Hacker News Reader

Comment by system16 | Hacker News Reader

Early in the pandemic, I was in a Zoom company meeting where the host (one of the stakeholders) was going through their deck of requirements. Most people on the call had their video off but audio on.

Somebody on the call would breathe heavily and grunt periodically, and it would cause the host to pause his presentation for a second until it stopped. After a few interruptions, the host finally said "Sorry folks, I'm getting some background noise, so I'm going to go ahead and mute everyone." and that was that.

To this day I still have no idea who it was making the noise or what they were doing. I am still amazed at how he handled that with a straight face as I was out of my chair laughing my ass off.

View on HN

I was on a 9am zoom call with 25 people.

Some guy on a different team fell asleep and started to snore loudly. A check of the participants showed one unmuted mic, so I DMed his boss, the host, and said “heads up: it’s Peter”.

Unfortunately, the presenter was sharing screen and hadn’t turned off notifications, so the whole room saw a pop up from me ratting out the guy.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ever since a co-worker was caught out messaging a snarky remark to his boss (who happened to be sharing his whole screen at the time, thus broadcasting the snark to the whole call), I've been absolutely paranoid about never messaging the presenter. The idea of having that happen is really terrifying, which helps keep me polite. :)

Oh, I keep messaging the presenter things like "so what did the doctor say about your genital rash?" to mess with them.

Back in the before-times when we had all-hands meetings, my boss had a running game where he would randomly call the cell-phones of people who were presenting or who were sitting in the audience, to see who'd forgotten to leave their phone on vibrate. Some people have very interesting ring-tones...

Sexual harassment lawsuit coming in 5.. 4.. 3... Just kidding, I hope you only mess with male presenters.

Wouldn't discriminating who I mess with based on gender be sexist?

You’ll have to send the same message to your female coworkers in the name of fairness.

You could claim you meant to send it to someone else. It might lead them to doable those notifications.

We have an informal game of trying to get fellow participants to crack a smile via slack.

Extra points if they break to the point they have to turn off their video.

> the presenter. The idea of having that happen is really terrifying, which helps keep me polite.

This is actually a very good and general principle of behaviour: "act as if anything you say to anybody is overheard by everybody else in the world". Maybe you won't ever become a sneaky manager if you follow this principle, but you will certainly sleep well at night.

That sounds like an extremely boring way to live

Maybe for you, but I live by that principle and I'm having a lot of fun!

Why would it be boring or even extremely boring?

Not a message, but a related story that has caused me to be paranoid about possible sources of embarrassment during presentations (turning off all notifications, closing all chat apps, email, closing all browser windows, etc.)...

I was on a cybersecurity team. We were all guys and much younger at the time, so perhaps not the most mature. We also were pretty decent at what we did, so our egos were...let's go with our egos weren't in check. As a result we had a running competition of who was the best at defending their laptop from getting hacked by one of the others, and who was the best at hacking them. Notice of success was delivered by setting the desktop background and/or screensaver to one of the Absolut ad images with Fabio style men dressed in skimpy clothing. Have I covered the not very mature at the time? This also was around 2002, so social awareness of just how bad this behavior was, and how toxic it could have been if female colleagues saw it, was not on our radar at the time.

Anyways, this all came to a halt one day. The team lead had been hacked a couple days before, and the person doing it went a little overboard and put the image [1] on the screensaver, the main desktop, and the external monitor desktop. The lead deleted the image from the screensaver and the main desktop, but didn't expect it on the external monitor desktop and didn't check.

He discovered it when he connected his external monitor port to the big screen just before a presentation to a small room full of 2-stars and SESs, who were shocked at what they saw on the big screen. Our team got an earful (rightly so), and we were probably lucky we didn't get fired. That was the last of that competition, and he was getting razzed about it a little four years later when I left the company for greener pastures.

[1] The image. Warning, it is a graphic male image. https://www.advertisingarchives.co.uk/detail/32171/1/Billboa...

