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The dreaded “Zoombombing” is a risk for all Zoom meetings, even private rooms secured with a passcode and data encryption. All it takes is for the invite to wind up in the wrong hands, and suddenly you have someone screaming randomly in your work meeting—or worse.Read more...

Zoom is letting you use its video chat service for free on Thanksgiving Day. Better yet, Zoom is going to lift all video chat restrictions that day, too, so you can talk to your loved ones—remotely—all day if you want to. Of course, you’ll still need to not blow past your ISP’s data cap if you decide to have a huge…Read more...

One of Zoom’s best features is finally available in Google Meet: Virtual backgrounds. For now, you’ll only get it if you’re using Google Meet via a desktop browser (sorry, app users), and it’s coming online via a rollout, so you might not even able able to access it yet. The novelty of the feature is too great to let…Read more...

With great work-from-home flexibility comes great responsibility. While your job is unlikely to get very upset if you take a moment to do your laundry, make a sandwich, or watch something funny on YouTube, that doesn’t give you carte blanche to do anything you might do in the off-hours during the workday.Read more...

Remote work doesn’t get much more exciting in 2020 than taking a Zoom call from a tropical locale—even if you’re not really there. As an added bonus, Zoom’s popular virtual background feature allows you to conceal your messy, work-at-home room from your colleagues—and it’s now available for use on the Android Zoom app.Read more...

I woke up this morning and suddenly realized that I had yet another game night scheduled for tonight with my friends. That’s just what our quarantine lives have become: endless game nights, during which we’re always trying to find something new that works well over Zoom / Facebook / Google Meet / you name it.Read more...

See if this scenario sounds familiar: You’ve put on your best Zoom shirt for your daily work check-in, you’ve poured the wine for your weekly friend hangout, you’re ready to engage in some digital face-to-face connection—but you spend the entire chat session staring at your own face. Happily, if you want to change…Read more...

Nobody likes looking like Homer Simpson. At least, that’s how I feel whenever I fire off an emoji to a friend on my smartphone and forget to change the skin tone. If yellow’s your thing, that’s great; I think it looks a bit weird in a text message.Read more...

If you’ve been using GIFs to chat with others during Zoom meetings, you might notice that functionality has disappeared.Read more...

As a card-carrying introvert (I laminated it myself!) with a severe aversion to talking on the phone, teleconferencing and looking at my own face on camera, our move to the 100 percent work-from-home lifestyle has been a true delight. And there’s nothing about it I love more than that point at the end of every Zoom…Read more...

Custom Zoom backgrounds prevent you from having to show off the same boring wall, messy apartment or kid-caused chaos in every meeting. And if you grew up on BBC shows like “Doctor Who,” “EastEnders,” and “BlackAdder,” you can now bring nostalgia to your conference calls with backgrounds from your favorite TV sets.Read more...

Forget trying to find the perfect desktop wallpaper. Now that everyone’s using Zoom—or one of the many Zoom alternatives—it’s all about picking the right virtual background. Swapping in one of Zoom’s built-in backgrounds might’ve elicited a chuckle back when teleconferencing was a new thing, but now that we’re all…Read more...

Now that we’re all doing more Zoom calls, Google hangouts and FaceTime sessions, we’ve started to run into that awkward moment where we might be ready to end the conversation, but the other person isn’t picking up the hint—and since most of us are physically distanced and sheltering in place right now, it’s not like…Read more...

Everyone is Zoom-ing nowadays—unless you prefer one of the solid alternatives to the can’t-get-enough-of-those-virtual-backgrounds meeting solution. And while you’ve probably heard a bit about how a Zoom meeting host can tell if the Zoom window isn’t focused on your computer when they’re screen sharing, there’s one…Read more...

Physical distancing means a lot of us have started to have virtual meetings or even virtual Happy Hours over Zoom.Read more...

Zoom is getting a lot more use these days now that people need to hold meetings remotely and carry on other events that require face-to-face interaction without the current risks posed by physical proximity. Zoom lets you create and host meetings, but it isn’t the only online video conferencing solution out there.…Read more...