• Apparently it FORCES you to have BOTH a microphone and a camera enabled and accessible to the site. It actually refused to run on my desktop computer because it doesn’t have a camera, had to pull out my laptop which made me late for the meeting.

  • Apparently it ALWAYS DEFAULTS to having both the camera and microphone on the instant you connect to the call, accessible by all other participants. With no warning before you join the call.

Fuck that shit. At least Zoom, as much as I also hate it, lets you connect with no camera and/or microphone (you can just use the chat), shows you a preview of your camera before you join and lets you disable it right then and there, and makes sharing your audio an explicit action for every meeting.

    • wetpot@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 years ago

      There is, at least for the camera as far as I know. Look into Virtual Camera for OBS. Also, OBS doesn’t allow you to change the name of the device, being set at OBS Virtual Camera by default, which you must change on a system level to prevent the meeting host from finding out, being done through regedit for Windows (am not sure abt Linux)

    • AgreeableLandscapeOP
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      3 years ago

      Definitely possible. You don’t even need OBS, pretty sure there are software that will emulate a fake camera showing nothing. I didn’t have time to find one and set it up though because that would have made me super late for the meeting.

  • sproid
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    3 years ago

    I hope it wasn’t a business meeting. Otherwise using the Facebook platform for meetings is just dumb.

    • AgreeableLandscapeOP
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      3 years ago

      Group meeting for a university research project. Wasn’t officially sanctioned or anything, just that my group members prefer it for some reason.

      • sproid
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        3 years ago

        just…just make sure they know you disapprove and is doing it reluctantly because is everyone vs one. That using facebook for anything serious is unacceptable for privacy and security reasons.

  • mekhos
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    3 years ago

    Having these privacy-super-criminals as a “go to” for messaging makes me feel sick.

  • bashrc
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    3 years ago

    I always liked the laptops with the little slider over the camera, but you can improvise with suitably positioned piece of cardboard. The microphone is harder to block, but if you can locate it then something sound absorbent taped over it will render it not very useful to Mr Z.

    • krolden
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      3 years ago

      I just disable it in the bios (and cover it with tape)

        • krolden
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          3 years ago

          It won’t work at all if there’s no camera detected? I thought you just have to allow access in your browser. Sorry I guess I skipped that bullet point lol.

          Anyway yeah probably best to work up a virtual camera device or something.

          Fuck Facebook.

  • greensand
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    3 years ago

    Google Meet is not much better… and also way too popular still