Heh. In my relative youth, I was pranking a fellow co-op student on our work term fairly regularly. One of my faves was that he was on an HP Unix workstation in the shared computer room, and the X display defaulted to allowing all connections from other hosts.

I'd set my DISPLAY environment variable to his desktop, then use xv to open whatever gross / unflattering / whatever pictures I'd found on the net that day.

I once texted a presenter who was explaining something for the 12th time to a slow coworker, “I’m sorry you have to do this.”

Thankfully it only showed my phone number and not my name, and it was ambiguous enough not to be totally obvious. But still....

I honestly don't know how I avoided doing this during my years of employment thus far.

Well that isn't cool, Patrick. We need to discuss this over some Huey Lewis and talk about your stats.

I only say this because I used to be that "teacher's pet" guy.

But my career has had much more upward trajectory, and I have had more fun by being actively sympathetic to my colleges mistakes and trying to "cover" for people instead of telling on them.

Of course I'd never cover for someone doing something illegal, but I stopped looking at work as a contest where I wanted to look the best, and decided to help everyone put their best presentation forward.

The weirdest thing is after I began to get a reputation for this, I am in a WAY better position to get someone fired if I really need to.

I have a similar story but the opposite end of things. I was listening in to a large meeting (>200 people) and the presenter decided to UN-mute everybody's microphones. I still can't believe I didn't hear any explicit or unprofessional things that day. That really was a dangerous move.

Christ, what software lets you do that?

It can be annoying that Teams lets you mute but not unmute people, but thank god it doesn't.

Webex lets you configure meeting options to allow the host to unmute anyone.

I’ve never tried it myself as the mere concept of doing so is a huge invasion of privacy, but after learning that any meeting could have this option enabled, I no longer assume that my muted mic will stay that way.

I suspect it was implemented so the presenter could help help less technically ept people.

Get a mic with a physical button or switch to mute.

Or use Qubes OS.

Zoom also allows the camera forced to on when joining. A colleague once dialed in from her bed.. Fair enough to her it was 9pm in India.

For this reason I always keep my laptop Mike volume to 0, and use the mute button on my headset which is not computer controlled. And an external webcam which I can plug in when I want to.

>Zoom also allows the camera forced to on when joining.

In Zoom on Windows I go to Settings > Video > check Turn off video when joining meeting

I'm pretty sure that will stop anyone from forcing my camera on. But I think that setting defaults to unchecked, meaning by default Zoom automatically shows your video.

For extra protection:

Settings > Audio > uncheck Automatically join audio by computer when joining a meeting

Settings > Audio > check Mute my microphone when joining a meeting

Settings > Audio > uncheck Press and hold SPACE key to temporarily unmute yourself.

I also generally join a bogus empty meeting before any real meeting to preview and ensure my microphone, webcam, virtual background, filters, and studio effects are all the way I want them and not something silly from some playful meeting yesterday.

For extra protection cover your webcam :) That should work.

It was Zoom. Apparently once you allow a host to unmute you remotely, they are able to do so until you revoke the permission. I don't remember allowing that, although its possible I did and forgot about it.

From my experience, if you are unmuted, and the host mutes you, they can unmute you again. If you mute yourself, the host is unable to unmute you.

Huh. Can you take over a host’s mute for a personal mute? Ie. Host mutes me. Some time goes by and I decide to watch YouTube. How do I take a personal mute so that i can’t be unmuted?

Quickly unmute, then mute again.

Huh, once I believe someone muted me then tried to unmute me and I got a popup saying the host wants me to unmute. I'm pretty sure I didn't mute myself; I was in the middle of talking, and my hands weren't even on my mouse or keyboard. There was someone else making background noise, so I believe the host tried to mute that person, accidentally muted me, then tried to unmute me causing me to get the popup.

If you have muted yourself, the host has a button that says "ask to unmute".

This is why you use a microphone with a physical mute button.

Wow. It never occurred to me that such a thing was even possible. Glad I dial in with my phone and use it's mute instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com