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You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

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121–130 of 353 posts

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In like 25% of my meetings, somebody is accidentally muted while they are trying to speak. The popup speeds up the process of them unmuting.

I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Having used Discord for so many years, this has never been a problem aside from a select few people who had very clear reason to mute themselves. Meanwhile in professional settings, people seem to be falling for this over and over while lacking the common curtesy of not letting random environmental noise bleed through (read: their mics are barely ever tur…

>I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake.

Because

1) most group calls that need people to be on mute most of the time are useless, boring, snooze fests, most attendees don't care about, so those 'professionals', who are caffeinated zombies half asleep, will space out and forget the status of their mic within 10 seconds of toggling it

and

2) most chat apps suck at drawing attention to the status of the mic and, if you have multiple monitors, you can be staring at one monitor (Jira, reddit, Redmine, HN, VS Code, etc.) while the chat app and the status of the mic is being displayed on another monitor where you're not looking

It's a mistake super easy to make. Still, better be safe and make the mistake of being muted all the time, than forgetting to mute yourself and have participants hear something you didn't want them to hear.

Ideally I'd want a feature that gives the image on all my monitors a nuclear red vignette, or something like that, whenever my mic is hot, so I don't have to keep paranoidly glancing at the mute toggle every couple of minutes, to make sure my mic is still muted, so they can't hear me mumbling on how incompetent management is and on how useless this meeting is.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#122
I use this[0] on Mac OS and it works extremely well. It turns the mic off at the system level. Holding down a key acts as push to talk and triple-pressing the key locks it on.

[0] https://github.com/yulrizka/osx-push-to-talk

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#123
It's always been risky to trust the mute button, even before zoom etc. The rules have been the same for at least 30 years. Never send an email or other type of text message you don't want the whole world to see. Never say anything on a conference call, even when muted, you wouldn't say when not muted.

Ethically any audio chat software shouldn't transmit any audio it receives when muted. The "hey, you are muted" notifications can all be done client side and don't need any server side support. But ethics is not a factor in the design of any enterprise office software.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#124
post #74
post #17

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…

> Sometimes, it's very valuable from a business standpoint to grab the incoming video, and do eye recognition and face tracking ... this should 100% be opt-in. Think what kind of future is being created.

it's a core feature of the app, in this case it's opt-in by the TEACHER, the student can simply choose not to participate in the course

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#125

As a Deaf person, the notification annoyed the heck out of me and there are not even an option to disable the notification. I muted my mic because I am Deaf and I don't use my voice to communicate with my fellow Deaf friends over Zoom/Teams. And there is no option to disable Zoom joining-room audio (the one that when you join the room, Zoom present the option to ask which microphone you want to enable). Why would I n…

Then why mute yourself? Even more interesting: Why do you prefer to sign over video instead of typing? Are there forms of expression that are more natural that way?

> Then why mute yourself?

Why not? The only sound they will find is my dogs barking, doors slamming (I lives in apartment), my partner talking in his phone, all of that background noise. Why participants should be subjected to those noise and why Zoom need to know the noises?

> Why do you prefer to sign over video instead of typing? Are there forms of expression that are more natural that way?

We signs because Signed Languages is our modality and the only form of expression in Deaf communities. There are no written sign language or spoken sign language. Using sign language is natural for us to use. We avoid using typing because it is not a true representation of the community, we don't have same proficiency of written/spoken languages as you and others. So to them, it looks like we are from a call center in India with broken English.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#126

As a Deaf person, the notification annoyed the heck out of me and there are not even an option to disable the notification. I muted my mic because I am Deaf and I don't use my voice to communicate with my fellow Deaf friends over Zoom/Teams. And there is no option to disable Zoom joining-room audio (the one that when you join the room, Zoom present the option to ask which microphone you want to enable). Why would I n…

Then why mute yourself? Even more interesting: Why do you prefer to sign over video instead of typing? Are there forms of expression that are more natural that way?

Is it a serious question? Why do you prefer to speak over video instead of typing?

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End-to-End encryption for group video and audio is now supported. I'm not sure it works or who is supporting besides Signal, but it is apparently not not required that the conference provider decrypt the streams to mix them. https://mashable.com/article/signal-end-to-end-encrypted-gro...

Element/Matrix also support e2ee. Jitsi has supposed e2ee videoconferencing (on Chrome - they used some chrome-specific API for processing) for (I believe) at least a year or two.

The API is called Insertable Streams. It's not actually supposed to be Chrome-specific, others are just lagging in implementing it.

Element has native E2EE for 1-to-1 calls, but uses Jitsi for group calls. Native E2EE group calls actually also exist, called Element Call (https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-...) but they're yet to be integrated into Element and specced into Matrix, I believe.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#129
post #13

Isn't it common knowledge by now that cameras and microphones are still "on" even if you disable it at the software level? Zuckerburg has been taping webcam/microphones/etc for a while now. Though being the CEO of a major corporation requires you take privacy more seriously. https://www.macworld.com/article/228326/mic-drop-how-to-keep...

Zuckerberg is an attractive enough target that someone would go to the trouble of trying to compromise his MBP's iSight firmware (and such compromises have been proven to be possible, and pretty easy in pre-T2 macs.)

The tape, however, is probably about really making completely sure he doesn't accidentally show video on a call or videoconference when he didn't mean to.

Video could easily reveal even his approximate location (via shadows and such), and that could potentially lead to deriving, say, that he's working on an acquisition or talks with another company, leading to stock manipulation/speculation and so on.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#130

As a Deaf person, the notification annoyed the heck out of me and there are not even an option to disable the notification. I muted my mic because I am Deaf and I don't use my voice to communicate with my fellow Deaf friends over Zoom/Teams. And there is no option to disable Zoom joining-room audio (the one that when you join the room, Zoom present the option to ask which microphone you want to enable). Why would I n…

Then why mute yourself? Even more interesting: Why do you prefer to sign over video instead of typing? Are there forms of expression that are more natural that way?

Signing has tons of advantages over typing, since you can convey emotion/tone with your hands and facial expressions. I'd also imagine it has a higher WPM, although WPM might be a bad measure since some small words like "a" can get skipped when signing.
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