 So, I actually recorded a video on this topic the other day and I didn't like how it went, so I just deleted the video and I decided not to talk about it because a lot of people are talking about Zoom. But now I really feel like I need to talk about this issue, this security issue. For those of you who don't know, Zoom is just one of many video chat classroom applications out there and it is not a very good one. It's not free, it's not open source, you're having to use their servers, there's lots of reasons we shouldn't be using it. You can set up your own servers for other things, very easy and there's a lot of services out there that allow a lot more security, but that's not even the issue, the privacy on that path. A whole other topic has come up, so my kids, my kids have had to take their weekly class through Zoom. Luckily we can do it with a web browser, it's somewhat contained, it's not horrible but it's not great either, but we get a message the other day from the coordinator of our group basically saying another group, and this I guess has been going on with a lot of Zoom meetings, had someone hack into their meetings, someone got into their meetings, someone and started while all these kids are watching this class saying and doing inappropriate things, which is bad. So why did this happen? How did this happen? How can we prevent it? Well, message we got said, so from now on we're going to have a password on our meeting, here's the link to the meeting, here's the password. Putting those two things together is number one, don't do that. Why would you say, it's like saying here, we're going to secure this site, here's the link and here's the password together, anyone who sees that can now have access to that. And my first thought was, well whoever hacked into this other class probably had access to someone's email because most video conversation software, when they create a meeting, they generate a random string that is so long and complex that you can't guess it. Well, that was not when, I don't know, I've never set up a Zoom meeting, I've logged in other ones people created and I'm assuming that these are ones that were randomly generated by Zoom. So I go back to the email that was sent to me and my wife and I look at it and here's your meeting ID and it is a 10 digit number. That is it. It is, is 10 digits. So zero through nine, that's nine digits and it's 10 characters long, which means there's a possible of 10 billion combinations, which might sound like a lot, but when it comes to computers is not. Click on the link, it says, you know, enter your username to enter this meeting. So I click on that, I change the user ID by one, I add one to it. Sorry, this meeting ID does not exist. I add one to that and it asks me to enter username to log into a meeting. So you see using sequential numbers like that is just a horrible idea. Now I'm assuming that Zoom randomly issued someone that meeting ID, which is a horrible way of doing it. It should have letters and characters, letters, numbers and maybe even other special characters, but just adding, forget about special characters like question marks and underscores. Just an alphanumeric, so, you know, A through Z and zero through nine. And when we say A through Z, it's going to be case sensitive. So it's 26 letters in the alphabet. So first off, the 10 billion is because like I said, 10 to the power of 10 is 10 billion, if I did my math right. If you have 26 letters in the alphabet, but you double that because they're case sensitive. So that's now 52 characters, add zero through nine. You're now at 62 characters. And if you have a set string of 10 of those characters, that is eight with 17 zeros trailing it. Yes, remember 10 billion is one with 10 zeros trailing it. This is eight with, I'm rounding here, eight with 17 zeros trailing it. That is a lot harder to guess. And plus, since it's not just numeric, you can't just add one and try to guess the next one. The possibility of guessing a random character, that string that's that long with that many characters is just unlikely that you're going to hit a meeting. So again, I don't know exactly how Zoom issues out these meeting IDs, but apparently it looks like they're just issuing numbers sequentially. So putting a password on that is definitely a good thing. So it's obviously a flaw if that is how Zoom is generating these numbers and it appears to be that way. But adding a password again, never put the password in with the link. Don't email people say, this is the link and this is the password. You have to send that separately. Email them and text them. Email them and call them. Let them know ahead of time what the password's going to be. But putting the two next together is part of the problem. But hopefully I'm wrong about Zoom always issuing meeting IDs like this. And if they are doing that, hopefully they change in the future. But again, using services like that are troublesome to begin with. You're making yourself dependent on someone else's server and it may sound complex, but you can spin up your own server in a matter of minutes and do a secure chat. And controlling the server and controlling the client software, meaning open source software on both ends is the only way to really be sure that you're having secure communications because most of these services they are watching, they are recording. It's not like being paranoid. They tell you they do in their user agreements. They know what you're doing. They're recording it. They're logging it. And they will possibly or probably be using the stuff in the future. That's what they do. They datamine. You may say you don't care about that, but you should. It's like saying I want to give our leader, our president, whoever. I trust him. So we're going to pass laws saying the president can do whatever he wants. So that's great. Maybe the president we have right now, maybe, theoretically. An imaginary president is the perfect president. Everybody in the country loves him. Never going to happen. We trust him completely or her. Never going to happen. But let's say we do it when we pass laws and say they can do whatever they want because we trust them. It doesn't mean we're going to trust the next guy or 10 guys or girls down the line the same way. Don't go oh I don't care. I trust them now. Don't trust them now because you may not trust them tomorrow and there's really no reason to trust them now. Anyway, don't use Zoom. If you're being forced to use Zoom, complain about it. And that's it. Have a great day.