Zoom service doesn't necessarily discriminate
Speaker 1: between commands that were sent over U d P versus TCP.
Speaker 1: So while a t CP command would have a verification
Speaker 1: that it came from a reliable source, a u d
Speaker 1: P command would not, and the service was interpreting both
Speaker 1: equally with equal importance. So a hacker who knows about
Speaker 1: this vulnerability could potentially hijack a Zoom session by sending
Speaker 1: commands over u DP to hand over desktop control to
Speaker 1: the hacker. And it gets super technical, and it's not
Speaker 1: the type of thing that the average Zoom user is
Speaker 1: going to do. And more to the point, Zoom has
Speaker 1: it's patched this vulnerability, so the whole thing is moot
Speaker 1: now anyway. But it wouldn't surprise me that now, with
Speaker 1: Zoom taking an even more prominent place in the wake
Speaker 1: of physical isolation, that we're going to hear about other exploits.
Speaker 1: Hopefully we'll hear about it from the good guys, and
Speaker 1: only after the vulnerabilities have been patched, and not as
Speaker 1: a result of bad guys discovering it and taking advantage
Speaker 1: of them. In the end, Zoom is popular because it's affordable,
Speaker 1: it's versatile, and it performs its basic functions well. There
Speaker 1: are numerous concerns, many of which I would argue are
Speaker 1: extremely valid, about this service, so it's good to do
Speaker 1: your research, and what the company does in response to
Speaker 1: all this scrutiny will no doubt determine its future course.
Speaker 1: I hope the decisions lead to greater transparency, better privacy protection,
Speaker 1: better security. That's what I want to see, because I
Speaker 1: think it does have a lot of great use, but
Speaker 1: it needs to be designed in such a way that
Speaker 1: people can't turn it to bad purposes, or that the
Speaker 1: company itself can't exploit user information. Those are very important
Speaker 1: things that need to happen well, that wraps up this
Speaker 1: episode of text Stuff. If you guys have things to suggest,
Speaker 1: then I highly recommend you do what these Twitter users did.
Speaker 1: They reached out to me on Twitter. You can also
Speaker 1: reach out to me on Facebook. The handle for both
Speaker 1: of those is text Stuff HSW. So send me ideas
Speaker 1: of what you would like me to cover in future episodes.
Speaker 1: I've got a little list growing right now, but I'd
Speaker 1: always like more submissions, and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.