Well, it is interesting to see how companies (actually the management) who have 
a need of secrecy and privacy shelter take it for granted that other companies 
become able to spy on them rather easily. 

Conference meetings allow at least for learning about who is meeting with whom 
how often abut what subjects, what messages (and information like urls) go via 
the conference-linked chats,  get exchanged in which context with whom and with 
what other companies. 

Add to that the great ability to automatically record what is spoken, use the 
great feature of automatically transcribing everything and you have arrived in 
a world which makes look Orwell‘s 1984 a stoneage tale, laughable.

Add to that having become able to store everything for decades, reanalyzing 
stored information with the latest anslysis tools, many AI based, over and over 
again.

Conference managing companies become able to arrive automatically at 
intelligence (better, faster than humans could come up with): no 
self-controlled, self-determined company or organisation, no goverment 
(administration) could have the slightest interest for such a catastrophic 
reality.

This is probably only possible because most companies are run by managers who 
have no clues with respect to IT, being dilettants who enjoy excercising power 
on IT issues believing that that makes them more competent with respect to 
their managing abilities, not realizing how much damage they may cause to the 
companies they run. 

For such managers it is sufficient that managers of other companies do rhe 
same, such that they can proof their professionality. If a problem shows up, it 
is not their individual fault, individual responsibility, but an „unforseeable“ 
 unfortunate event the entire industry faces. 

Just witness how IT-dilettant managers (in the 21st century!) take decisions 
against mainframes and infrastructures without being able to assess the impact 
cost-wise and organisation-wise. Just read about many of the wrong going 
migration attempts. 

Being able to operate a smartphone or pad does not make people, managers IT 
experts although many feel that to be the case. :)

Rant off.

Use non-surveilled conference software for your needs. Try with your 
(professional) friends or family something like the Jitsi conference software.

Try it out, go to https://meet.jit.si enter some string and share the resulting 
url and everyone is able to immediately join a meeting/conference.

It takes 10 seconds to set up plus a sms, message or email with the Jitsi link 
to join.

I do this with all meetings I control, with friends, colleagues, with students, 
with family (scattered literally over the goibe).

You as IT professionals should have tried Jitsi at least once! :)

Lookup Wikipedia about Jitsi or BigBlue Button and then reason why any 
management of a company with an IT department would use commercial and 
expensive conference companies when they can set up a fully and self-controlled 
conference system for free!

Jitsi and BigBlueButton are open-source, maintained, stable, powerful and best: 
totally transparent, not surveilled and free.

Try it out, go to: https://meet.jit.si and create your first self-controlled 
meeting in ten seconds! :)

—-rony

Rony G. Flatscher (mobil/e)

> Am 08.02.2023 um 19:55 schrieb Tony Harminc <[email protected]>:
> 
> On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 at 13:34, Steve Thompson <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Kind of a rant, but more making a point.
>> 
>> Teams via browser means you have to have an M/S account because
>> your data is in someone else's data center (isn't that a Cloud?
>> ;-) ). Or to put this another way, someone has to have an account
>> so that you can get access via Teams in my experience.
> 
> You don't have to have an MS account to be a guest at a Teams meeting.
> To be sure I just now tried this myself using Firefox, and joined a
> Teams meeting I hosted using my work Teams account. It worked fine.
> The host may have rules that prohibit you from joining anonymously,
> and as always Microsft has all kinds of dark patterns to "encourage"
> you to hand over as much information as they can extract from you, but
> basically it works.
> 
> None of these services MS Teams, Google Meets, Zoom, or any of the
> second tier ones offer anonymity or true end-to-end encryption. All of
> them will collect as much personal data about you as they possibly
> can.
> 
> If you want a good degree of privacy on an audio/video call, use
> Signal. For that matter use Signal anyway. Yes you have to install an
> app, but it's open source and run by a charitable foundation rather
> than a for-profit company.
> 
> Tony H.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to