New York City bans Zoom in schools, citing security concerns

https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/05/zoom-new-york-city-schools/

by fyrefoxboy12 • 6 years ago

139 59 6 years ago

techcrunch.com

mwnivek• 6 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22782302

fyrefoxboy12• 6 years ago

Ah, sorry, didn't see it'd been submitted before

irjustin2• 6 years ago

As 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."

Nullabillity2• 6 years ago

How on earth is it acceptable to force students (who have pretty much no position to argue) to install what is effectively malware?

puszczyk• 6 years ago

What would you instead?

zulln• 6 years ago

You can use Zoom online without installing anything.

simonh8• 6 years ago

We'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.

irjustin2• 6 years ago

So 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.

arcticbull3• 6 years ago

None 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.

zkid18• 6 years ago

I would agree with you on the point on adoption outside the school. Btw, what kind of serious vulnerabilities in Zoom are you talking about? Been using it in a big tech company for almost two years already. Our sec department seems confident with it afaik.

valuearb8• 6 years ago

Please elucidate these "risks", because they are far from clear.

battery_cowboy2• 6 years ago

The 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.

valuearb8• 6 years ago

Why would schools need to export video feeds?

fermienrico• 6 years ago

Zoom sent data to Chinese data centers during the surge. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-ceo-i-really-messed-up-on-...

eagsalazar23• 6 years 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.

satysin2• 6 years ago

I 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• 6 years 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?

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

Regarding the macOS installer: did this turn out to be real? Last time I saw this turn up, there seemed to be some question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750619

wdr1• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

"I bet Microsoft is behind this" I thought, and sure enough - found the obligatory Teams push in there.

JumpCrisscross• 6 years ago

As a New Yorker who voiced support for this, no, Microsoft is not “behind” it.

addicted• 6 years ago

Maybe 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.

Krasnol2• 6 years ago

You mean besides the usual privacy issues in the operating system or Office 365?

https://thenextweb.com/privacy/2019/07/15/german-schools-ban...

valuearb8• 6 years ago

No one is going to win a lawsuit over a classroom video.

Eridrus2• 6 years ago

It's omitted from this article, but they also banned Google Classroom at the same time, so I'd give this more credence than I usually would...

lern_too_spel• 6 years ago

No, they didn't. https://mobile.twitter.com/DOEChancellor/status/124689704627...

bsimpson• 6 years ago

I recently discovered there's a Chrome app:

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• 6 years ago

After trying out a few solutions, I found 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

eagsalazar23• 6 years ago

Been 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?

New York City bans Zoom in schools, citing security concerns

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