This sounds more interesting than it actually is. Starlink routers, provided with the standard service, support Eero-like mesh networking for use in larger homes.
It would be cool if this was some sort of multi-dish arrangement, but it is not.
If you’re looking for something with a little more capability and that fits nicely into a Markdown-centric workflow, there is also Marp: https://marp.app/
I lack words to adequately express how much I prefer Presenter to something like Keynote or Google Slides. It’s just brilliant, and they put a huge amount of thought into making the output look beautiful.
Bonus points for being able to export in PDF, Word, etc. in various combinations of with/without speaker’s notes, ruled notetaking sections ok each page, and a bunch of other pleasant details.
I built presenterm (https://github.com/mfontanini/presenterm). Also a terminal based presentation tool which uses markdown, and supports images, PDF exports, etc.
Pretty confident this is related to the way the Zoom app can detect what conference room you are in when that room is fully equipped with Zoom hardware.
This is what Cisco's conferencing software does, too.
When it works, it means someone can walk into an appropriately equipped meeting room, and the software on their machine detects that.
The audio, video, and screen sharing all route through the meeting room, rather than the laptop. Virtually zero involvement for the user.
Certainly with the Cisco system, not worth the money they charge for the hardware! Every room has a few $25 wholesale price Ikea grade chairs, a table, and then a $100k conference phone.
They are priced high enough that companies doing this are already hip deep in Cisco's world.
They probably already have the corporate surveillance thing going.
I recall that if you were not signed in to an account on their Org, it would only show up with you as that you were a guest in the room, and you could not do much/anything without someone from that org authorising you.
I dont know if the token is long lived, i would hope its rotated frequently.
i also suspect that because it's above audible range, your average video compression might strip it out.
I had to turn this off (not sure how it ever got turned on) because the Microphone indicator was on 100% of the time it was running (as it should be) while it searched for nearby devices through some kind of audio communication.
I'm not as familiar with Zoom, but WebEx and Cisco video conferencing hardware use ultrasonic sounds to let you start and transfer meetings from the mobile and desktop app to video conferencing devices.
With WebEx you can turn this off in the preferences. I'd assume Zoom has a similar config setting.
They do? Ugh.. hopefully not continuous emitting of pulses.. I can hear some ultrasonics due to my cochlear implant, and it's been really annoying how these days Lutron is selling motion detectors that use both ultrasonics and IR. They like to buzz, even when people are already in the room.
I contacted the implant manufacturer when I became aware of the issue.. apparently there is even a warning that ultrasonics can damage it.. but it's not clear to me if that's just legalese or if it's actually a clear and present danger.
I haven't contacted Lutron yet which is bad of me, and I really should do that, but I don't think they would care since the amount of people who can identify that there's a problem with their devices is small.
Today disability is an issue that is taken seriously. If Lutron's technology is affecting your disability then you should absolutely contact them, and barring a satisfactory solution you might even get aggressive with them. They cannot hurt you, arguing that people like you are rare.
Yes, Zoom has a similar setting. I don't think the client is listening for the ultrasonics all the time; you need to click the "Share Screen" button on the main zoom page to have it work, and it presents a "please wait" screen for 5-10 seconds after pressing that button while it appears to detect the room info.
Yea, and it was a battery killer on a laptop - at my company, it even had a side effect of all but pegging the CPU. The confluence of poor software meets bad device driver is entertaining.
The mechanism is not the problem, it's that it turns on the mic by default. Most Zoom users are not in the luxury position of being in a location with a presentation room where they might need to present something, so for most people this is just an unnecessary feature and a possible nuisance. So this setting should by default be turned off (it can still work when the mic is turned on already).
Yes, but if you’re in a zoom/whatever conference room, with a zoom/whatever client running, it’s not unreasonable to think that you want to use the conference equipment. Couple with the various constraints on BT, etc this is a reasonable solution.
Where this reasonable solution is actually implemented securely is another question, and Zoom’s track record isn’t exactly fantastic.
From the description it sounds like it's just a handoff feature, as in you go into a conference room with whatever their conference room product is.
