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

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351–360 of 367 posts

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

#351
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it fair? You do give the same amount to everyone, but you do not take the same from everyone - you have to take more from those who chose to work. Hence the unfair part.

It's fair to the extent that anyone can drop out and have the remaining workers pay for their livelihood. As more people do this, the more rational it becomes, and the closer to economic collapse we get.

If there were evidence that a substantial percentage of people would simply opt out of contributing to society at all but it still required considerable levels of human labour to support the standard of living a UBI is expected to provide then I would absolutely be against it. I don't believe the former is true though, and the latter will continue to become decreasingly so, to the point automation etc. will generate more than enough goods and services than we need for everyone to enjoy decent lifestyles.

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can accuse UBI of many things but unfair it is clearly not, hence the "universal". Everyone gets the same amount - but the assumption is most will then choose to work and earn extra income on top of that.

> You can accuse UBI of many things but unfair it is clearly not, hence the "universal". Everyone gets the same amount - I pointed out upthread that the so-called "universal" aspect of UBI is a dealbreaker. Special groups will complain, and have mass support for their complaints, if ever UBI is rolled out. In your world, it's "fair" if 20yo gamers get the same monthly stipend as a 40yo cripple. In reality you'd have…

Yes, it's fair because I wouldn't expect that stipend to be required to pay for whatever extra medical costs said cripple had. Further a "fair" system is never going to abolish all unfairness inherent in human existence - at a minimum it just needs to provide sufficient support that those who are struck with particularly bad luck don't suffer unnecessarily for it.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the url, i'm sure it had a get parameter to identify him.

Sure. Companies run phishing trials all the time; it is a favorite pastime of security consultants. They want to see how many of their employees will click on suspicious links. It's extra-difficult to deal with SMS when it comes in from the airwaves, and not a company-controlled system that can be firewalled and IPS'd. It seems misplaced to blame the company for surveillance when they're trying to keep everyone safe,…

Trying to keep everybody safe using misguided strategies that do not work, instead of doing something that works (like using 1 internal domain and nothing else, for example).

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

#354
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a human right to be fed & sheltered by others? Without giving anything in return? What about human rights of those at the other side of a stick? Is it a human right to demand something from another human being? Is it a human right to have to provide to someone?

Yes. Articles 22 and 25 in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... Either you are trolling, trying to pass as a ultra-tough meritocrate or you just don't care about other people. Maybe all of the above. Edit: All edge and no point sums up your comment, and the GP, pretty well, I guess.

UN can go fuck themselves. Corrupted fuckers, sometimes literally (e.g. blue helmets). Silly forum, run mostly by dictators nowadays.

Once somebody's „human rights“ has to be provided by someone else and is someone else's work... It's no longer a „human right“. It's forced labour from the providing side. This modern version of so-called „human rights“ is a disgrace to once great idea.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your objection. I also run a business. I also pay people to do things for that business. The amount of money that eventually reaches my personal bank account does depend on the performance of the business and that in turn does depend on how much we pay people and how good a job they do for us. So I care very much about whether they get those jobs done well. But I couldn't care less how much time th…

Hey good on you if you’re signing over paychecks to employees that leave work to go shopping or take extended lunch breaks. Apparently I just don’t have that kind of cash to spend on non-productivity. I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping.

I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping.

I guess this is where our perspectives differ. I want the time when people are working to be productive. People have other things going on in their lives - sometimes very important things - and someone who is sitting in the chair with their mind on something else probably isn't going to be very productive.

Of course they are there to do a job and it's important that the job gets done properly and the rest of the team shouldn't have to pick up the slack if someone is abusing the relationship. But the most reliable way to keep the work on track IME is to make sure there's a decent work-life balance and build the mutual respect that any good relationship needs. Sometimes that means trusting people to get things done without imposing too many rules on when or how they do it.

I find the recent trend for experimenting with shorter working hours fascinating because so often the outcomes are counterintuitive - at least if you expected that shortening the hours would lead to a proportionate loss of productivity. One of the most interesting results I remember - I wish I'd thought to bookmark the paper but unfortunately I didn't - was working 9-3 every day with a half-hour allowed for lunch or something like that. It turned out that the company's performance actually went up during the period of the experiment. Participants reported that because everyone knew they had only that much time in the day to get things done the level of focus improved and there were fewer distractions and more awareness of not interrupting colleagues who were trying to concentrate. They managed to sustain that for something like 3 or 6 months and it's hard to argue it was just a novelty effect after so long.

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

#356

Creeps can't stop themselves from creeping. How about this: Step 0 - define the ungameable behaviours that you know will result in an improved business outcome. Step 1 - tell everyone about these behaviours so that don't have to guess about what should be done to make the business great. Step 2 - track all of behaviours to ensure that everyone is doing them. It isn't necessary to be a creep about it because the behav…

what is NPV?

Net present value.

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if I agree. Govmnt has to deal with much more than mere function of their programs. It must have approval, integrate with other social databases, be somewhat resilient against fraud. Not to mention this assumes everybody can be reached by electronic deposits which isn't a given.

This is pretty much a reasonably solved problem. You issue a bank card to anyone who doesn't have a bank and deposit the funds and resolve issues of identity by physically showing up an an office. Post offices are pervasively available and usually very close to where most people live. For fraud issue you have the bank or banks running the program handle fraud per normal procedures and the government steps in to prose…

Identity fraud is a solved problem (in most developed countries anyway) a bigger issue is false claims and general inefficiency of government welfare programs.

You can just give everyone an equal amount of cash instead but then disabled and other people who are unable to work would starve to death unless there is massive increase in taxes/redistribution.

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

#358

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…

Ah yes the famous phishing tests. They bypass every spam filter, and if your company is like mine, that uses a new external website every week for something, it's completely impossible to tell apart phishing from actual email.

I've successfully navigated dozens. Git gud?

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

#359

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…

That seems pretty reasonable. Out of nowhere a user started running commands targeting malicious links. Could be control signals for an attack.

Yeah. Like... monitoring network activity on the VPN for security is one of the areas I would be surprised if the employer IT wasn't doing. I don't know why that would surprise anybody.

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

#360
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health related information may absolutely not be shared, and doesn't need to be.

Honestly I wasn't sure how much that point applied. However with people that suffer chronic illnesses or disabilities that require special consideration I would be surprised if it was always possible to adequately communicate those needs without also mentioning information that the employee might not want to share publicly.

You can communicate special needs (e.g. "do not put this person in a loud room"), but not health information (e.g. "this person has epilepsy"). I struggle to think a special consideration a person could need that you could not just articulate instead of whatever medical issue they have (at least it has never come up for me).
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