On 30/1/25 17:44, D MacDougall wrote:
On 1/29/25 21:20, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 12:28:55PM -0800, Donald MacDougall wrote:
I've been using Zoom from the beginning of the Corona virus epidemic
[...]
and haven't had any trouble that I think could be related to Zoom [...]
Thanks for your report. Prompted by this thread I went to the Wikipedia.
After having read that, I'll try not to use Zoom (and to convince others
to do likewise) as far as I can.
Cheers
Just now I read the article in Wikipedia and realized that I had read it
before several years ago. There were a considerable number of security
issues back in 2020. I haven't spent the time to go through them all in
detail. My university was involved in the early development of Zoom for
use in teaching university classes. I was not personally involved in
this. From those who were, I understood that the company was very
responsive to requests for features that were needed to make it useful
for the university. This was all going on before the pandemic started
and the use of Zoom exploded overnight. I was impressed with how fast
they were able to scale up. They were there at the right time. I
think many of the problems resulted from this unexpected growth. It was
tested in the fire, so to speak. The security reports in Wikipedia were
all from 2020 or earlier, and nothing seems to have been added since.
Perhaps there are but I didn't see anything and haven't heard of
anything, so, optimistically I've been thinking that the problems have
been mostly ironed out.
From only the Wikipedia report and no further reading it's not clear to
me whether using a web browser to attend a zoom meeting would be any
safer than using the native application and I'm not doing international
diplomatic negotiations anyway. All I can say is that it's been working
flawlessly for me for 4 or 5 years and has been improving quite a bit as
time goes by. If your need is to attend Zoom meetings, you can't just
use Jitsi instead. And I have always wondered, if Jitsi or any other
app were used as much by as many people as Zoom has been, how many
security flaws would be found in them. The Wikipedia article on Jitsi
says that due to it's hosting on AWS Jitsi is not GDPR compliant. Do
you or anyone have alternative that can be said with confidence to be
better?
Don MacDougall
As I have previously said, the issue of zoom was previously discussed on
this list, and, people interested in considering zoom, should have
searched the list archive, and, found previous discussions relating to zoom.
One report that was previously cited in previous discussions of zoom on
this list, that should have been read by people recommending zoom, is
the report at
https://www.theregister.com/2023/0/15/software_freedom_conservancy_zoom/
But, if you want to record what goes on in the bathrooms of your houses,
and, the sex lives and nude imagery of your wives and daughters, and,
broadcast them on the World Wide web, then, sure, go ahead and use zoom,
to your hearts content. Such is the nature of zoom, like the pedo guy's
cars, that have been reported to have cameras specially placed in them,
to record and transmit back to the car manufacturer's headquarters, such
material as upskirt videos and photographs, for the pleasure of the
world's richest pervert.
Who needs or wants privacy and security, anyway?
..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............
