Posted on 04/18/2022 11:12:55 AM PDT by ShadowAce
With many people working remotely, everybody should by now know how to behave when in a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting. Your camera picks up every move even when you think no one is watching, and your microphone can catch the faintest of sounds.
Most people assume that muting their computer’s microphone gives them total privacy. That should be the case, but it’s not.
Read on to find out how your microphone is sneakily still listening to everything you say.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that your device’s microphone continues to listen even after hitting the mute switch.
While the researchers didn’t name the specific applications that do this, they strongly hint that it is most video and conference call apps. In a blog post, the study claims that all the apps they tested “occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated.”
If that’s not bad enough, the audio then transmits to the servers of the hosting platform. The team explains further that in at least one instance, an app was “delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.”
It also doesn’t matter whether you use a built-in microphone or an external one, as it’s the platform’s software that dictates how the microphone works. The research team plans to present its findings to a panel at July’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.
The best way to ensure you’re actually muted when on a video chat is to mute the chat program and the microphone you’re using. If it’s an external microphone, unplug it. If you’re using earbuds, you can mute the microphone on them. The combination of a muted chat program and microphone should work.
The technique is called “double muting,” where you mute yourself in the application and on your device.
To mute your microphone through settings on a Windows computer:
Just remember to enable it again before speaking. You can also right-click on the microphone icon in the taskbar, click on Open Volume Mixer and mute the microphone.
On an Apple Mac:
How to disable your computer’s webcam and microphone
Protect your webcam and microphone
“ctrl-alt-del... duh :)”
That same combination works on all Linux too. Or you can set a key combination for “Kill”.
But once it is done it is done. I have my first intall of Mint cinnamon 18.3 that is still working like new for 5 years now. And I never let it update once... Linux can keep on keeping on even without updates. :)
LOL! I can hear the music ...
I don’t think my laptop has a mic. Would probably have to get an external one if I wanted to Skype or whatever.
Keep
I don’t get “Settings” when I right-click on the Start button. Maybe ‘cause it’s Windows 7... ? I dunno.
“’PC load letter ... what the f**k does that mean?”
Thank you for proving my point.
And that proprietary BIOS extortion from MS is the chain we try to break. The same thing would have to be done if one wanted to reload windows back from an external drive. The BIOS would have to also be changed first to boot from USB.
Not just Linux, ANY and EVERY bootable external drive...
So to try and peg Linux alone for this BIOS issue is dishonest.
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