Is your kids' school forcing Zoom on them too?

Joshua Judson Rosen rozzin at hackerposse.com
Mon Aug 10 20:48:05 EDT 2020


On 8/10/20 10:23 AM, r270 at mrt4.com wrote:
> I don't have any kids, but my school district and other governments who claim jurisdiction over me also require it.
> 
> Since Zoom had said before that it was secure and it turned out that it wasn't, it certainly doesn't make since to trust them now. The way we do it in the open source community is to have lots of eyeballs looking over the code so we can verify it ourselves. So, where can I get copies of the sources for Zoom's app and server?
> 
> Also, although the CEO of Zoom has become a U.S. citizen and they are headquartered in the U.S., Zoom is essentially a Chinese-owned company. They do whatever the Chinese government tells them to do including shutting down the accounts of U.S. and Chinese human rights activists.

Yeah.... Though the `developed in China' aspect isn't necessarily a `red flag' by itself
(there are good people everywhere, and there have been some really great projects
that came out of China specifically--OpenMoko and Qi Hardware
come to mind for me--and IIRC I heard somewhere that Ubuntu/Canonical got
a lot of funding from China; and there's probably a lot of good things that I'm forgetting)...,
when taken together with the other symptoms _and_ the general patterns of `privacy tonedeafness'
and `what could they possibly hav been thinking when they decided doing that was a good idea',
it doesn't really help to shift the scales back in their favor....

> There are at least a dozen alternatives:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_telecommunication_services_and_product_brands#Browser_based_-_does_not_require_software_downloads
> 
> https://techwiser.com/open-source-zoom-alternative/

Well..., the NH State Board of Education signed a deal a couple weeks ago to provide
BigBlueButton and a bunch of other hosted open-source services to every school in the state
for grades K-12 (the NH universities had already standardized on the same things a while ago...):

	https://www.ilearnnh.org/sites/default/files/media/2020-07/doe-press-release-july-28-2020.pdf

So hopefully the schools will at least start taking up what the state is offering
instead of going it alone (even if the security- and privacy- [which I guess I have
to remind people are *not* the same thing...] arguments fall on deaf ears,
there's a pretty obvious *economic* "why are you using your funding for this instead of spending
everything you can on our kids and teachers" argument....

(and if schools are using Zoom but *not* paying for a contract to ensure [supposed] FERPA compliance...,
  ummm...)

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