By Benny Morales, Staff Reporter
With many schools being forced to switch online, many difficulties that are occurring with everyone include system crashes, hackers, teachers/instructors who are uneducated on using the software, and many confused students.
For the past month or so now, students, teachers, friends, and workers have been forced to work online and communicate through an online website called Zoom.
Zoom.com is a video chatting call that allows multiple people to be in a virtual meeting. Zoom helps classrooms, as well as working environments, maintain social distancing while still being connected at the same time.
As days go by, more and more people are becoming dependent on Zoom, leaving more individuals vulnerable to hackers. Usually, Hackers on Zoom are men although I am sure that some women have been doing the same.
I have experienced Zoom hackers about three times since we first started meeting online, and let me tell you, it is by far the most awkward situation one can ever be in.
In my acting for non-majors’ class, we were presenting live monologues when all of a sudden a young male barged into our meeting vigorously shouting cuss words.
Since this meeting was only our second meeting of the online part of the semester, our teacher was having difficulties keeping the intruders out. Continuously, the boy kept joining back and disrupting the class. It was not long until my teacher finally ended the class and apologized for something she had no control over.
When seeing these types of actions, at first one may think it is kind of funny although after the situation prolongs it becomes annoying and a total waste for you and everyone else in the meeting. Inappropriately screaming “F*ck my *ss and Eat my d*ck” during someone’s presentation can be extremely uncomfortable, totally disruptive, and even offensive.
As if we thought “Zoombombing” could not get any worse, other flaws have turned up in Zoom’s software that could let hackers spy through a computer’s webcam or microphone. Zoom says it released fixes for these issues on Wednesday Apr.1st.
Zoom is also facing multiple lawsuits with some classes. The lawsuits are mainly about how the website is sharing personal data with Facebook, even data on people who are not Facebook users.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in a blog post on Wednesday, Apr. 1st, that the company is freezing work on new features to focus on fixing its privacy and security problems.
“We recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s – and our own – privacy and security expectations,” Yuan wrote. “For that, I am deeply sorry, and I want to share what we are doing about it.”
According to a post on justice.gov, Federal prosecutors are now warning pranksters and hackers of the potential legal consequences of “Zoombombing.” Where if someone successfully invades a public or private meeting over the videoconferencing platform to show inappropriate videos, pornography, or other disruptive content they could receive a fine and imprisonment. According to justice.gov.
Although Zoombombing may not seem like a huge crime, it is being treated as one. So unless you want to have the police knocking on your door, I would suggest for everyone to never attempt to interrupt online meetings.
