[simonh]

"Think of the Children" is when an issue that is only tangentially or tenuously anything to do with children, and may not even be a legitimate concern anyway, uses a notional impact on children as emotional leverage to gain undeserved attention.

This case is literally and specifically about the protection of specific children from a proven risk.

[arcticbull]

Is the proven risk that China is snooping on American children? If so, I'm sure I'd have read it everywhere. If not, it's sensationalism. The case is literally and specifically about Zoom having the ability to snoop. Children are ancillary.

[simonh]

I'll reluctantly repeat the below from another post of mine on this thread:

There are two vulnerabilities in particular that can grant access to videos to anyone. One is that Zoom video chat IDs are short enough and low enough entropy to be guessable so it's possible to crash meetings. Also saved videos have a standard naming scheme that makes their file names guessable and therefore accessible publicly, as anyone who knows the file name can access any saved video.

Both of these are deliberate choices. They made meeting IDs short and memorable, which makes them guessable. They also wanted saved videos to have meaningful names derived from meeting and user metadata, but again that means they are guessable, and easy to access without annoying security controls.

[valuearb]

What "proven risk" is that?

[simonh]

I already answered that to a sibling post to yours 2 hours before your post.

[valuearb]

No you didn’t. Because there are no proven risks. Videos of kids discussing math should have a security concerns near zero.

[simonh]

Oh my god, you really didn’t read my post did you? To repeat myself, the concern is that if they have this software already installed and know how to use it, and in fact have to use it and it is recommended to them, that they will then also use it for private chats with their friends. Thus exposing the private video chats of teenage children on a platform with many known trivial vulnerabilities. How anyone can’t see what a bad idea this is boggles the mind.