Friday, April 3, 2020

Who's Zooming Whom?

Catastrophes bring out both the best and worst in people. For every story of noble medical personnel and doughty grocery employees, there are stories of hoarders and grifters and just plain shitty people. Now, with a lot of business being conducted over teleconferencing platforms, the trolls are out in force. In particular, the anime Nazi crowd is waging coordinated campaigns to bombard Jewish schools with antisemitic threats. Flooding conferences with violent porn and racist content is seen by the 3edG5U crowd as a prank, never mind the trauma it can cause the victims, including children at 'learn from home' sessions and individuals in recovery.

I go in to work every day, I receive my briefing in person from the gentleman working the shift before me, and I end my shift by disinfecting the company cell phone and placing it on the desk for the hand-off. I haven't used this teleconferencing software at all. Hell, I don't even Skype or FaceTime, preferring audio phone calls so my attention isn't divided. The poor security protocols for these teleconferencing apps makes me disinclined to start using them. There are a lot of disaffected people out there with poor socialization, and they are bored... that's not a recipe for good outcomes.

2 comments:

mikey said...

This problem is super easy to solve. The real problem is millions of people who have never used Zoom (or gotomeeting or hangouts) and don't know the software well enough.

If you just do a few things: 1.) NEVER publish the meeting link 2.) ALWAYS require a password 3.) Only give the host the ability to share the screen and 4.) Lock the meeting once everyone is there you will be fine as frog's hair.

Software always has features that you have to become familiar with. Until you do, you haven't done your job...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Yeah, I'm familiarizing myself with several platforms these days.