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The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

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Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#211

Post by c22 »

rdl wrote: post #29

I care about audio so much more than video, and text/keys/etc captured from the machine even more. As long as my screen and keyboard are out of the frame of the camera, I don't really care about it getting RATed. At worst, you'll see me naked, or making angry/etc. faces at someone on irc or email. While embarrassing it would be less bad than most of what you could accomplish by stealing actual information. OTOH, carr…

I removed the mic and speaker from my phone and now make calls using a bluetooth enabled headset that is usually turned off. This "hack" took about 15 minutes and is not too inconvenient for my lifestyle.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#212

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ci5er wrote: post #206
superuser2 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With people who are intrinsically motivated to do a good job. Craftspeople take pride in their work, because doing it well feels better than doing it poorly. They'll voluntarily make their own jobs more difficult if it makes the project better, even in ways that only others skilled in their craft would notice. They'll actually fight management for more hours, more money, better tools, different processes, etc. so the…

This is a very interesting topic to me. On one hand, you want to (in my world) empower developers and let them take ownership of ... whatever. On the other hand, you want to learn, as a group how to do better. On the gripping hand, you want to be able to tell the customers (and investors) what to expect and when. It seems as if you can do the combination of #1 & #3, somehow, without tracking what you are doing and ho…

> In your world, measurement is "bad" for an individual's autonomy.

It isn't actually the measurement itself. It's when the metrics end up tied to rewards and penalties that people start to game them. [1]

What you could do is measure things and then, when unit 15 is above average and unit 9 is below average, figure out why and let everybody know what works and what doesn't.

Which also has the side benefit of improving your metrics. Because if you see that unit 15 has the best numbers and you treat this as an undifferentiated "unit 15 is better and we don't know why but let's reward them" metric, you can miss things like, unit 15's district has a higher population density and they're actually below average after you take that into account.

Investigating the sources of success and failure without assigning personal consequences to them allows people to be honest about why they succeeded or failed. And then if anybody has actually found the secret to success you can share it with everyone else.

[1] Although you do have to be careful not to make "collecting metrics" a thing that eats half of each employee's work time.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#214

Post by ci5er »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #212
ci5er wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very interesting topic to me. On one hand, you want to (in my world) empower developers and let them take ownership of ... whatever. On the other hand, you want to learn, as a group how to do better. On the gripping hand, you want to be able to tell the customers (and investors) what to expect and when. It seems as if you can do the combination of #1 & #3, somehow, without tracking what you are doing and ho…

> In your world, measurement is "bad" for an individual's autonomy. It isn't actually the measurement itself. It's when the metrics end up tied to rewards and penalties that people start to game them. [1] What you could do is measure things and then, when unit 15 is above average and unit 9 is below average, figure out why and let everybody know what works and what doesn't. Which also has the side benefit of improvin…

> Which also has the side benefit of improving your metrics.

That's key. You never get them right the first time, so improving your tracker is even more important than improving the tracked.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#215

Post by sbarre »

vinceguidry wrote: post #143
sbarre wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (anecdotally) disagree. I'd love to have a good-spec laptop that had no logos or branding on it.

It's not so much the logos or the branding, it's the build quality. I used to run Ubuntu on old ThinkPads, ditched it like an ugly girlfriend once I could afford a Macbook Pro. Old ThinkPads were a step up from commodity PC laptops, which were a step up from desktops. In a brief fit of FOSS zeal I bought a System76 Galago Pro, but the build quality was so inferior to a Macbook Pro that I relegated it to desktop duty.…

I totally agree with what you're saying here.. That's why I sand "good spec" laptop. ;-)

But yes the question is whether or not that actually exists.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#216

Post by undersuit »

krylon wrote: post #95
50CNT wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some laptops already have physical switches for wireless connectivity, couldn't you just add one of those that cuts power to the onboard microphone and camera?

At work, two of our users have Asus notebooks (I forgot the model, though) where the "On/Off"-switch for the camera just moves a piece of plastic in front of the lense. Maybe it also turns of the camera, but once the lense is covered it doesn't really matter any more. I like the idea, and since it must be rather cheap, too, I wonder why not more companies do this.

If you buy the business version of my webcam you get a plastic cover for $2 over the cost of the consumer variant. One day I might spend $15 for a cover: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I005TPS

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#217

Post by vinceguidry »

sbarre wrote: post #215
vinceguidry wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much the logos or the branding, it's the build quality. I used to run Ubuntu on old ThinkPads, ditched it like an ugly girlfriend once I could afford a Macbook Pro. Old ThinkPads were a step up from commodity PC laptops, which were a step up from desktops. In a brief fit of FOSS zeal I bought a System76 Galago Pro, but the build quality was so inferior to a Macbook Pro that I relegated it to desktop duty.…

I totally agree with what you're saying here.. That's why I sand "good spec" laptop. ;-) But yes the question is whether or not that actually exists.

If there was then System76 would be using that provider. Actually, if there was, then everybody else's laptops wouldn't be so horrible, either.

Re: The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

#218

Post by krylon »

undersuit wrote: post #216
krylon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, two of our users have Asus notebooks (I forgot the model, though) where the "On/Off"-switch for the camera just moves a piece of plastic in front of the lense. Maybe it also turns of the camera, but once the lense is covered it doesn't really matter any more. I like the idea, and since it must be rather cheap, too, I wonder why not more companies do this.

If you buy the business version of my webcam you get a plastic cover for $2 over the cost of the consumer variant. One day I might spend $15 for a cover: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I005TPS

On the one hand, for a price difference of $2, I would go for the version with the plastic cover.

On the other hand, with an external webcam, I can simply disconnect it. If you have a laptop built into a laptop that is not so easy to do. At least, you have to trust the laptop's manufacturer to do that, while a builtin plastic cover is so simple one does need to "trust" it; at the same time, you can't retrofit it on a laptop... :(

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