With the big escalation in Zoom use due to the coronavirus, a lot of people are having fun playing pranks on public Zoom conferences, playing entertaining videos, shouting epithets, that sort of harmless fun.
In case anyone is doing that, you probably shouldn't. The FBI is threatening to investigate and prosecute people who play these fun pranks, even if they don't even do anything beyond connecting to a call where they aren't recognized. I suspect people having fun on high school or college conference calls are going to be especially targeted, as opposed to someone say playing Meatspin as their video feed on a mass online poetry reading, so definitely avoid that.
Zoom has had serious security flaws in the past and they lie about having end-to-end encryption. I assume they collect many forms of identifying information from your computer beyond the IP that you use to connect- serial numbers, hostnames (which often contain service tag information), MAC addresses for network adapters, login usernames- and they doubtless will happily turn this over to anyone prosecuting people who play funny pranks on their service. It might be a little safer if you used a VM running on a host OS that's connected to a safe VPN, but even then it's entirely possible that they snoop on stuff that can be used to identify you. So, better not to take the risk.
In case anyone is doing that, you probably shouldn't. The FBI is threatening to investigate and prosecute people who play these fun pranks, even if they don't even do anything beyond connecting to a call where they aren't recognized. I suspect people having fun on high school or college conference calls are going to be especially targeted, as opposed to someone say playing Meatspin as their video feed on a mass online poetry reading, so definitely avoid that.
Obviously don't do anything illegal, but even if you are having fun legally, you should remember that you might be targeted by the FBI and similar Stasi organizations in your own country if you live outside the US even if you never did anything wrong.
Zoom has had serious security flaws in the past and they lie about having end-to-end encryption. I assume they collect many forms of identifying information from your computer beyond the IP that you use to connect- serial numbers, hostnames (which often contain service tag information), MAC addresses for network adapters, login usernames- and they doubtless will happily turn this over to anyone prosecuting people who play funny pranks on their service. It might be a little safer if you used a VM running on a host OS that's connected to a safe VPN, but even then it's entirely possible that they snoop on stuff that can be used to identify you. So, better not to take the risk.
