Daily Archives: February 8, 2021

With the global Covid-19 pandemic forcing many people to stay home and participate in endless Zoom meetings, one farm in the UK is hiring out goats to stand in for you.

Unfortunately, the animals dont know how to unmute themselves nor how to switch on the camera.

Cronkshaw Fold farm in Lancashire made headlines this week when its Goats on Zoom programmewent viral.

In a description on their website, the farm said it can help ascertain whether your colleagues, friends and family are paying attention during the call.

There are several goats to choose from, each with its own personality- so they can fit right in - and cost around 5 (about R102) for five minutes.

The goats are savvy in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Blue Jeans, Skype, Google Hangouts, Jitsi, Go To Meeting and Ring Central. Want to use a different platform? Message us, the website advertised.

From Zoom-bombing to live kidnappings during calls, bored participants have been doing the most during the pandemic.

At least with a goat, you know the boss wont catch you working in a towel.

Read more:
Want a goat to stand in for you on Zoom? Itll cost you around R102 for 5 minutes - SowetanLIVE

Figures available worldwide are painting a gloomy picture of peoples mental health and wellbeing during the current Coronavirus epidemic. Apart from worry and grief over the loss of, or potential loss of loved ones, the main effects are the feelings of loneliness and isolation that lockdown brings.

As businesses and organizations begin to act proactively to counteract their employees failing mental (and physical) health, at Tech Wire Asia, we are looking at different ways that technology can help support remote workers.

The poorly-fitting appsMany pages of the technology press Tech Wire Asia included have been dedicated in recent months to examining the ways that collaboration and communication software is helping the remote worker and the businesses employing them. But in most cases, the applications that we all now use daily were conceived and written for only occasional use. Just a few short months ago, we called remote workers road warriors, individuals who worked from airport lounges, hotel rooms, and in the corridors outside conference halls.

Solutions like Webex, Zoom, Jitsi, and Teams were designed to connect working groups: a few remote workers, a body of specialists in one office with a meeting room full of others in another.

With a workforce thats been forced to go remote, these tools simply arent making up the differences between working together in person, and working together remotely.

All the comms solutions lack the human touch: even video conferencing software tends to flatten out features and compress information so that facial micro-gestures are lost. Typically, too, much of a persons body language is also missed out because of the position of the average webcam on a laptop or monitor.

The specialist applications

Both the Apple App Store and Google Play are full of apps that help users meditate, become more mindful, calm down, and concentrate. These activities are highly beneficial, but like collaborative and comms apps, they are not explicitly focused on helping people during their working day.

Embedding this type of positive, habitual reinforcement of awareness, stillness, and mindfulness into work-focused applications is not anything that we at Tech Wire Asia have seen previously (until now see below).

Therefore as part of a new series on mental health in the APAC region during these times of COVID, we focus on ways that employees can boost their overall wellbeing while working from home.

LIFEWORKSThe first app we are considering is LifeWorks, a platform that delivers a broad range of employee-focused wellbeing-focused training, activities, and media.

The levels of support and different content types are as varied or directed as required. That ranges from standard EAP (Employee Assistance Program) fare such as work-focused training and gamification of work success, right through to offering 24/7 access to counseling and support services, either live or as snackable clips.

Mindfulness and meditation guidance sits alongside physical wellbeing programs on the latter score, the app integrates with employees Fitbits or smartwatches to track exercise and daily activity, if desired.

The appeal of LifeWorks is that all resources are available for the employee in complete confidence: as the employer, you receive no personalized information about who is accessing what. Employers do get analysis and figures regarding uptake and engagement, allowing leaders to build their teams better. Whats trending and proving popular will help decision-makers push their employees health and wellbeing successfully, with positive outcomes for all parties in the long-term.

LifeWorks can be used as an adjunct to existing HR solutions or as a standalone, wellness, and health-oriented app. It is uniquely positioned, we feel, between traditional HR technology and personal development apps.

You can read a deeper dive into the LifeWorks offering right here on this site.

SMILING MINDThe second app we are considering is Smiling Mind, created by a non-profit organization and entirely free. (Many mindfulness apps need users to either pay upfront or subscribe somehow.)

Smiling Mind focuses on the different areas in which people can gain significantly: in their sleep, developing mindful practices, in their relationships, and especially relevant here in the workplace. The latter area of focus has around 40 dedicated sessions, designed specifically to reduce stress and conflicts.

Most of the sessions range in length from just a few minutes (perfect for coffee breaks) to nearly an hour.

And for those of us whose attention might wander during Zoom meetings, there are dedicated sessions on tap where users are taught tactics to re-steer their minds back onto other peoples speech. In fact, the focus of mediation can actually be other people talking: perfect for those long sessions where its easy to let attention wander from critical information.

As a bonus, the app also has specialized programs designed for educators, children and teenagers, so those juggling homeschooling kids and working at home can help promote positivity for themselves and their charges.

Finally, as well as iOS and Android versions, Smiling Mind is also available on the web, so those stuck to their laptops for hours each day can intersperse spreadsheet sessions with a few minutes in which to develop a smiling mind of their own!

See more here:
Keeping mindfulness and employee health at the forefront: app reviews - Tech Wire Asia

OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images

Last year wasnt exactly short of threats facing humanity, but Zoombombing was an especially 2020 kind of disruption, one that sought to hijack one of the most prominent means of communication by which people stayed in touch with everyone from co-workers to friends and family during lockdown.