Once you get in handoff range they only need to exchange sufficient information to get the AV equipment to start a connection to the appropriate zoom/webex/whatever channel, and presumably the reverse of getting the original zoom client to close.
I'm assuming there is some work to reduce the likelihood of unintentionally triggering it, and some basic authentication, but this is not a lot of data, and ultrasound is more than sufficient to do it very "instantaneously".
OK, so the actual communication (the call itself) will be transmitted over wifi. But this means that at least some kind of access token must be transmitted over ultrasound. Is this safe? I would love to see an analysis of that communication; whether it is encrypted, is the handshake secure or can it be hijacked, does,it transmit only an anonymous access token or the whole user ID etc.
I mean, if I ever switch off Bluetooth it's exactly for the reason that I don't want my device to be detected/tracked. Zoom going around this by using ultrasound is kind of mean, since I can't prevent zoom from using audio if I want to be able to make calls.
> OK, so the actual communication (the call itself) will be transmitted over wifi
That was my interpretation of the feature described earlier in the thread
> But this means that at least some kind of access token must be transmitted over ultrasound. ...
Yup, I agree I'd love to know more about what is involved. I like to think there's a degree of authentication involved, but this is also Zoom. The company that installed a persistent service in order to circumvent a security feature in safari, that also allowed unauthenticated RCE.
> I mean, if I ever switch off Bluetooth it's exactly for the reason that I don't want my device to be detected/tracked.
I had assumed Android and PC had adopted the randomized MACs apple uses to prevent such tracking?
> Zoom going around this by using ultrasound is kind of mean, since I can't prevent zoom from using audio if I want to be able to make calls.
If we assume for now that it is properly authenticated, and has safe tokens to break tracking, identification, etc, then this behaviour seems reasonable. It would require you to open zoom in a room with the requisite enterprise-y teleconference equipment.
But of course that is quite a load bearing "if", and it already appears that they're trying to maintain the channel when they aren't active.
> I had assumed Android and PC had adopted the randomized MACs apple uses to prevent such tracking?
True, and this is why I rarely switch it off, except in situations where I don't want to be visible to devices that I previously connected to. Same for wifi.
I just find it quite over the top to work around user-controlled communication channels like bluetooth that the user might have chosen to disable, by using a medium (sound) that the user cannot switch off and still use the app.
In this case it's a convenience feature, rather than a avoid user controlled channels thing.
As I noted earlier it works without bluetooth available, but more importantly I suspect, if it were bluetooth everyone would have to peer their devices with every conference room. If it were wifi you'd need to know the network name of the conference room's AV system.
While both options would work, having a single "switch to AV system" button is clearly the best user experience, so you try to make that possible. Given both the app and the AV system have the ability to create and record sound, that's the obvious choice.
But again, I'm not making any statement on the security of the actual implementation from Zoom :D
It's pretty cool in that commodity integrated hardware is capable of doing something practical at those frequencies. Not long ago it was a struggle to get the Pro Audio Spectrum ISA card working at all.
It's awful in that using the auditory domain is too much an intrusion into the human space. There is enough noise pollution. Interference patterns around the room may generate harmonics at audible frequencies. Young kids can hear high frequencies we forgot we ever could. I can still hear CRT flybacks. Sometimes I thought I heard something electronic in conference rooms but convinced myself it was nothing.
Someone else was complaining about it affecting their cochlear implant. That is horrifying.
It is not so farfetched that it has an adverse affect on health either. America is losing diplomats left and right to some mysterious ultrasonic weapon, or at least that is one of the leading theories.
It is awful that my CPU has to be constantly running a FFT to read this signal. I think Apple has an ASIC which does the Siri voice recognition.
It's awful that it triggers the orange light to be constantly on so you end up ignoring it. What if Zoom is simultaneously using the microphone stream for nefarious purposes.
This is what Bluetooth was made for. This is a worse idea than Wifi over lighting. Even the 9-digit Zoom dial codes are better.
>Someone else was complaining about it affecting their cochlear implant. That is horrifying.
Definitely.
>It is awful that my CPU has to be constantly running a FFT to read this signal. I think Apple has an ASIC which does the Siri voice recognition.
