A simple Microsoft 365 Roadmap update will now generate a raft of unhappy headlines. The idea is simple. “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.”
Forget the locational anonymity of a Teams virtual background. Teams will update your location when connected to your company’s WiFi. On video, you may have your usual background complete with company logo. But your boss will know you’re not in work.
My boss knows I work from home. Get wrecked Teams
What if you change your SSID to match your work’s WiFi?
You not working?
AWS down
Oh ok, don’t worry
Teams is trash, electron is a miscarriage of an idea, and M$ is totally morally bankrupt.
Shocker.
Electron is amazing, for smaller teams, individuals or whatever BUT a trillion dollar company cutting corners on native apps, even for their own platform… come on
So people will know in which company building you’re in? Who gives a shit lol
The problem is they’ll know when your not in a company building. So people can’t WFH even though their boss isn’t watching them at the office anyway.
If you’re outright refusing company rules like that then yeah you sorta run the risk of justifiable sacked lol
It’s not refusing so much as taking advantage of a grey area. The work is still getting done.
It’s not very grey if they’ve been told to get into the office and they aren’t doing that
It’s grey if their boss can’t tell if they’re there or not without a Teams notification. Stupid rules are meant to be ignored.
So it’s grey the same way speed limits are? I dunno man, it seems pretty clear cut to me
Well speeding can arguably make driving more dangerous so not really the same thing. No one is being hurt by people doing the job they can easily do from home, from home. If anything danger is reduced because they’re spending less time on the roads. Stop bootlicking.
That sounds like an issue with the the arrangement between the employee and employer to me.
Yeah, but not everyone has the flexibility to just hop to a different job the second their current one becomes unsatisfactory. Some people have to make do with what they’ve got.
It sounds like you are defending taking an in person job with the intent to deceive your employer by working at home. Because I still fail to see a circumstance where it would be a problem unless the employee is trying to be deceitful to work from someplace unauthorized.
If there’s no reason for them to need to be in the office other than that their middle managers don’t know how to do their job remotely then you’re damn right I’m defending it. If you need a teams notification to know your reports aren’t working from the office then it means they’ve been getting their work done from home and there’s no reason they need to be there. Many places went WFH during Covid and are now dragging their workers back to the office needlessly. Stop bootlicking for corpos.
And somehow their implementation of e911 will still not work.
I don’t get it. Why would it matter that Teams knows where you are working? If you need to hide from your coworkers or your boss then maybe it’s time to change company?
On the other hand: if Teams is using Wifi to correlate your position you could mess with it by exchanging the access point positions, ie exchange your bosses AP with the one in the cellar.
I can see one legitimate application for this, specifically for accountability during an emergency. It’s one more thing to tell whomever is checking where to look for people and only if it’s actually reliable. I doubt that it would be reliable enough.
Yes, I wouldn’t go so far and trust MS applications in emergency cases :D
Well. I’m remote. So they know I’m not at work.
Don’t be surprised when IT tries to move into your house thinking it is an office building
The company your work for is Microsoft’s biggest client - not you… Not even you if you use Windows on your own home computer. Use Linux at home, use Linux at work if you can.
Teams is already such a bloated fucking mess of an application.
I’ve gone back and forth with my opinion on Teams, but now I agree with you. Earlier there was a lot of shit talk about it, and it just worked for me with no problems. After all of the additional bloat (now we have Copilot in it) it crashes all the time.
It never crashes for me - because I have to use the browser PWA app, because the native app doesn’t work on Linux that great.
On the other hand, the UX is absolutely terrible.
The native app for Linux is no longer supported anyway. PWA is the only official way now.
And yes the UX is terrible. Especially the search function, it always finds unrelated things and almost never what I’m looking for. Same thing with Outlook (the real outlook and the ‘new’ one), OneNote and Sharepoint.
It is my #1 and pretty much only usecase for copilot. I think copilot for office is not great but searching for my stuff it does do very well. Paying $30 a month to fix something that should have worked in the first place is a bit mad though.
Yeah people hated it for being Microsoft for such a long time that by the time it actually sucked people had been crying wolf for so long it was hard to believe.
To me it has always sucked compared to something like Slack. It has really low information density for example with its huge bubbles around everything. Multi-tenant switching was a really slow and painful process unlike slack which simply has a sidebar for quick switching, and it creates a huge garbage dump in sharepoint when people upload stuff to a chat.
To be fair, Microsoft never had “Don’t be evil” as their motto.
Bill Gates was an asshole from the start. Happy to use freely available stuff from the early computing community as well as using his school’s resources to build either DOS or BASIC and then acting like he had built it all with his own resources when ranting about free software. To be clear, I don’t gaf about using free resources to build something and make money from it, but his hypocrisy and anti-competitive BS makes that aspect worse with him.
So it was always shit, it was just that once upon a time, they actually had to make good software that ran on very limited hardware in addition to their anti-competitive BS, and then had a period where they kept trying to make good software but didn’t realize yet that they didn’t need to (like windows ME was pretty much universally panned, but it didn’t drive people away from windows in general).
I think it was win 10 that I first felt like I was in conflict with my OS. Like in win 7, I’d spend time looking at each update’s kdb entry to decide if I wanted it (and skipped the nagware ones about win 10 entirely, for example). In win 10, I had to jump through hoops just to be able to control when it applied updates on my own timeline, not MS’. Win 10 was the worst for resetting settings, like I get it set up like I prefer it to be, then a few updates later I’d have to do some of them again. Though tbf, I don’t recall that happening in the last few years, but other worse enshitification has settled in since then and now windows never even touched my current main machine.
Mac / iPhone have location services since find my mac / iphone and sends location of your device to apple and nobody gives a fuck, android sees and sends your every action, so is facebook that trains on your voice and photos, but no windows in workplace is your real enemy !
It’s that any boss would presumably have easy and direct access to the information without having to ask IT. It turns what should be diagnostic/device security information into disciplinarily actionable.
you can change work and don’t give a fuck about teams, you can’t change the things I listed, see the difference ?
To begin with, all of the things you listed are bad and we complain about them just as much. It’s never a good argument when people complain about some bad thing and your reasoning is “but what about this other bad thing?”.
Secondly, this particular update is not about general location tracking, which Microsoft already does quite a lot of, but also being a narc and telling your boss about it, which adds a whole new layer of reasons to complain.
And to finish off… Yes, Windows in the workplace is your enemy. So is Windows at home. Or in an ATM, supermarket cashier, airport totem, or any other computing device.
they things I listed doesn’t involve earning money so that’s the difference
Microsoft’s products are no longer usable.
Not safe, not sensible, not smart.
I am glad I work where nobody monitors teams because that would be stupid.
But exactly how will this work for the people who are actually using modern computing? So I am on Azure Virtual Desktop for one instance of teams, and another that I use for calls on a personal laptop, maybe on their wifi but always with a VPN because we habitually run vpns.
So where am I?
List of locations it compiles for you, based on a heuristic analysis of data, time of day, and cross-referenced by your consumer data would do it pretty nicely
Good.
Anyone who gets in bed with a company that uses these products deserves all the shit coming their way.
Until all companies start doing this.
Good thing we don’t need to rely on software companies for video chat.
