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Zoom Escaper: self-sabotage audio, making your presence unbearable to others
- chrisma0 6y ago"Man Weeping" or "Urination" are clearly the effects you want to get out of that meeting! "James, we'll have to drop you out of the call unfortunately, your crying is way too loud! Goodbye."
- nickthemagicman 6y agoI can create the urination effect without an app.
- LilBytes 6y agoAwww, I get the down votes. But I laughed. I laughed a lot.
- slt2021 6y agogood ole low tech analog solution
- yellowapple 6y agoI can create the "man weeping" effect without an app. And usually do.
- hobs 6y agothe most powerful version of this I see in a contractor I talk to; its just an incredibly high frequency whine - you know they are not doing it on purpose but at the same time you are desperate to end the discussion as fast as possible.
- leephillips 6y agoHow do you know it’s not on purpose? Seems to have what might be a desired effect.
- cbanek 6y agoThis is great. I have someone in my meetings to has the bad connection problem all the time. When trying that one out though, if I disabled it, it would only sometimes disable itself (and re-enable audio)?
- danaliv 6y ago"Sorry, this browser isn't compatible with Zoom Escaper. Please try Chrome on desktop." How many times will we have to learn the lessons of the late '90s/'00s?
- _Microft 6y agoI agree. Every webdev should know by now that you also need to tell visitors the screen resolution that a webpage is best viewed with.
- codetrotter 6y ago420x6969. Ultra portrait aspect ratio.
- dylan604 6y agoI miss visible visitor counters and guestbooks!
- motoboi 6y agoYeah, safari is the new internet explorer.
- saaaam 6y agoCreator of the Zoom Escaper here... Sadly it relies on a web audio feature that's chrome only. Also too bad because I use firefox as my primary browser.
- boredpandas777 6y agoThe most annoying and least suspicious thing for me personally would be the person on the other end playing back my own audio with a delay, just like the echo of your own voice that you get sometimes on a bad phone connection. This way I would blame it on my connection, not the other person, who is actually causing it. In a team setting, it goes like "Oh, so we're all hearing our own echoes. We should quit and try again" If there is one person acting as reflector with the right delay (echo generator) for everyone else, that could work, in theory.
- brokencode 6y agoI’d attribute that to the other person playing the audio out of their computer speakers while using a mic that is not directional enough to filter it out.
- ghayes 6y agoI generally consider it rude to not use headphones in a meeting. The primary issue is you can't have simultaneous talking when someone isn't using headphones, since most applications auto-cancel audio input when they detect feedback. You then have to switch to turn-taking which isn't always suited for certain conversations.
- closeparen 6y agoI dearly wish this could be an actual norm.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoMost meeting software I've seen shows talkers, making it very obvious who's causing the echo. I've never seen local echo on a video conference nor do I really see a realistic path that could reasonably cause this. Regular echo, on the other hand, is common.
- Minor49er 6y agoMost modern voice applications give a pretty clear visual indicator about who is making noise. I think in your scenario, the person echoing the audio would be quickly identified and told to mute themselves. If they were the only ones playing your audio back after a delay, people would suspect that they are the ones with the connection issue. However, this was pretty common for a prank, especially 10-15 years ago on services like Ventrilo which resulted in the then-popular Ventrilo Harassment series. Most of the people who got pranked in those didn't get a visual indicator of who was playing sound. The situation you describe can be seen in this video titled "Ventertainment - Nerd Confusion 3: The Ring": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5AkIfgioA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5AkIfgioA4
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- temp8964 6y agoCan you fake a slow connection by streaming 4k video(s) from YouTube / Netflix while zoom meeting?
- chanandler_bong 6y agoIf you are on a Mac, check out the Network Link Conditioner. https://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/ https://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/
- dylan604 6y agoI think just using Zoom meetings imitates a slow connection. At least, it slows my entire laptop responsiveness down to a crawl, so I'm just extrapolating its effect.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoHow much bandwidth do those use? I'd probably have to stream a couple dozen of them.
- galuggus 6y agoYou can use bufferi.ng
- system16 6y agoEarly 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.
- iambateman 6y agoI 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)_/¯
- castillar76 6y agoEver 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. :)
- StavrosK 6y agoOh, I keep messaging the presenter things like "so what did the doctor say about your genital rash?" to mess with them.
- castillar76 6y agoBack 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...
- NoPicklez 6y agoAnyone who has grown up playing multiplayer games knows how important it is to have everyone with 1. A good headset with a noise cancelling microphone 2. The ability to control other people's volume individually and 3. The ability to switch to push to talk rather than open mic. And last but not least... tech literacy
- StavrosK 6y agoI keep asking people to switch to PTT but nobody likes it, so I keep hearing their keyboard and shirt noises :(
- wlll 6y agoA better microphone would fix that, and has the added advantage that when you Do P to T your audio quality isn't crap for the duration you're saying stuff. I use a Blue Snowball, it's great, there may be better alternatives. PTT (in my experience) has some significant disadvantages in terms of interactivity. You can't have a real spontaneous conversation, and you can't hear people laugh.
- StavrosK 6y agoHuh, why not? I just push the button whenever I do something that I want people to hear, including laughing.
- wlll 6y agoBecause it's weird. I've done it, pressing a button to laugh feels really strange and fake. You can solve the issue with a decent quality mic (which you should have when you're using PTT anyway) and by using headphones, so there doesn't seem to be much of an advantage to having PTT on permanently.
- StavrosK 6y agoIf people don't want the zero-cost solution of PTT, they definitely won't buy a $100 mic.
- chanandler_bong 6y agoIf you are on a Mac, check out the Network Link Conditioner. https://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/ https://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/
- technick 6y agoIf your behind a router with QoS features, learn how to use QoS.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoTrue but the NLC you can click on and off on the spot at a moment's notice. Beats logging into your router and fiddling with stuff which often needs time to update.
- tyingq 6y agoI suppose you could join via the web, then use the Chrome dev tools bandwidth throttling. Not sure if it works on webrtc and websockets though.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThis is indeed a great and little known feature of Mac (though it's an optional install). Great for troubleshooting and the occasional excuse when you really don't want to share video.
- ineedasername 6y agoThat would work for 2 maybe 3 meetings, then you'd be asked to make appropriate accomodations to do your work. But if you choose those 2 or 3 meetings wisely...
- dylan604 6y agoWhile this sounds loads of fun, I'm really interested in Zoom Deleter. While I will personally never allow some other software the power to delete other software, it just makes me smile (only to avoid crying) that Zoom has this effect on others.
- m3kw9 6y agoGood way to get fired
- anonytrary 6y ago"Hey John, can you mute yourself? Thanks!"
- franga2000 6y agoI saw something similar, though far less sophisticated, at the start of the pandemic. Universities all started doing online exams where students had to have ther microphones active the whole time, so a bunch of CS students got together and made a little script that added noise, randomized echo (so echo cancellation didn't work), dog barks and that buzzing sound that GSM phones used to make when next to speakers. After the first few exams, the microphone requirement was lifted. Another fun one was a script (actually just a gstreamer chain) that intentionally garbled your camera's video stream, since another exam requirement was a running wide-angle camera (sometimes two!).
- a0-prw 6y agoI teach kids and it's cool how there are ALWAYS a few who WILL find the mouse holes in software. It's been fun teaching them over MS Teams.