Google rats out people who fake bad connectivity to dodge meetings

Originally published at: Google rats out people who fake bad connectivity to dodge meetings | Boing Boing

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Enable camera, put black tape over it, hide from people when you just can’t.

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Point camera at monitor with loop of you just…staring on it. Hey, they said you needed to show yourself, they didn’t say which timeline.

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Like any classic heist scene.

And then they will notice that our glass of milk or what ever suddenly when from half full to full when the segment starts over.

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This looks like a really useful tool to have. I wish zoom had this feature.

That being said, I frequently route my web cam through OBS so I can freeze frame me staring attentively into the camera so I can do other stuff during zoom calls without being distracting to others. I could do a video loop, I suppose, but I’m not really trying deep fakery, just trying to be unobtrusive.

(Also, while I could morph the edit in the loop, I don’t have a realtime way to morph out of the loop into realtime video, so the same glitch as from the still frame would happen.)

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Wasn’t this a part of the plot of Infinite Jest?

It wasn’t, but it does remind me that the protagonist’s father got rich selling avatars for video calls. Or something like that. I kinda lost interest midway through that must-read book.

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That was such a long time ago…

but maybe this article will ring some bells

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Or you could attempt something like this.

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So, Google has once and for all given up the notion of “don’t be evil.”

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I think it was actually the parents of one of the Tennis Academy students, or possibly one of the sober house residents. Himself first got rich from his work on optics.

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In “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt”, Michael Lewis tells of a tool named “Thor” which RBC created that induced lag into their trading system to counteract front-running by coiling “38 miles of fiber and stick it in a compartment the size of a shoe box to simulate the effects of the distance”. Perhaps untwisting a Cat5 cable could do something similar to a connection?

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Paywalled, but 30 miles * 5280 feet/mile * 1 nanosecond/foot ~= 0.2 milliseconds of lag.

(Yes i neglected to include the refractive index of the fiber in this calculation).

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Beyond the paywall. I suppose that you could also download the ebook sample

All three predatory strategies depended on speed. It was Katsuyama who had the crude first idea to counter them: Everyone was fighting to get in as close to the exchange as possible — why not push them as far away as possible? Put ourselves at a distance, but don’t let anyone else be there. The idea was to locate their exchange’s matching engine at some meaningful distance from the place traders connected to the exchange (called the point of presence) and to require anyone who wanted to trade to connect to the exchange at that point of presence. If you placed every participant in the market far enough away from the exchange, you could eliminate most, and maybe all, of the advantages created by speed. Their matching engine, they already knew, would be located in Weehawken (where they’d been offered cheap space in a data center). The only question was: Where to put the point of presence? “Let’s put it in Nebraska,” someone said, but they all knew it would be harder to get the already reluctant Wall Street banks to connect to their market if the banks had to send people to Omaha to do it. Actually, though, it wasn’t necessary for anyone to move to Nebraska. The delay needed only to be long enough for their new exchange, once it executed some part of a customer’s buy order, to beat high-frequency traders in a race to the shares at any other exchange — that is, to prevent electronic front-running. The necessary delay turned out to be 320 microseconds; that was the time it took them, in the worst case, to send a signal to the exchange farthest from them, the New York Stock Exchange in Mahwah. Just to be sure, they rounded it up to 350 microseconds.

To create the 350-microsecond delay, they needed to keep the new exchange roughly 38 miles from the place the brokers were allowed to connect to the exchange. That was a problem. Having cut one very good deal to put the exchange in Weehawken, they were offered another: to establish the point of presence in a data center in Secaucus. The two data centers were less than 10 miles apart and already populated by other stock exchanges and all the high-frequency stock-market traders. (“We’re going into the lion’s den,” Ryan said.) A bright idea came from a new employee, James Cape, who had just joined them from a high-frequency-trading firm: Coil the fiber. Instead of running straight fiber between the two places, why not coil 38 miles of fiber and stick it in a compartment the size of a shoe box to simulate the effects of the distance. And that’s what they did.

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I learned something new today. Thanks for mentioning it.

My freeze-frame trick uses an iPhone app called Camo Studio. It allows me to employ the much better cameras in my iPhone as a webcam. I use the video pause regularly in long Teams and Zoom calls.

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OBS doesn’t have a built in freeze frame feature, but there is a free “filter” plug in that will do freezes.

You can then use OBS to send out a “virtual camera” output that zoom accepts as an input. I’ve been kind of enjoying having other OBS features to layer my input, such as lower 3d titles.

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How about… Developer tools and limit bandwidth on the Meet tab?

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That was always, always, always just a catchphrase.

ezgif.com-optimize

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