Zoombombing countermeasures are ineffective within the overwhelming majority of circumstances

An upset young woman closes her eyes rather than look at her laptop screen.

Enlarge

Because the COVID-19 pandemic compelled colleges, faculties, and companies to restrict in-person conferences, the world rapidly adopted video conferencing from companies comparable to Zoom and Google Meet. That, in flip, gave approach to “zoombombing,” the time period for when Web trolls be a part of on-line conferences with the objective of disrupting them and harassing their members. Assembly companies have adopted a wide range of countermeasures, however a brand new analysis paper finds that almost all of them are ineffective.

Essentially the most generally used countermeasures embrace password-protecting conferences, utilizing ready rooms in order that convention organizers can vet folks earlier than permitting them to take part, and counseling members to not submit assembly hyperlinks in public boards.

The issue with these approaches is that they assume the fallacious menace mannequin. One frequent assumption, as an example, is that the harassment is organized by outsiders who weren’t aware about assembly particulars. Researchers at Boston College and the State College of New York at Binghamton studied zoombombing calls posted on social media for the primary seven months of final yr and located that wasn’t the case in most cases.

Learn 12 remaining paragraphs | Feedback

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *