I don’t disagree, but corps are going to push the settings in their software and products that makes them the most money. It sucks but should be expected.

It’d be better if there were competitve open source options with the same ease of use, of implementation at scale, and ease of management at scale, but unless you’re willing to do custom forking and dev work, most of the time it’s easier to go with whatever is the overwhelming standard is and work around the rough spots, as at least then you’ll almost never be in completely uncharted waters.

I spent a few years building a custom solution for integrating a semi-popular but still relatively new HRIS system with a hybrid AD/Entra environment with a somewhat unique hybrid Exchange (email) setup. Doing it live, no real documentation to speak of because the few other places that had done it turn out to be consulting groups that sell their solutions for ridiculous amounts of money. My workplace has now hired an entire team and spent at least half a mil on a new software suite that will replace my solution eventually, after more dev work by this new team.

That was after I burned a year trying to figure out how in the hell I could programatically try to clean up a horribly misconfigured and mismanaged old SolarWinds Orion setup that had accumlated tech debt for years, only to be stymied because they don’t allow public discussion of their fucking database structure, and what I found out myself was batshit. Don’t trust software that use their own custom bastardization of SQL.

After those experiences I’m pretty damn content to stay in the land of “well documented and popular” and just work around the rough edges. Keeping up with patch and update news and delaying updates a little usually gives plenty of time to effectively opt-out by changing the settings before it hits our environment at large.

Fuck Microsoft’s bullshit, but at some point it’s the enemy you know, especially in a corporate environment. I’m no stranger to masochism through tech work, but I’ve gotten used to MS’s brand of fuckery, as a lot of us have.

No… then they don’t do what I’m talking about. I’m sorry you deal with the suck, but your IT team still gets hammers.

My workplace backs up to OneDrive itself. No requirement of work VPN, just sign in on a work machine with internet connection and confirm the MFA prompt.

Technically OneDrive is some unholy patchwork on top of Sharepoint Online, as evidenced by a ton of back end settings going through the SharePoint admin UI, but that’s not relevant to the discussion.

I didn’t even know it was possible to hijack Onedrive to point to SharePoint Server. For that matter who in the absolute fuck is still using Sharepoint Server? It went out of support two years ago, and extended support (at significantly extra cost) ends July 14th.

There is technically another On-Prem version past 2019, but it’s obvious bare minimum life support.

Plus, Microsoft locks so many of their security and other features baked into Azure behind Office 365 E5 licenses that most places are just using those for Office etc, and those come with a shit ton of storage per-user in OneDrive and SharePoint online.

We also don’t have auto-deletion turned on (yet). I’ve already done what I can to talk my boss out of it, but we will have options to prevent it on specific files and folders, as we already do with email (auto delete past certain age, unless it’s in the archove folder. you can set up auto archive rules if you need, but there’s rules on max space).

TL;DR- Your workplace does not in fact do “essentially what I described”, which is a large contributor to the issues you’ve seen. Go get hammers and beat your IT staff with them.

Especially the Sharepoint Server shit. That’s horrifying. No one should have to even think about touching that. Ewwww.

Depends entirely on the implementation. If it’s wired right into the power line for the camera/mic, then it comes on when power goes to that hardware, but without extra engineering you could just pull off the LED and solder over the gap in the trace/wire.

And I have to apologize, I had forgotten that there are already third party companies advertising services to bypass/disable it on the meta glasses. Have to edit my last comment.

I’m sorry, that sucks. It really only takes about ten minutes to search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings, but I’m sure that at a huge org that would end up stuck in absurd change review hell that IT folk seem to try and avoid.

The meta glasses supposedly are designed with a bright led on the front that comes on when the camera or microphone is recording.

Edit: I had forgotten when I wrote this that there are companies already offering services where you can send in your meta glasses and they claim they will somehow disable/bypass the LED indicator.

I wasn’t. Now I’m hungry.

Go beat your IT department with hammers. I have roughly a decade in IT with primarily Windows in our environment. There’s no reason for it to suck so bad in a corporate environment. They can disable it entirely very easily, or make it work amazingly well with some effort.

My workplace:

• We redirect/sync My Documents and My Pictures to OneDrive seamlessly. If it’s saved in either of those, autosave is on and it’s the same file locally and on onedrive. Files saved follow to any machine. Viewable in explorer always, actually downloaded locally on the fly as needed. Obvious overlaid icon on every file to indicate if it’s synced, syncing, or not available locally (when you’re offline and can’t connect to one drive). You can right click files and folders to easily adjust if they’re always downloaded up to date locally or just on demand.

• If there are any conflicts it can’t auto-merge (usually only non-office docs) it saves them with the source computer name appended to the end of the file name so you have each version available, and it pops up a notification that stays until it is manually dismissed, so you know it happened.

