Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 359 posts

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#271

Post by zvr »

teo_zero wrote: post #254
nine_k wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking out a camera to make a picture is pretty noticeable in a meeting with few participants. The standard way to use a phone camera involves lifting it pretty close to your eye level. Other participants could literally shout to please stop photographing the screen. It will be also very visible who was trying to do so. Yes, somebody who's clever enough would keep the camera away from view, and maybe would try severa…

I'm not sure what scenario you're imagining, but Teams is mainly for remote meetings.

I think he meant that in a meeting of few people, all with cameras on, a participant can't simply raise his phone and take a picture.

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#272

Post by zvr »

kenjackson wrote: post #213
Aeolun wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, what they’re doing is making it harder for me to work around their (inevitably misplaced) expectations of confidentiality. This is one of those things that will be misused to hell and back so we’re better off not having the feature at all. It’s existence is a net negative to corporate employees everywhere.

The other commenter is right. Same reason I use DRM email. It’s not that I’m stopping espionage, but reminding folks that this message shouldn’t be distributed to others.

Some people also use formats like PDF or images instead of editable text or slides for exactly the same reason.

It's not that they can't be modified, but it's an indication that you're not supposed to.

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#273

Post by 7bit »

WWLink wrote: post #270
Aurornis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All these are due to laws and regulations that are there to protect the big companies and don’t take into consideration users This feature is not due to laws and regulations. The user in this case is the presenter who clicks the button to enable screenshot protection on their meeting. This is Microsoft trying to deliver a feature their users want , not laws and regulations making them do something their users don’t…

What's really going to happen is IT people will enforce this by default because good users aren't supposed to take screenshots, apparently.

I am a sysadmin and we will enable this. This is because many meetings discuss confidential or strictly confidential information that must not be leave the meeting. In-house, you would simply hand out papers that you collect before concluding the meeting. In Teams meeting it's not possible hence you block people from creating screenshots. This requirement comes from legal and compliance, and many other positions from CEO downwards.

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#274

Post by 7bit »

buyucu wrote: post #268
Aurornis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All these are due to laws and regulations that are there to protect the big companies and don’t take into consideration users This feature is not due to laws and regulations. The user in this case is the presenter who clicks the button to enable screenshot protection on their meeting. This is Microsoft trying to deliver a feature their users want , not laws and regulations making them do something their users don’t…

It's a pointless and stupid feature. It's trivial to take a picture of the screen with your phone.

It's about convenience. You would be surprised how much information is leaked simply because it was so convenient to.

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#275

Post by 7bit »

Aurornis wrote: post #55
queuebert wrote: post #22

What's to stop me embedding a pinhole camera in the lamp behind me, zooming it in on the screen, and recording every meeting? These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.

I love all the comments imagining complex technical workarounds while skipping right over the obvious workaround of using a smartphone camera to take a picture of the screen (which was mentioned near the top of the article that everyone read, of course). Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame. > These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doin…

Thank you for this. I'm honestly baffled about the quality of other hackers' comments on this topic. Many of them take the feature as a personal attack where it simply is an additional layer of protection against accidentally leaking confidential information. Then making statements that this prevents people from working, where they did not understand that taking screenshots from meetings where this is enabled is not working, but violating work guidelines. When the presenter enables this, they want people to not take screenshots.

This whole comment sections is honestly ridiculous.

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#277

Post by thih9 »

kccqzy wrote: post #109
thih9 wrote: post #99

I very often take screenshots during meetings, it’s a helpful reference point to me. I never used that to save more sensitive data than what I already have access to. Still, I assume my use case will no longer be supported. That’s unfortunate.

I do the same. But I think you can just nicely ask the presenter to share the deck.

That’s significantly more trouble though than taking a screenshot of the information that I already see no less.

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#278

Post by globular-toast »

rolph wrote: post #47
queuebert wrote: post #22

What's to stop me embedding a pinhole camera in the lamp behind me, zooming it in on the screen, and recording every meeting? These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.

the Analogue hole Will never Die

It's not technically currently dead, but running a film movie camera pointing at your laptop during a Teams call is a bit out of reach of most. Even movies costing millions of credits are not shot on analogue any more.

Can you manufacture film yourself? Know anyone who does?

It could start with quietly making the essential chemicals in film production and development "controlled". Then you might need a licence to do analogue photography. Eventually even the last few analogue photographers either die or switch to digital due to the increasing impracticality of analogue. Then the film companies stop making it, then you make it illegal for them to start making it again. You've now killed the analogue hole.

Maybe you're hoping it would be futile like the war on drugs, except there's actually demand for drugs. I can't imagine dealers suddenly stocking up on illegal film for all the people wanting to capture stuff from their Teams calls.

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#279

Post by cwillu »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #262
lolinder wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pure security theater, there are a few clear gains for those who care about such things: * Naive screencaps are much less traceable to the leaker than a naive photo is. Yes, someone can strip out EXIF data, but we've seen over and over again that they generally don't. And even without EXIF a naive framing on the photo is more likely to expose information about the location or identity of the person who took…

Good summary. It's best to think of controls like this as guardrails. They are mostly "safety" features rather than hard-core security features. They help honest people to avoid potentially dangerous mistakes.

Guardrails that break support for devices that aren't owned by the equipment manufacturer, yeah, about that…

Re: Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

#280

Post by AlgebraFox »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #214
NKosmatos wrote: post #78

LOL Another stupid feature (enforced by regulations/law/policies) that has no real world use, besides making us users angry :-( Like Google collecting all of our location history for their own usage, but not allowing us to see it via web anymore (only on mobiles), or having the android dialer not allowing us to record our own phone conversation (easily circumvented), or movie/music/game publishers not allowing us to…

I could not figure out how to record phone calls on Android! No app worked. I know it is forbidden in the EU, but I forget so many important details from calls that this would be very important.

GrapheneOS allows call recording. I believe LineageOS also allows.
Post reply on HN