🍴 The Web: Zoom Caught Red Handed

Amazon Starts Investing Heavily In India

India is the second largest internet market in the world… and Amazon wants to stay ahead.

Amazon is investing $2.8 billion in Teleganda, India to set up their new AWS Cloud Region, called the Asia Region, in the southern state of India. They are planning to launch by mid-2022.

What is an AWS Cloud Region? This is a geological boundary where Amazon hosts multiple isolated and physically-separate data centers. Each data center within the region is interconnected with a high-bandwidth, low-latency, redundant system. This allows Amazon the ability to continue to serve its users in the case that one or more data centers go down.

Amazon announced that the new AWS Region will enable more developers, startups, and enterprises to run their applications and serve users from data centers located in India. In the last couple of years, Amazon has gained business of some of the large corporations that run in India — including Tata Sky, Ashok Leyland, Axis Bank, and Freshworks.

The behemoth e-commerce company has invested close to $6.5 billion into India thus far, as it’s the world’s second largest internet market. These investments aim to keep Amazon and AWS at the top as there is still fierce competition with other cloud services, including Microsoft and Google. To date, Microsoft has 3 data center regions in India, while Google has 2.

Zoom Not That Secure After All…

*Zoom call gets “zoom-bombed”*
Zoom: Uhh, trust us, we’re safe…

After accusing Zoom with engaging in “deceptive and unfair practices that undermine the security of its users,” the FTC has announced a settlement.

Zoom “zoomed” to new heights as COVID-19 hit the world, forcing millions of workers to stay home and do work remotely. The user base skyrocketed from 10 million users in December 2019 to 300 million users in April 2020 during the pandemic.

While in the midst of the pandemic, Zoom claimed that their video calls were encrypted “end-to-end,” making it nearly impossible for anybody to listen in.

Well…. you see, Zoom ended up lying.

Zoom wasn’t end-to-end encrypted, and instead was only encrypted one way. Zoom maintained the cryptographic keys that could hypothetically allow Zoom to listen in on meetings. Even worse, Zoom even stored some meeting records unencrypted on its servers for up to two months.

After Zoom knew they were in the wrong, they froze feature development to fix these changes. The video conferencing company eventually rolled out end-to-end encryption in late October, for paying customers only.

What was Zoom’s consequences? You can go here to see the entire settlement, but basically they got off easy.

The FTC has prohibited Zoom from misrepresenting its security and privacy policies going forward, and agreed to start a vulnerability management program to implement stronger security across the platform.

Quick “Bytes” — Digestible News for You

• WhatsApp Gets Ephemeral. Facebook’s WhatsApp will be introducing disappearing messaging, to rival Snapchat. They will allow people to choose or keep their messages after seven days.
• Microsoft’s .NET 5 Launches..NET 5 was built to get a larger group of developers to migrate to the .NET Framework. This new platform allows developers to build software on a single platform for all things related to .NET — no more .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Mono anymore.
• Uber Rolls Out New Feature. Uber is allowing people book trips in advance with a new feature called Uber Reserve. The premise is to allow those to manage their schedules, and will show the fare upfront.
• Apple Launches New Macs Before Christmas. During Apple’s “One More Thing” event, they announced three new Macs (MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini). All will be using the new Apple M1 chip.

R.I.P. Alex Trebek

To one of the most recognizable TV hosts in America, thank you for hosting Jeopardy! for 36 years. May you rest in peace.

Fun Fact About The Web — Veterans Day Edition

War isn’t something to glee over, but the technology on the war front has helped create some of the greatest technological achievements to date. The World Wide Web that we know and love originally started life back in 1977 in the form of its forefather the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). This network technology, along with TCP/IP became the technical foundation of the Internet as we know it today.

Jeopardy! Answer

“Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!
Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!
Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!”

And no, that wasn’t a real question on Jeopardy! If you don’t get the joke, let me refer you to this video — and please, immerse yourself more with the dank meme culture ❤️