• If for some reason you’re working on a document outside of the synced folders, office programs do not default to saving in one drive, they default to where the document was opened from or to “My Documents” for new docs, so shit doesn’t get silently moved on you. I can and have had the same doc opened on multiple machines at once, made edits on each, and it worked just like live collaboration with other users.

It doesn’t have to suck, and it’s also easily disableable entirely in enterprise environments if your IT doesn’t want to configure it well. We kept it entirely disabled from our environment until we had our config planned and thoroughly tested with a pilot group for a few months before we let it hit the company as a whole.

I’m not sure what you think your threat model is here. I’m not happy about it either, but my place of residence isn’t entirely private information already. I’m pretty certain it’s available through multiple public information sources. Cameras being able to see me in that vicinity might help someone determine my daily habits and schedule, but there are many other ways of that as well.

Again, I’m not happy about it, but I feel like you need to ask yourself what risk you’re trying to protect yourself against here.

As another commenter pointed out, any of the amazon based ones are part of amazon sidewalk and record nearby bluetooth and wifi devices. Sidewalk is also partnering with flock, so that data is available to law enforcement and possibly corporations that use flock for security to be able to use for advertisement.

But so is your phone’s location data.

So if you’re trying to protect against this sort of thing, you’d need to be taking much more extreme steps. Different dogs at different times with entirely different outfits and rocks in shoes to make different gaits. Face coverings. Multiple burner phones not tied to your identity, and only taken out of farady bags to use in association with different identities.

And then it still would all tie back to the same house/general vicinity.

There’s no perfect privacy options, so you need to identify your threat model. What are you trying to protect against, how important is it, what are the quantifiable risks of failure, and how inconvenienced are you willing to be to achieve this.

It sucks. I’m not happy about it. But you can’t stop your neighbors from using them. So you’ll need to accept it, or come up with alternatives. Feel like moving to someplace more rural?

It’s always going to be a balance.

Where shitpost?

Why bother with creative writing drawing more subtle parallels between fantasy and reality that might be more effective in changing hearts and minds, when you can just point at real things and go “bad thing is bad”.

Anyone who already has a clue gets to go “hahaha bad thing bad they’re so right” and people who don’t just get bounced off the show so there’s no chance to get them to think about things.

Where meme?

Edit: Here’s a quick image for posts like this, enjoy.

Got a coworker where his sinuses just built up again or something after a few years and his doctor told him he’d have to have it done again. Best of luck to you.

That was exactly my point. It absolutely qualifies as “trying to/working on having a kid”, definitely as much or more so than tracking cycles for unprotected sex. Similar for the IVF process.

It’s work and it’s not easy.

You don’t need sex to have a kid, actually. There’s the adoption process and IVF as well. Both would also technically be “trying for a baby”, but people usually are more specific when talking about those.

That sounds great. No offense to OP, but even with the blur the speed of theirs would just make me anxious all the time.

Martin will never escape.

Generally speaking it rests on “god” or “gods” being beyond our comprehension. The whole “biblically accurate angel” thing isn’t just a meme, to some degree it’s also best effort attempts at making images of something described in a way that most people nowadays would consider borderline lovecraftian.

So it kinda follows that if those things are supposed to be the approachable messengers, than anything remotely human-like can’t map well to the “form” of the god over them.

Also, biblically there’s already arguments for time not being a thing for the Christian god.

If omniscience is truly what it says on the tin, there’s no reason that a being with it couldn’t care about what every creature in the universe is doing with their respective reproductive bits, as well as caring about every single more important thing everywhere, simultaneously. The whole point of omni-* in terms of gods is to be limitless.

I genuinely don’t get how you could possibly think that’s somehow mutually exclusive with believing in space/the universe. The universe is so incomprehensibly big compared to what any of us will get to directly experience in our lifetime. If anything I would think it would make it easier to believe in a being similarly incomprehensibly outside the scope of human existence, experience, and understanding. Like you’re perfectly fine with the cosmic infinities, but you can’t bring yourself to imagine some being one more level hierarchally above that?

You think that someone could look at all the amazing and wildly weird shit in this world, think that some god being made it all happen, but then also think “yeah, it definitely stopped there, no more”?

Like, I’m sure there’s plenty of people that do. There absolutely were over the course of history. But to me it just seems kind of like a huge conceptual schism to believe in some sort of god being and not believe in space/the universe/etc.

Pardon the pedanticness: Phones do NOT completely power down. The jury is out on if they are still traceable in “standby”/psuedo-powered off mode. The generally accepted advice is to treat them like they are still tracable.

There’s plenty of blame to go around on this, no need to only go after one party in the whole chain that allows this to occur.