Peter wrote:
Nearly all of that list is irrelevant to any user with enough braincells to not use their online banking password for talking about planes.
That is fine Peter. I just wanted you to know. Use whatever you like.
When I read that stuff it reminds me of so many “bad security” articles. Some time ago I was setting up some VPNs. If you google on PPTP VPNs you find reams of stuff about the “poor security”. But if you dig deeper you just find that everybody is lifting stuff from every other website, so it all goes around in circles, and the vulnerabilities are not exploitable by anyone below the level of NSA, GCHQ, KGB, MI5, MI6, or some other State agency. For sure Zoom advertised some false claims about their security which later bit them on the arse, and it is vulnerable to spam and gatecrashing etc, but this doesn’t matter for any casual usage. For secure conferencing you need a totally trusted physically secure server and you aren’t going to find that on a free product, and even then you still have to trust the admin of that server. See my comment about Linkedin (and many others got the same). You actually cannot trust any “retail grade” product. Sysadmins screw up regularly, yet you would have expected top-drawer outfits like Linkedin and Yahoo to have really good people.
Otherwise, there is a video meetup product for every pilot in GA 
There are certainly areas where good security is needed (the EuroGA server would be trashed by certain parties instantly, if they could, so there is pretty good security around that) but this is not one of them.
@buckerfan – PM sent, but I suggest you join the telegram group because that is where times and dates etc will be discussed.
Other info:
I would vote for Webex. It is a commercial-quality product from Cisco. Given its use by companies worldwide and Cisco’s reputation, it couldn’t afford to have the issues of ZOOM, a new product for the masses with the data security and privacy issues of Whatsapp, Facebook, etc.
I don’t buy in to all Peter’s comments. There is a wide variation in quality of “retail-grade” and “retail-grade” isn’t the same as “corporate-grade”…. and sometimes one cannot judge the quality of the product by the price. Telegram and Autorouter are two prime examples.
I agree with Peter that the bad press Zoom has is mostly history by now. I don’t know if Zoom is a “new product for the masses”. In any case Swedish universities all use Zoom for distance education and meetings — which amounts to a lot of traffic these days. Of course there is a difference from the free product as the Nordic universities have a dedicated server pool located in Sweden (I believe, or at least in one of the Nordic countries).
AFAIK there was never a practical way to make use of the widely publicised vulnerability of that Mac executable, because practically everybody is either behind NAT (the by far most common retail user scenario) or is running behind a suitably configured corporate firewall.
Sadly Cisco is no guarantee of quality and has not been for years, once you are below their top end enterprise-level hardware. Look up the infamous RV320 which has more bugs than functionality It is, like most Cisco stuff nowadays, made by some outfit which Cisco bought in. As for webex security, it takes only seconds to find stories – example.
My experience with WebEx is that it often suffers of low quality of voice/video comparing practically to any other solution. I’m pretty sure that it’s not solution for a large group video conferencing.
We use Webex at work. Obviously it is a premium enterprise-level solution that my employer (a large company) pays a fair amount of money for.
I expect it is pretty secure. It is slow and juddery at the moment, but that is an issue with our corporate VPN because we presently have 99% of the company working from home as opposed to the usual ~50%.
FWIW, I believe Zoom will be much quicker in addressing any actual (and some imagined as well) issues than Cisco in their WebEx. But for EuroGA purposes both work, and for me it’d be 6 one way, half a dozen the other. For EuroGA needs Skype or whatever else would probably work just as well, if it didn’t require registering an account.
But JasonC does have a good point that the world doesn’t end with Zoom. I believe Dimme mentioned some tool as well.
Emir, with all due respect, I’ve been in WebEx sessions with literally hundreds of participants, obviously most of them passive, so the scaleability argument I don’t buy. I could accept the resilience for low quality connections and the overall quality of codecs used, but see my opening point about Zoom being more “agile” (shudder) than Cisco.
Not sure about Zoom, but WebEx is an absolute resource hog on Linux.
Heh, Slack vs. Jabber comes to mind ;-) And IRC during the Gulf War…
Let’s try this link tonight at 19:00Z (Peter is onboard):
Password is the first four digits of standard air pressure in hPa.
Great, will try to be there.
