On February 15, Chicago PUG welcomed Robert Haas with his talk titled Improving pg_basebackup In Version 15 and Beyond. As far as I can tell, it was the first event of that kind: the community members had an opportunity to learn first-hand what was in the works for the next PostgreSQL version.
Unfortunately, this exciting event was disturbed by a Zoom-bomber, who started to interfere with the presenter using the annotation feature. And unfortunately, it took us a while to regain control. We reported the incident (we could provide screenshots since the meeting was recorded). The Chicago PUG leadership team discussed the incident and the measures that we will put in place to prevent future incidents from happening.
A part of our challenge is the “personnel shortage” – putting some of the measures in place requires more people monitoring the situation, and we are planning to work on that.
However, there is one thing I wanted to bring to everybody’s attention. For all of our previous meetups, we always used a secure virtual events setup provided by meetup.com – links to the events were never published in the open access and were only available when somebody registered for this meetup.
The February meetup was an exception. I wanted to use this unique opportunity to help other user groups, possibly less active than the Chicago PUG, resume their activities in the post-pandemic era. That was why I sent a zoom link directly to several people to use it for their meetups. In some cases, the link was resent further.
Now, it’s extremely unlikely that somebody would intercept random emails. This makes me think that the link was posted somewhere on a publically accessible website. The meeting was password-protected; thereby, it could not be a random web-wonderer.
In conclusion, I just wanted to say:
- Please be careful with zoom links!
- Thank you for your support of the Chicago PUG!
- Special thanks to Robert Haas for his presentation!
- Please join us virtually on March 16 – the event will be announced shortly
- Please help us to keep our meetings safe!!!!
The World of Data 