[nesfa-reading-group] I signed up for a personal Zoom account.

[David G. Grubbs]

I signed up for Zoom. I thought some of you might want to know some of what
I just found out.

(Side note to those who heard me talk about the MIT Zoom license that Rick
Kovalcik and Richard Duffy have access to. It doesn't seem available to me.
I didn't really expect it, but I thought it might be possible since I have
the same legacy account as they do, and I was one of the people who
actually set up the MIT connection to what was to become "the Internet" in
the early 1980s.  I thought I might be still connected in some way.)

I paid for a personal Zoom account that will allow one host (which is
enough for a small meeting) and up to 100 participants.  I can afford it
for now and I looked carefully at a lot of details.  I can cancel at any
time, for one thing.  Another thing I looked at is the uproar over security.

Because Zoom was suddenly in the forefront of video conferencing services,
they received a lot of attention. Several "security watchdogs" dove in and
attacked the system. They found several problems, but every one of them has
been fixed (according to the watchdogs themselves -- who went on to say
that *other* conferencing systems might still have problems in the areas
they found).

Zoom has something like 75,000 large corporate clients who use Zoom all
over the world. Those companies also pushed Zoom to improve in all sorts of
areas and they responded to make their platform, in my opinion, unlikely to
be any worse than anything else. All other choices would be at the same
level of trustworthiness as Zoom, or *less*. If you are simply wary of
video-conferencing, then don't participate. Otherwise, Zoom seems to be
robust and one of the best of its kind.

They say in absolute terms that they do not sell personal information. Any
noise about that is due to leaking from (apparently fixed) bugs in the
system, not intentional plans to use personal info.

So, I'll practice a bit so I can set up small meetings if that becomes a
need. My setup *could* support a NESFA meeting, if something went wrong
with Richard's setup, but I'm not suggesting that. I was thinking more of
the Reading Group, or other things I do for NESFA such as the NESFA Press
group, or the web-committee, or board meetings (if Richard is
pre-occupied), or . . .
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