SpaceX bans use of Zoom by employees
For security reasons, SpaceX has banned its employees from using Zoom for video conferencing or communications.
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has banned its employees from using video conferencing app Zoom, citing “significant privacy and security concerns,” according to a memo seen by Reuters, days after U.S. law enforcement warned users about the security of the popular app.
…The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Boston office on Monday issued a warning about Zoom, telling users not to make meetings on the site public or share links widely after it received two reports of unidentified individuals invading school sessions, a phenomenon known as “zoombombing.”
Investigative news site The Intercept on Tuesday reported that Zoom video is not end-to-end encrypted between meeting participants, and that the company could view sessions.
It appears that Musk’s concern is that someone might use Zoom’s security weaknesses to do some industrial spying. Based on what I have read about Zoom, it seems to me that Musk’s concern is valid.
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For security reasons, SpaceX has banned its employees from using Zoom for video conferencing or communications.
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has banned its employees from using video conferencing app Zoom, citing “significant privacy and security concerns,” according to a memo seen by Reuters, days after U.S. law enforcement warned users about the security of the popular app.
…The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Boston office on Monday issued a warning about Zoom, telling users not to make meetings on the site public or share links widely after it received two reports of unidentified individuals invading school sessions, a phenomenon known as “zoombombing.”
Investigative news site The Intercept on Tuesday reported that Zoom video is not end-to-end encrypted between meeting participants, and that the company could view sessions.
It appears that Musk’s concern is that someone might use Zoom’s security weaknesses to do some industrial spying. Based on what I have read about Zoom, it seems to me that Musk’s concern is valid.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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it means that people used the static “Personal Meeting ID” when they scheduled meetings, so that each meeting from them had the same “address”. While this can be handy in certain situations, it DOES mean that people can join meetings to which they were not invited. Zoom even tried to mitigate this risk several months back when they made all admins decide if they wanted to require per-meeting passwords to join, in addition to the randomly generated meeting IDs we already use. At the time I decided it wasn’t worth the support headache, but I think if I had 1000+ untrained users instead of 200+ trained ones, I might have made a different decision.
As someone who uses and admins Zoom use, this looks a WHOLE lot more like what happens when you have a sudden 600%+ increase in use of Zoom without any training.