I spy with my little eye, but Zoom can’t!

I like to meet face to face, but Zoom to Zoom works as well. Or atleast, until Dr. Fauci casts a vaccine spell onto all of us so that I can smell grandma’s cookies and not just look at them through a computer screen. Either way, some suspicious Americans, which is all of them, have been speculating. “What if I am in a Bingo meeting and then a Zoom employee joins my call and shouts ‘Bingo!’” Not only would that ruin the game, that would also break the law. However, it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Zoom employee to ruin your Zoom gladiator fighting meeting or whatever it may be. Here is why.

ENCRYPTION:NOITPYRCNE

If you fell asleep in English class, then I hope you were woken up when your teacher was talking about Latin roots. Latin plants have Latin roots, but that is not what I am talking about. So the word “crypt” means hidden. To encrypt means to put something into a hidden form. To decrypt means to take something out of that hidden form. I can encrypt “My dog is fat” into Morse code so that no one has to know. Anyone could understand it in English, but not many people would understand “My dog is fat” in a series of beeps and boops in Morse code. But how would you take that Morse code and put it back into English? Google translate? No. You’d need a key. Something that shows what the beeps and boops translate into. It’s the same shabang with computers. Anyone, even my technology illiterate mother, could go onto the WiFi and intercept whatever weird Zoom meeting I am in and watch the video. But what if I encrypted it and made sure that only me and whoever was on the receiving end had the key. That means that my computer can decrypt the video, my friend’s computer can decrypt the video, but to whoever is illegally intercepting it, it is complete and udder jargon. That is encryption.

Evil or clueless?

So could Mark Zuckerberg intercept my Zoom meeting and put it on Facebook… or even worse, TikTok? No, he does not have the key to decrypt the video. But what if I worked at Zoom and wanted to intercept and decrypt a Zoom meeting? Afterall, all the video gets sent to Zoom servers and then rerouted to the other members in the meeting. Well, the host’s computer makes the key and only shares it with the other people in the meeting. No one else has it, not even Zoom! The encrypted video is sent to Zoom servers, but Zoom doesn’t have the key so all they’d see is “j3jkfgwe6573wuetd76wc7eg” instead of my mother showing cooking tricks to her friends.

How to hack into Zoom meetings

Let’s get sneaky. Shall we? You need someone on the inside, someone with the code for the meeting. A decryption key takes many lifetimes for a computer to figure out, and by then your meeting would already be over. (unless its book club) But if you have the meeting code, you circumvent all of that. So, even with the millions of dollars spent on encryption and servers, all you need is a good friend. SUCH A MORAL MESSAGE.