Zoom Is Easy. That’s Why It’s Dangerous.

But those same qualities have made it easy for trolls to use the platform to invade alcohol recovery meetings and shout slurs during online lectures.

People can change their settings to make it less likely they will be harassed, but few people do and they’re not to blame. The company didn’t focus on security and other dangers when it should have. Zoombombing is now a consequence of the company’s deliberate choices to make video calling a breeze.

People who work on technology products obsess about removing anything that slows us down. “Friction” is bad. As was the case for other companies that decided to make things as easy as possible, Zoom’s ease was good until it wasn’t.

Now that we’re living more through screens, we need a little friction — even if it’s annoying.

Requiring everyone to enter a password before joining a Zoom meeting, or making a teacher approve 30 students sharing their homework with a virtual class is a pain. It’s also protection against Zoom-crashing harassers, and it’s good that the company is moving in this direction. Zoom said it’s now focusing more on its security and re-evaluating the balance between security and ease of use.

Adding friction is not a cure-all. Bad people will find other ways to spread hate. But now that Zoom has failed to protect our privacy, “we shouldn’t just continue to use its product,” my colleague Brian X. Chen wrote, “just because it works well and is simple to use.” (Brian has a list of protective steps you can take if you need to use Zoom, and he suggests alternatives such as FaceTime and Webex.)

I’m not saying everything in life should be harder. I want to flip open Netflix instead of hunting through 10 menus on my television set. But when there are stark consequences to easy, making things a little more annoying makes life better for all of us.

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Don’t try the hummus

My quarantine life has a telltale sound: The knock-knock-knock that nags me about incoming messages in Slack, the chat app I use with my colleagues to talk about work — and dumb things on the internet.

Being cooped up with my pinging screens has made me curious about the back story of this notification tone. Don’t judge me.

What I hear is Slack’s standard incoming message sound called “Knock Brush,” a company representative told me. It was created by Danny Simmons, a musician friend of Slack’s chief executive, Stewart Butterfield. Like almost all the sound effects in Slack, the Knock Brush originally appeared in Glitch, a failed video game from Butterfield and others that morphed into today’s Slack.

Before we go …

• It took a pandemic to make the phone call cool: Verizon’s average number of weekday mobile phone calls are more than double the typical peak it sees on Mother’s Day, the Times reporter Cecilia Kang wrote. We’re talking to each other for longer than usual, too.

• Think twice before following advice from doctors on YouTube. “He’s treating handling your groceries like doing open-heart surgery,” one biologist told Bloomberg News about a family physician’s cereal box disinfectant video. It’s tricky for YouTube to weed out both intentionally harmful coronavirus hoaxes and honest mistakes.

• This moment was made for “Sweatin’ to the Oldies”: For those of us stuck inside and slumped in our sofas, maybe try a vintage workout video — many now online! — from Cindy Crawford, Cher (?!?!?) and other home exercise honchos from the VHS era.

Hugs to this