Covid-19: Full refund if you booked air tickets from March 25 to April 14

Many have been complaining on social media as airlines have decided not to give refunds in cash for cancelled flights and are instead issuing credit for future travel.

The Civil Aviation Ministry on Thursday said the passengers who had booked flight tickets during the first phase of lockdown for travel up to May 3 must get a full refund from the airlines without any cancellation charges if they ask for it. Many have been complaining on social media as airlines have decided not to give refunds in cash for cancelled flights and are instead issuing credit for future travel.

Zoom not a safe platform, says MHA advisory

The Ministry of Home Affairs said in an advisory that video conferencing software Zoom is not a safe platform, and is not for use by government offices or officials. Earlier, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan had apologised for the company failing to fully implement its usual geo-fencing best practices, while assuring customers that there was no impact on Zoom for Government Cloud, a separate cloud service for government customers.

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Maha tally crosses 3K-mark, 2,073 of these in Mumbai

As many as 286 new cases of COVID-19 were detected in Maharashtra, taking the tally beyond the 3,200-mark on Thursday, while the fatality count inched towards the 200-level with seven more deaths, most of them senior citizens, said a state health official. With the detection of fresh cases in the last 24 hours, Maharashtra has so far reported 3,202 coronavirus cases, the highest for a state in the country, while the death toll is now 194, he added…Read Full Story

Zoom not a safe platform, says MHA advisory; SpaceX, Google ban use

The advisory further gives detailed instructions on the safe use of the platform including security configurations through website and app

The Ministry of Home Affairs on Thursday said in an advisory that video-conferencing software Zoom was not a safe platform, and was not for use by government offices or officials. “Zoom is a not a safe platform and advisory of Cert-In on the same dated Feb 06, 2020 and March 30, 2020, may kindly be referred,” said the advisory from the Cyber Coordination Centre under the MHA, dated April 12. The advisory further gave detailed instructions on the safe use of the platform, including security configurations through website and app.

Responding to the MHA advisory, a Zoom spokesperson said: “Zoom takes user security extremely seriously. A large number of global institutions ranging from the world’s largest financial services companies and telecommunications providers, to non-governmental organisations and government agencies, have done exhaustive security reviews of our user, network and datacenter layers and continue to use Zoom for most or all of their unified communications needs.”

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) put out an advisory on March 30 about “Secure usage of Zoom video conferencing application,” detailing the steps users should take to ensure their data remains protected.Salman Waris, managing partner at New Delhi-based specialist technology law firm TechLegis Advocates & Solicitors, said the issue is the Government both at the Centre and individual state level working remotely and using Zoom to conduct official meetings and discuss the emergency response. This includes planning a critical official strategy to Covid-19 having to operate outside the secured workplace and managing machine sprawl— when the numbers of virtual machines on a network increase, securing hundreds of thousands of endpoints becomes a much bigger challenge…Read More