7 ms·
New York City bans Zoom in schools, citing security concerns
- mwnivek 6y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22782302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22782302
- fyrefoxboy12 6y agoAh, sorry, didn't see it'd been submitted before
- irjustin 6y agoAs the previous discussion already noted it seems disingenuous. 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."
- Nullabillity 6y agoHow on earth is it acceptable to force students (who have pretty much no position to argue) to install what is effectively malware?
- puszczyk 6y agoWhat would you instead?
- zulln 6y agoYou can use Zoom online without installing anything.
- Nullabillity 6y agoAfter exhausting all other options. And the malware peddlers are still ultimately getting their payday.
- igetspam 6y agoI tried that the other day and could only get a 403. Is their web portal still active? I ended up just dialing in.
- GhostVII 6y agoThey disabled it temporarily (https://status.zoom.us/incidents/16ll08mmddk6 https://status.zoom.us/incidents/16ll08mmddk6)
- simonh 6y agoWe're talking about videos of children in their homes, in many cases probably their bedrooms. If they have to use it for school, they may also use it with their friends other than for school work as they will have it set up and know how to use it. I think the risks of illicit access to that material are pretty clear, and there are several serious vulnerabilities in Zoom that can grant direct access to video chats and saved videos, plus numerous other vulnerabilities.
- irjustin 6y agoSo why target Zoom specifically? 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.
- simonh 6y agoBecause Zoom in particular not only has numerous demonstrated security vulnerabilities, many of which are apparently intentional features, but has also shown a recklessly cavalier attitude to security generally. Surely it makes more sense to use and promote solutions from companies with better track records on security and privacy, which at this point seems to be pretty much anybody else.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eagsalazar2 6y agoZoom isn't being "targeted". They have repeatedly been in the news for gross security failures and personal privacy abuses. Other video services have not because they have not had this series of failures and abuses. That is not "targeting" zoom, that is reality being appropriately reported that zoom has bad and suspicious security practices and probably should be avoided.
- arcticbull 6y agoNone of that, while distasteful seems to signal any national security or personal security risk. This seems pretty hyperbolic. Why on earth would the Chinese government want access to videos of children in bedrooms? Ridiculous.
- battery_cowboy 6y agoThe reason SpaceX banned it is because of legal reasons: they can't export their tech. When children are involved, there are very similar legal concerns: they can't export the data associated with the children, aka: the video feed. I think both bans of Zoom are reasonable.
- valuearb 6y agoWhy would schools need to export video feeds?
- battery_cowboy 6y agoRight now it's been proven zoom lied about some parts of it's tech, particularly the end to end encryption part, so the state probably sees it as a legal risk if anything were to accidentally get out or get hacked.
- fermienrico 6y agoZoom sent data to Chinese data centers during the surge. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-ceo-i-really-messed-up-on-security-as-coronavirus-drove-video-tools-appeal-11586031129 https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-ceo-i-really-messed-up-on-...
- eagsalazar2 6y ago"negative news train", disregarding importance of security for schools? What are you talking about? The negative news train is just the negative series of revelations about Zoom. There is no media conspiracy here.
- satysin 6y agoI respectfully disagree. I feel it is safe to say that Zoom have some serious issues in their development process. It seems every other day there is some new issue. Install fuckery on macOS, lying about E2EE, including code they did not properly understand, etc. 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.
- thefounder 6y ago>> including code they did not properly understand, etc. Yeah we understand all of our code, right? I'm developing an Electron app. I let you guess how much I know about the code behind electron/chronium. >> 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?
- igetspam 6y agoI know you're saying that in jest but it's a good idea. If my wife wasn't sometimes active with a NPO, I'd have it filtered at the network.
- satysin 6y ago> Yeah we understand all of our code, right? I'm developing an Electron app. I let you guess how much I know about the code behind electron/chronium. 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.
- wdr1 6y ago> As the previous discussion already noted it seems disingenuous. > 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.
- nihil75 6y ago"I bet Microsoft is behind this" I thought, and sure enough - found the obligatory Teams push in there.
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoAs a New Yorker who voiced support for this, no, Microsoft is not “behind” it.
- addicted 6y agoMaybe because MS has a good solution that isn’t riddled with privacy issues? 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.
- Krasnol 6y agoYou mean besides the usual privacy issues in the operating system or Office 365? https://thenextweb.com/privacy/2019/07/15/german-schools-ban-microsoft-office-365-amid-privacy-concerns/ https://thenextweb.com/privacy/2019/07/15/german-schools-ban...
- thawaway1837 6y agoComparing an operating system to a video conference app...SMH. Anyways the article you list is more about privacy policy issues, the kind of which even ZOom is subject to because the US govt forever it on all their companies. Zoom, in addition to that, was also routing the video through Chinese servers,making you vulnerabl not only to the NSA but also the Chinese services. 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.
- bsimpson 6y agoI recently discovered there's a Chrome app: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom/hmbjbjdpkobdjplfobhljndfdfdipjhg 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.
- fsh 6y agoAfter trying out a few solutions, I found https://bigbluebutton.org/ https://bigbluebutton.org/ by far the best for classroom settings or even for general meetings. Being able to upload a presentation as a collaborative white board is much better than simple screen sharing (which is also possible). Video quality is not the best, but audio is rock solid and we had zero connection problems with tens of people in a conference. Getting started is simpler than Zoom, since no installation is required and both Firefox and Chrome are fully supported. It is also pretty easy to self-host and there is even a load balancer for large installations: https://github.com/ICTO/BBB-Load-Balancer https://github.com/ICTO/BBB-Load-Balancer
- eagsalazar2 6y agoBeen evaluating Jitsi all day, pretty good! I'm actually kind of impressed. Anyone have more experience who can elaborate on limitations and weaknesses we should be aware of before expanding to a larger internal pilot?