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

[Wesley Brodsky]

Dave;



I think the version of Zoom you have costs $15/month. I had suggested that regulars in the reading group all contribute $5/month to reimburse whoever pays for Zoom.

 

-Wes


On April 12, 2020 at 11:08 AM, "David G. Grubbs" <dggrubbs at gmail.com> wrote:


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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