Zoom is rolling out a new Zoom 5.0 update to address some of the many complaints that Zoom has faced lately.
One of the features of the new update is that there is now a security icon that arranges together some of Zoom’s security features. You can use it to quickly lock meetings, remove participants, and restrict screen sharing and chatting in meetings.
Also, Zoom is enabling passwords by defaults for most customers and IT admins can define the password complexity for Zoom business users. Zoom’s waiting room feature is also now on by default for basic, single-license Pro, and education accounts. This feature allows a host to hold participants in a virtual room before they’re allowed into a meeting.
Most of the changes are direct responses to “Zoombombing” a term used to describe acts where pranksters join Zoom calls and broadcast porn or shock videos. Zoom’s previous default settings didn’t encourage a password to be set for meetings, and they allowed any participants to share their screen.
The Verge also reports that Zoom is improving some of its encryption and upgrading to the AES 256-bit GCM encryption standard. This still isn’t the end-to-end encryption that Zoom erroneously said it had implemented, but it’s an improvement for the transmission of meeting data. Business customers can also control which data center regions will handle meeting traffic for their Zoom meetings after concerns were raised that some meetings were being routed through servers in China.
Zoom’s CEO Eric S. Yuan had promised changes to the video conferencing service and it is good to see the company leave to up to its promise though there are more issues to address and improvements required.