Isn't it the zoom box that has to be doing the detection? The pc is just sending the signal, which wouldn't take much processing.
>It's awful that it triggers the orange light to be constantly on so you end up ignoring it.
I think someone commented that's for the purpose of detecting if someone is muted and notifying them. Still, there should definitely be a choice to disable this behavior. I wouldn't be able to ignore it.
>What if Zoom is simultaneously using the microphone stream for nefarious purposes.
There's a lot of nefarious things they could potentially do even without using the mic, considering it's software already running on your pc that already has an encrypted connection to their servers.
> Isn't it the zoom box that has to be doing the detection? The pc is just sending the signal, which wouldn't take much processing.
If the PC were just sending the signal it wouldn't need the microphone to be on. And it would stop working when people turn off their speakers like a lot of people do in a busy meeting room.
By the way there seem to be other ways to do it too. Not sure if it's Bluetooth but MS Teams warned me in the past that I was in a room with a Surface display (the huge first generation one). It doesn't keep the microphone active though.. I never investigated how it figured that.
That gives an explanation but doesn’t actually answer the question - “why is it doing this when I’m not using zoom”
Plenty of people use conference rooms for non video chat reasons, and many of those reason have confidentiality rules.
I know for example there are strict rules around what is required to protect client/lawyer confidentiality, and most of the protection goes out the window if you record, or allow some one else to record them. Would zoom listening in on that count? I have no idea
The only class of apps that have any business using a microphone while not in active use are “assistants”, and those have no business doing anything other than listening for their initiator phrase (except haven’t they all been caught sending arbitrary recordings to their parent company?)
I can assure you Zoom is not doing anything that would legally constitute "recording." In all US states and probably a lot of countries, recording is illegal without the consent of at least one party to the conversation. In the US, in some states, all parties must consent to recording. If Zoom were even skirting the line here, their lawyers would put the kibosh on it real quick.
Hmm... but, then again, there was that thing where Amazon Alexa was recording people without their knowledge... hmm.
Really? At places I've been, you could definitely notify a lawyer of an issue, with the process ranging from walking up to their desk to looking up someone in the legal department and emailing them. I've never had cause to actually do it, but I certainly could have, had the situation warranted it.
> If Zoom were even skirting the line here, their lawyers would put the kibosh on it real quick.
And then the people in charge of the money would do the math on "this earns us 1 billion dollars and the fine has a 10% chance of happening and would be 100 million... so do it anyways, it's worth the tradeoff". This happens over and over.
On the other hand, like any other American company Zoom can be “asked” by intelligence services to “cooperate” - and there is no law that would protect its users against it.
> If Zoom were even skirting the line here, their lawyers would put the kibosh on it real quick
Their lawyers didn't stop them from claiming to provide end-to-end encryption, a blatant misrepresentation that resulted in receiving a consent order from the FTC [1] and settling a class-action suit for $85M [2], so I don't think it's safe to assume that they would prevent the company from doing obviously unacceptable things.
> I can assure you Zoom is not doing anything that would legally constitute "recording."
No need to use quotes here, that was literally my question :D
> In all US states and probably a lot of countries, recording is illegal without the consent of at least one party to the conversation. In the US, in some states, all parties must consent to recording.
Literally every company that got caught having their assistants record conversations turned around and said the victims were informed and consented through the terms of use agreement.
I would guess that performance isn’t the main consideration for most folks, but you should check out the BMW 330e and 530e. Both are plug-in hybrids with very respectable performance numbers. You can even get them with the M-sport package (not that it makes them faster, but it makes them a little sportier).
Interesting post and interesting project. Does anyone have a sense of how practical it would be to have architects and building engineers working on software development like this?
Currently, not at all practical. But that's why we think it's important to make education a part of the initiative. The idea is that we can make relationships between computation and design to have architects understand design as part of a larger family of analytical tools, and people from machine learning/software development understand how those tools can help with creating a physical thing that is distributed across time/space/etc.
Always a fan of new approaches to old games. It would be interesting to see pool tables of other geometries and how someone skilled with traditional tables could translate those skills on to the new designs.
It would be cool if this was some sort of multi-dish arrangement, but it is not.