71–80 of 353 posts
I am generally against new government regulations, but I would most likely support a law that requires all microphone and camera elements have an LED hard-wired into the power wire/trace. If the sensor is powered, the user should be able to tell.
I suppose that perhaps there could be audible artefacts when muting/unmuting if these algorithms didn't continuously do this.
This is not an advertisement ;) I no longer actively develop this app, however, I am still a happy user ;)
My team and I built some of the world's most decentralized videoconferencing software, using WebRTC. You can try it on https://yang2020.app/meeting for example ... but it's available in all of our apps, including for teachers, etc. Since a major point of our platform (qbix.com/platform) is to avoid relying on external third parties, that meant we built a version of livestreaming that is completely peer-to-peer. Imagi…
this should 100% be opt-in. Think what kind of future is being created.
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I hate the latter, because I use a keyboard shortcut to mute/unmute the microphone on the OS-level. This works fine with Google Meet, but in Microsoft Teams I have to use the button in its UI because that pop-up gets in the way (also: Teams not working at all in Firefox, what's up with that?).
Yes, I have the exact same situation, and had to resort to uBlock Origin's element zapper because of how annoying that popup is. Of course it's an alphabet soup of minified CSS classes, so I assume it'll break the next time they update the UI.
Google Meet at least it's very obvious to tell they do this because if you talk while muted, they will show a pop-up saying that you're talking but you're muted. Whether this functionality is justification for more nefarious data usage remains to be seen.
Once I was on Teams meeting and someone exclaimed “We can see your screen, systemvoltage!”. Sure as hell, I wasn’t sharing anything. Thankfully I wasn’t browsing HN, but writing code. These things implemented somewhere in the middle of the stack seems dangerous. I much more prefer a slider switch. Preferably made from real atoms and molecules.
After sitting through over an hour, including the part I thought was essential to my team, I jumped off the call and proceeded to explain the shit show to my fellow passengers for 15m or so.
When I got to my destination and pulled out my phone I discovered _I had never hung up_ - I was on the line the whole time. I had said some things that you should never say about your employer within their earshot and expect to remain in their employ.
After some nauseating minutes I realized I had been saved by the auto-mute feature. When a call has over x participants, everyone is muted until they take their mic off of mute.
I am much more careful now about these things, bc I don't expect to get that lucky again.
I always use my browser instead of these native apps precisely so I can deny microphone permission whenever I want it muted.
Some microphones have physical switches. Turn off your internal laptop microphone and only use a mic with a switch.
I feel like they're trying to make an insidious suggestion about the usage of these. IMO, there's likely a good reason - user experience. At a hardware level, grabbing the microphone can take time. Even worse that timing is inconsistent across devices, workloads, etc. That leads to a bad experience when unmuting and needing to delay your commentary. The solution to this is to keep the microphone on, but mute at a sof…
Teams has a notice that it pops up if you're talking and on mute, and there's another for if you're not on mute but your mic is producing no signal (mic has it's own mute). I find those super helpful, personally.
I am muting because I don't want the sound in my room broadcasted... if it was silent, I wouldn't have to mute!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once I was on Teams meeting and someone exclaimed “We can see your screen, systemvoltage!”. Sure as hell, I wasn’t sharing anything. Thankfully I wasn’t browsing HN, but writing code. These things implemented somewhere in the middle of the stack seems dangerous. I much more prefer a slider switch. Preferably made from real atoms and molecules.
Not long ago I dialed into a 100+ person, 3+ hour long quarterly planning type call. It was a video call, but I had to be in the car for part of the time so I dialed in. After sitting through over an hour, including the part I thought was essential to my team, I jumped off the call and proceeded to explain the shit show to my fellow passengers for 15m or so. When I got to my destination and pulled out my phone I disc…