New York City bans Zoom in schools, citing security concerns
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Spacex has real security concerns with national security secrets and trade assets.
Schools primary goal should be accessibility when it comes to teaching and Zoom arguably with its better video/audio has the best even with glaring security flaws (that do not necessarily seem decidedly worse than Hangouts).
Banning Zoom seems to be getting on the negative news train and applying the old adage, "everything looks like a nail."
This case is literally and specifically about the protection of specific children from a proven risk.
There are two vulnerabilities in particular that can grant access to videos to anyone. One is that Zoom video chat IDs are short enough and low enough entropy to be guessable so it's possible to crash meetings. Also saved videos have a standard naming scheme that makes their file names guessable and therefore accessible publicly, as anyone who knows the file name can access any saved video.
Both of these are deliberate choices. They made meeting IDs short and memorable, which makes them guessable. They also wanted saved videos to have meaningful names derived from meeting and user metadata, but again that means they are guessable, and easy to access without annoying security controls.
You're asking a broader question of children's safety. 100% it's a valid concern, but video tele-learning should be under fire then.
Source: Father of two teenagers struggling with getting them acclimated to online school right now.
We talk so much about wanting to protect children that we should not be using software that gives audio and video access to their computers that we do not have confidence in.
>> We talk so much about wanting to protect children that we should not be using software that gives audio and video access to their computers that we do not have confidence in.
Let's start banning facebook. Shall we?
I get your point however I feel there is a different between not having full understanding of the platform you are using (be it Electron, Windows, macOS, Linux, etc) and a small library from Facebook of all companies. The fact they were able to change/fix the issue within a day(?) says to me they just didn't bother to look at what it was really doing in the first place.
> Let's start banning facebook. Shall we?
Is Facebook not banned, or at least extremely restricted within the New York school network? My daughters school in the UK has a complete block on Facebook.
But yes I would happily ban Facebook. I feel the value it adds is not worth the trade off. For the purely social connection functionality (which I do see value in obviously) there are other options that are not as dirty as Facebook.
The only question is different interpretations of “fake”: it is a real system dialogue, invoked by a deprecated API; it is fake in that the text is set by Zoom to trick the user into allowing it to install itself without approval.
> Schools primary goal should be accessibility when it comes to teaching and Zoom arguably with its better video/audio has the best even with glaring security flaws (that do not necessarily seem decidedly worse than Hangouts).
Schools also have the primary goal that elementary school children are not exposed to male genitalia, pornography, graphic violence & the like under __any__ circumstances.
It doesn't matter if the first occurrence was a zoombomb, and it's fixed now, or the standard tech reply of "oh, well, it's the had the wrong settings."
Parents have zero tolerance for these things. They'll be coming for someone's head if it happens. Let alone if it happens again.
And no school administrator is going to put their job on the line once trust in a platform is destoryed.
What’s actually behind this is the threat of a mountain of lawsuits that are gonna come descending on school systems that compromise little kids’ privacy by forcing them to use Zoom.
If the images of one child during their private moments show up on the internet because Zoom has so many vilnerabilities and a malicious actor was able to control the students camera school systems are gonna get sued out of their existence.
https://thenextweb.com/privacy/2019/07/15/german-schools-ban...
More specifically, Teams has been in use for several years now, without a faction of the security issues that Zoom has had in the last couple of years.
Edit: The US government regulations are the problem there which is why the article mentions that Google and Apple also do not meet the same privacy standards. In other words, all the OS makers fail to do so, and not just Microsoft.
The only solution that would probably work for the German standards (and is something the EU should be investing heavily in anyways) would be Linux.
And yeah, this is MS' attitude to privacy issues. The fact that nobody cares about that or doesn't want to write an article about it every day doesn't mean that it's less worse or somehow good. Zoom has been there for years too, just like those problems. The fact that now everybody DOES want to write an article about it is a result of the fact that it became so popular and it became so popular because it just works. Acting now as if MS is some kind of privacy heaven compared to Zoom is plainly wrong.
> The only solution that would probably work for the German standards (and is something the EU should be investing heavily in anyways) would be Linux.
This is not true. There were guidelines by the Federal Office for Information Security for Win7 that would work just like for certain versions of Office. Windows 10 is the first one where they plainly say: it's so ridden with privacy issues that it's just bad (data protection and privacy accident) and you should avoid it.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom/hmbjbjdpkobdj...
Gives you most of the featureset of the Mac app (unlike Zoom's crappy web app), but has a much narrower permission set which should mitigate most abuse.