Welcome! Collaboration Tools and Zoom plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Welcome!

Craig discusses collaboration tools for business and reviews Zoom and why you should not use it for business

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

---

Read More:

Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking

Twitter breach exposes one of tech's biggest threats: Its own employees

Cybercriminals Turning Bullies; Ransomware the Latest Weapon of Torture

FBI Issues Cybersecurity Warning to Air Travelers

New wave of attacks aiming to rope home routers into IoT botnets

The Streaming Wars: A Cybercriminal’s Perspective

Emotet spam trojan surges back to life after 5 months of silence

Apple's Next MacBook Could Solve the Worst Thing About Working Remotely

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] We've talked about, go to meeting Microsoft teams. We've mentioned the WebEx teams. We've mentioned Zoom. Now we're going to start delving into that even more. We're going to be talking right now about Zoom, the pros, and cons. It's probably the one you've been using.

How do I know it's probably the one you've been using because that's been the default. Zoom has a lot of advantages and some serious disadvantages as well. So we'll talk a little bit about those, but the number one problem that we've had with Zoom over, frankly, the years has been security and lies.

Did you know that Zoom has misrepresented so many times about, their ability to encrypt what they're doing, where they're routing? It is been, it's just been crazy what these guys have been up to. So it is not end-to-end encrypted. Let's just start with that, which means that anybody who is potentially in the middle.

[00:01:00] What'd you is, by the way, Zoom itself is somebody who can listen in on the conversation. Now, remember what I said about Zoom and that their developers are, many of them are at least I think it might be most of them, but they're in China. And we had a big story that I don't think we're really talked about on the radio here, but it had to do with China and zoom routing people's phone calls.

To China, which was absolutely a huge thing, then zoom had excuses for it. we have data centers all over the world. We try and run them back and forth. Oh, okay. Yeah, exactly. I absolutely get it. Yeah. But there are articles online, have a look at the intercept. For instance, they are generating their encryption keys in China for Zoom that had to absolutely credible zoom has also just in the last week or so it's been exposed.

[00:02:00] They have been. Cutting off some of the Zoom user's meetings, because China objected to China. Didn't want some of these people who were talking about China and some of the bad things China has been doing. And in reality, we haven't been talking about these anywhere near enough here in the United States.

But Zoom has capitulated to the Chinese government, the socialist over there. It's absolutely amazing. What has it been going on? And they're using some old versions of encryption that have been easily hacked. They've got the worst type of AES keys out there. Those the researchers have confirmed that they're using 128-bit keys for their communications.

[00:03:00] In other words, Even the encryption that they have, which is extremely limited, is extremely yeah. Poor. It's just amazing. Keep saying, Oh, we're fixing it or we have fixed it and they keep getting caught in what the media has been calling lies again. And again. And these encryption keys in China and routing the data through China and capitulating to what China wants him to do.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's a very big concern, These guys just have not been upfront and honest with people. it's a terrible situation. So Zoom is something I absolutely would never. Use for anything that really mattered. So if you're talking about some business process that might be confidential, if you're talking about some intellectual property things, Which is confidential business information. If you're talking about banking information, if you're talking to your accountant, if you're talking about anything that could be used by hackers or Nation-States anybody malicious. Don't use Zoom. Now I get it. I understand why people used it. I have used Zoom and I'm probably still going to continue to use Zoom for certain things.

[00:04:00] The big advantages to Zoom are. Number one it's easy to use and set up and manage. It is quite straightforward. Now. Unfortunately, unlike WebEx teams, you do have to install a client. You have to install software on your computer. Guess what? That's another area. Zoom has been caught doing some things that are very poor.

Practices from a programming standpoint and the nefarious. If you want to look at this through a slightly different lens, when it comes to Mac computers, they were installing a whole server on your computer that allowed remote access to pretty. Everything on your computer. Can you believe these guys? Okay.

[00:05:00] It's really crazy, Zoom, you don't need IT team to manage it. You don't need to have somebody like me come in and get everything set up, help explain it to you. Cause there are not very many functions in it. There are not very many features. It's not like a WebEx team room and spaces that can all be.

Tied into other devices, get set up on your mobile devices. And maybe like I have sitting right here, I have this amazing WebEx team names displayed. It's just absolutely amazing. We were using it yesterday for a meeting and it has a built-in whiteboard and I'm just drawing on the screen. It's it is really quite impressive, but.

[00:06:00] You don't need any of that with Zoom. And that's why so many people went on and used it. And frankly, they've more than doubled in size over the last six months or so. It's been huge. So you would zoom, you can get up to a hundred participants, Penn standard on your Zoomer count. You can have a quick one on one meeting, which is handy.

You have your own zoom room. In fact, the zoom rooms have been where most of the Zoom bombing has been going on, where people drop in and it takes pornography in the middle of your meeting. It's been happening for schools. It's been happening for everybody. Who's been using them by the way. If you're a school, don't use Zoom, get something good.

Get again, WebEx teams, Hey, listen, we sell it. We use it. We do that because we love it. Believe me. It's just phenomenal. You can have your meetings on Zoom phone webinars, chats on zoom, which is really handy. They have conference rooms and mobile devices.

[00:07:00] I really like conference rooms. That's what I used to run. The FBI's InfraGard webinars for a couple of years. Works pretty darn well for that sort of stuff. Zoom also has some of these one-on-one or excuse me all in one and appliances, which makes it even simpler to deploy, manage, and scale the room experience.

But again, Those all in one appliance have been found to be anything but secure. It's just crazy. These guys, they just don't get it. They either don't know anything about security or they just don't care about it. So these all in one appliance has been shown from Zoom to be very insecure.

And it's very cheap. It's inexpensive to do it. And it does have some integration with Google and Microsoft. So you can use their app marketplaces over 200 integrations with things like Slack and PayPal and many others. In fact, that's what we did with the FBI InfraGard program. We had some that were paid, some of these meetings that were paid, and that went over like a lead balloon.

[00:08:00] Let me tell you. Yeah, but, at any rate, kind of one of the final straws when I left doing that for the FBI InfraGard program, because so much of this information, I'm trying to get it outright. Why should people have to pay for some of these webinars where the presenters are, volunteers, me running the webinars for the FBI InfraGard program, our volunteers, and then they start charging people.

And then they're, they in a couple of cases, they actually paid behind the scenes, the people who are doing the presentations, but for the most part, they weren't getting paid anyway. I don't know. Maybe that's a little inside baseball. Okay. Now, why am I still going to use Zoom? In some cases, Zoom is just what everybody knows.

It's what everybody uses. It just makes life so easy. And I think probably continue to use it for some people. Some people have a hard time with anything new, but you know what, now that the majority of people know how to use zoom, because they've had to, because of working from home. With the coronavirus thing, the Zoom is going to be a platform that's going to be around for quite a while.

[00:09:00] And yeah, it's got its drawbacks as I just talked about, but the fact that it's ubiquitous, everybody knows that everybody can use it. Everybody has used it. It is not going away anytime soon. So stick around if you missed any of today's show, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com. You'll find it all there as well as on your favorite cast app and stickers because we're going to talk about my favorite collaboration system.

When we get back, I'll stick around.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553