171–180 of 353 posts
If I could pick one hardware feature that I'd love on all my i-devices and laptops, it'd be physical shut-off switches for the mic and camera(s). Or, in the camera's case, maybe a cover, since that way you're less likely to have the camera "turned on" without realizing it. [EDIT] and by "physical" I mean "actually breaks a circuit when off"
I haven't used it and have no connection to them but think they're onto something in their product design.
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…
Honestly, it feels like most people here aren't reading the article. > The researchers then decided to see if they could use data collected on mute from that app to infer the types of activities taking place in the background. Using machine learning algorithms, they trained an activity classifier using audio from YouTube videos representing six common background activities, including cooking and eating, playing music…
The way I read that is, only one of the apps actually sends audio data to the server when the mic is muted. I'm not sure why they don't say which one, and I'm not sure what is meant by "occasionally gather raw audio data" but it could be as innocuous as the mute button not updating and a half second of audio being sent before muting starts. Nobody is building a machine learning profile out of that.
The real story here should be that one app where the mute button doesn't actually work. The others are all operating normally as far as I can tell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, it feels like most people here aren't reading the article. > The researchers then decided to see if they could use data collected on mute from that app to infer the types of activities taking place in the background. Using machine learning algorithms, they trained an activity classifier using audio from YouTube videos representing six common background activities, including cooking and eating, playing music…
It is, just most people don’t care. And you can’t buy a little shutter for your laptop mic like you can for the camera.
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…
It’s something to be aware of. The first time I had ever heard of Zoom, it was long before the pandemic and it was about how Zoom was a videoconferencing app that was installing an http server (read, a security hole on the user’s computer) which remained even if you deleted the app. This was to “improve the user experience” so that it could quickly reinstall itself if you clicked one of their web widgets to start a c…
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…
The reason they do this is to give you that little warning "You're muted" when you speak while on mute (if they weren't listening to the mic, they wouldn't know that). This is such common behavior (even with the warning!) that I think a videoconferencing app without such warnings would be virtually impossible to use.
Reduced latency after unmute is probably the better explanation.
> They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular videoconferencing applications as the audio traveled from the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while the app was muted.
> They found that all of the apps they tested occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated, with one popular app gathering information and delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Audited data privacy is a core selling point of enterprise communication systems like Slack and Zoom Is Zoom audited? Zoom had been lying for about having end-to-end encryption, for example, until they were caught by the US Federal Trade Commission. Surely, something like that would have been discovered earlier in an audit, if they were audited and the audits were worth something. They were also sending data to thi…
They also kept microfone on after closing calls, and reverted after getting caught https://thinksproutinfotech.com/news/zoom-update-fixes-macos...