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WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

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Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#261

Post by marcosdumay »

notbeuller wrote: post #109

During covid when WFH, I received a legitimate looking SMS message with a link, so rather than clicking it, I curl --verbose'd it (and one subsequent redirect) before seeing it was an obvious phishing / troll. The next day, my VPN & SSO was disabled with instructions to contact corporate security. My use of curl had been detected and while they didn't accuse me of anything, they claimed that they wanted to make sure…

At the beginning of the covid it became popular to hire some companies that send those links, and then report back who opened them to you, so you could train the people.

You may have been caught in one of those exercises.

But anyway, always assume your workplace's VPN logs every access. The obvious retention period vary from one place to another, but the logs seem to always exist.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#262

Post by godelski »

II2II wrote: post #184
2devnull wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people, like easy wealth does to the newly rich. A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.

I used to be employed in a community where the vast majority of people collected welfare and did not work. Except that most of the people who did not work actually did work. They would hunt for food, chop fire wood, haul their garbage to the dump, cook their own food, raise their own children, and do the many other things that are necessary to live. I'm not saying that they type of person you describe does not exist.…

This is a very important part of the equation and I think many miss. "Work" is not well defined. I often ask what people would do if money wasn't an issue and they didn't have to have a job[0]. Most people end up answering that they'd pursue passions like art, volunteering, doing research, or other things that many call "work" but might not pay (after they say they'd travel and do other things like that, of course (follow-up is always required)). A lot of work is not quantified by traditional economic transactions (i.e. pay for work). People don't want to sit around and do nothing their entire lives. The other thing is people also seem to forget that this is exactly the situation those from generational wealth are in, and that the vast majority of them do some form of work. Yes, there are those that don't (especially while younger) but the majority do.

I have a very hard time buying the narrative that were people to not work to make a living that they'd be a net drain on society. I see little evidence. I also see this as claiming that a post-scarce society is impossible. This is also critical as we live in a time where the potential for a post-scarce world exists (robotic workers liberate humanity from labor). It is even critical if we live in a semi or limited post scarce world, which is the transitional period to a post scarcity society (we're possibly in this).

[0] I say I'd like to read math books, research, and publish openly. Not far from what I do now (academia). People counter me saying that that's work.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#263

Post by godelski »

tomcam wrote: post #173
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "basic" in basic income isn't there for decoration: just taking UBI and not working would probably be about as comfortable as living on something like Universal Credit in the UK, minus the adversarial means-testing, which is to say, "not very". Certainly I wouldn't characterise it as "easy wealth", more like "easy bare minimum so you don't have to worry about starvation". Besides, if it was that much gloriously e…

How is means testing adversarial?

Because Goodhart's Law complicates things.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#265

Post by judge2020 »

ano-ther wrote: post #212

This is why I got really worried when MS somehow combined my private O365 with that of my employer. Likely happened because I had both accounts on the same iPhone. Suddenly, my work computer offered to open a word doc from my private OneDrive. Microsoft is very intransparent here. They didn’t ask me, I couldn’t find out if that means my employer has access to my private data, and it kept coming back even after I foun…

The link is because Microsoft's account system is such an old beast that a proper account switcher, like the one Google has, is completely out of the question. Instead, it seems the product team for M365 / Office.com created this high-level account linking process to make it at least palpable to the majority of users that only have one enterprise-based account and one personal account. If you happen to have more than 1 account, the account switchers on anything other than office web apps is going to break.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#266

Post by judge2020 »

userbinator wrote: post #55
threatofrain wrote: post #2

Always request a separate laptop and phone for work, and always create a separate set of accounts.

Why does it even need to be "request"? Are they that cheap these days that they won't pay unless asked (begged)? If the company needs you to use a computer, it needs to provide you one. I am sure not letting my personal and work machines mix, both for this and IP reasons, and on the other side, if I was in control of such things, using personal machines would be an exception.

Good employers already give you your own laptop and might offer to give you a phone. But good employers are few and far between, especially in recession-esque periods where everyone that doesn't have an extremely resilient IT staff (or isn't a public company) will have bean counters cutting costs in many areas, either downsizing new laptop purchases (making doing work harder) or cutting them all-together.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#267

Post by EatingWithForks »

tomcam wrote: post #173
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "basic" in basic income isn't there for decoration: just taking UBI and not working would probably be about as comfortable as living on something like Universal Credit in the UK, minus the adversarial means-testing, which is to say, "not very". Certainly I wouldn't characterise it as "easy wealth", more like "easy bare minimum so you don't have to worry about starvation". Besides, if it was that much gloriously e…

How is means testing adversarial?

If it's helpful, there are cases in which means testing was introduced in the UK Disability benefits. Once disabled people are determined to be able to work, there were more than one case where the disabled person starved in their home because they could no longer afford food. [i.e. they starved before they had time to even worry about rent...]

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#268

Post by EatingWithForks »

Shaanie wrote: post #228
guy98238710 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, UBI has its own moral panic. Never thought I would see that, but it seems obvious in retrospect. Both capitalism and communism worship work like some insane religion. If you work, you are a good person. If you don't, you are scum.

People who don't work are usually economic parasites for those who do, so it makes sense to encourage working regardless of which economic system is used.

Wow, I never thought to consider my mother an economic parasite.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#269

Post by lumost »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #198
joezydeco wrote: post #6

Now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, I wouldn't trust them one bit to keep your activity there away from your employer. It would be really easy to correlate your sentiment analysis on Teams/email against your LI messaging traffic.

Now that there's a tick box in Outlook to tie your surveilled corporate account to your real-life personal account on LinkedIn -- combined with the fact that we know that Microsoft aggregates our "productivity" data to allow companies to compare their scores -- do people really think that Microsoft ISN'T selling a person's "productivity" scores from their previous and current employers to potential recruiters?

Is this going to turn into a game where the individual who uses Microsoft products the most is considered the most productive? These scores do have some meaning, after all, there are folks who are giving the job their all and folks who are phoning it in. These people aren't guaranteed to be the same in 6 months. The hard worker may burnout, and the person taking it easy might have life circumstances change. The person working hard may be so successful they leave anyway.

We generally dislike paying people more than a 2x difference within the same bracket which means once you hit the top of the terminal level, there is limited incentive to work hard. Folks are either working for the next gig, or they are learning to extract more life satisfaction from their employers.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#270

Post by ElFitz »

mantas wrote: post #67
oneplane wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What leads you to believe that people who do not want to work are desirable to have in the workplace? UBI also doesn't give you wealth, it gives you basics, and overal that's much cheaper than dragging down an entire team or department. At the same time, we currently have plenty of people who do not want to work and do indeed not work, that will not change regardless of what you implement. I also think that happy and…

They ain't desirable. But who wants to pay them do nothing? Many people ain't happy to cover existing welfare. Increase welfare and even more people would feel it's unfair.

Do they prefer covering for shareholder value? Who wants to pay people simply for having, or being able to borrow, the money to buy shares? Or put money in a VC fund?

Do they perhaps prefer covering for execs bonuses?

It’s really weird how many people will wail and rage against welfare for both their peers and poorer people, but have no issue whatsoever making a someone else richer.

Just to be clear, I personally have no issue with either, as long as it feels reasonable.

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