Zoombombing, for those unfamiliar with it, works like this: An unwanted participant or participants access a Zoom call without being invited, against the wishes of the participants, and cause problems. One Massachusetts-based high schools Zoom session was hijacked by an individual who screamed profanities and then shouted the teachers home address. On social media, some users reported that their Zoom session had been taken over and used to show pornographic content.

Zoom, whose usage exploded during the pandemic, was suddenly at the center of what appeared to be a glaring vulnerability problem: It was as if the leading manufacturer of front door locks revealed a high failure rate during a home invasion epidemic.

But researchers from Binghamton University in New York say theres more to this story than meets the eye. According to a worlds-first study they have carried out, the majority of Zoombombing incidents are actually inside jobs. To draw an analogy with creepy campfire stories about terrified babysitters: The calls are coming from inside the house. Well, kind of.

There were a lot of people that thought that maybe this was some kind of clever hacking, or else [the result of attackers] finding people that would accidentally post Zoom links on social media or sending out email blasts, Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University, told Digital Trends. [People figured it was] these outsiders who were randomly showing up, somehow finding a link to a meeting. It was an act of attack that the Zoombombers were perpetuating, just by themselves.

Blackburns major research interest, his university website profile notes, involves understanding jerks on the internet, from toxic behavior and hate speech to fringe and extremist web communities. He was intrigued by the rise of Zoombombing as a phenomenon, but also not entirely convinced by the theories.

How were they getting in? They could be brute-forcing the call IDs, but given the size of the search space, it seemed unlikely that they would be able to consistently find active calls to target. And while human error was certainly possible, in terms of people leaving Zoom links lying around, this also seemed improbable.

To quote Sherlock Holmes popular aphorism: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, must be the truth. Or, in this case, if people arent breaking into Zoom calls on their own, someone on the call must be willfully letting them in.

As it turns out, what we found is that Zoombombings were perpetuated by people that were legitimately in the call, Blackburn said. What would happen is that [a member of the call] would go ahead and share the meeting link on some fringe websites and say, Hey guys, show up and, you know, say the N-word or whatever in the call. Pretty much every time, it was a student asking people to come [and] Zoombomb lectures. They would also do things like say, Hey, use this name when you connect, because thats the name of somebody else in the class.'

To reach this conclusion, the researchers scoured tens of millions of social media posts, uncovering more than 200 calls for Zoombombing between Twitter and 4chan during the first seven months of 2020 alone. Between January and July that year, they identified 12,000 tweets and 434 4chan threads that discussed online meeting rooms, then used thematic qualitative analysis to identify the posts calling for Zoombombing. As Blackburn noted, the majority of the calls for Zoombombing in their dataset targeted online lectures, with evidence of both universities and high schools being the most heavily targeted groups.

In addition to Zoom, they also found evidence of similar bombing attacks on other popular communication platforms including Hangouts, Google Meet, Skype, Jitsi, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, BlueJeans, and StarLeaf.

[For a company like Zoom], unless they perform the type of investigation we did, on their end it seems really difficult to detect this type of thing, Blackburn said. Because its not really a technical vulnerability. Its kind of a sociotechnical vulnerability If they were just looking at traffic [or whatever other] metrics they have, Im not sure it would be possible to purely detect this. You would need a study like ours that goes out and specifically tries to understand how this sociotechnical problem is unfolding.

(Digital Trends reached out to Zoom for comment, and we will update this story when we hear back.)

The results pose a challenge for communication platforms like Zoom. Their ease of use makes them appealing. Just click a link and youre suddenly talking to your friends or joining the morning huddle at work. But this also necessitates lowering security measures that could eradicate this behavior.

Anything involving security is always kind of a trade-off between ease of use and the robustness of the security, Blackburn said. I dont think people [would want to] go through a whole process of registering individual users and creating one-time links [in a more time-intensive manner]. Its much easier, and much more straightforward for non-tech-savvy people, to just have a link, click it, and it opens the program. That is certainly a big reason that Zoom gained the type of adoption it did. If it would have had a much more complicated, but secure, registration system, I would imagine something else would have [become] the dominant application.

Zoom does offer passwords as a login option. However, given the complicity of users, they would seem unlikely have to blocked Zoombombers with the right advanced knowledge. The same is true for waiting rooms, in which the host must manually approve people for entrance. While this would seem to be a more secure option, they are insufficient if the Zoombombers name themselves after people in a class in order to confuse the teacher or lecturer. (Thanks to a recent update, hosts can, however, pause their meetings to manually remove troublesome participants.)

Blackburn describes Zoombombing behavior as raiding, and says that it has always been a part of online life. Now, its using Zoom, but if you go back even to the IRC days (read: Internet Relay Chat, an early text-based chat protocol created in 1988), there were [online] wars where people would try and take over different channels, he said. Any time you have computer-mediated communication on the web [thats] instant and semi-anonymous, youre going to have people that get into conflict and attempt to disrupt things. In that sense, its not new, its the same basic sociotechnical problem with the internet. If theres an available mechanism to cause trouble, somebodys going to cause trouble.

In addition to Blackburn, other researchers on the project include Chen Ling, Utkucan Balc, and Gianluca Stringhini. A paper describing the work, titled A First Look at Zoombombing, is available to read online.

Link:
Inside job: Why Zoombombing isnt as random as you might think - Digital Trends