Tech

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    Microsoft Teams Collaborative Meeting Notes

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 5 minutes

    Recently, Microsoft released a preview feature, making meeting notes collaborative using MS Loop. As part of the M365 newsletter subscription I offered a deep dive into the eDiscovery implications of the tool and how it works, but there was more I wanted to say about the functionality of it outside of that. Hence, I’m writing a blog post about how I looked at these notes as a trainer and leader as opposed to how I looked at them as an eDiscovery professional.

  • Please Don’t Take Chances with Stalkerware

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Let me repeat what I’ve said before. If you are in an abusive situation and your partner has had access to your phone, leave it behind. If you suspect any of your devices had these tools installed, do not take any chances with them. Yes, getting a new phone and changing all of your passwords will be a pain in the ass. It will suck to set up a new email and change the default email address for all of your online accounts.

    It still beats getting tracked down by a violent ex-partner. Do not make light of this. This is life and death stuff. Trying to remove stalker ware incorrectly might kill people. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. Don’t take the chance.

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    Linked – Social Media Is Dying

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    While I would love to end this with a condemnation of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, I think it’s important to point out that many of us are complicit. Fund managers seeking the best short-term profits for their investments run funds whose shareholders include most of us. When we log in and look at our IRA or 401(k) accounts, we look for how much the value has increased, not what makes the most sense for society. Our account balance looks a little nicer when a company lays off 10,000 employees and the stock price increases.

    It’s all entwined. To paraphrase Michael Corleone – “We’re all part of the same hypocrisy.”

  • Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    But, here it the real world, this doesn’t always work out very well. You really need the culture to be one where everyone is used to working asynchronously and checking the public channel for chances to help out the team. It sounds like that is both the expectation and the reality at this company but for a lot of us the reality is very different. Posting something in a public channel where no one gets a notification that a message is being posted generally means no one sees it. So we go back to using private channels or tagging people in the public channel in order so that we purposefully interrupt them. We haven’t developed a culture where asynchronous communication works and I suspect it’s because we don’t really want it. We want people to respond to us now. We don’t trust them to get back later and, to be fair, we don’t give our peers reason to trust us because we spend all of our time putting out fires and frequently forget to get back to people.

    In many cases, it’s a humblebrag. “Oh I saw your message but then I got involved in important things because I’m an important person and never got back to you”.

  • Linked: Don’t Forget to Name Your ‘Digital Executor’

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    As we head into the metaverse, or whatever the cool kids are calling it this week, this is only going to become more complex and more necessary. It won’t just be a social media profile and photos, it’ll be an entire identity in the crypto-blockchain space that will not be accessible to someone else without the appropriate transfer. Don’t leave it to chance. Your family is going to be dealing with enough.

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    Linked: Facebook Cooperated With Law Enforcement in an Abortion Case. Did it Have a Choice?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    However, the article below goes on to note that Meta has options. It could create hurdles, it could delay and fight it. Neither of those would likely make much difference in the grand scheme.

    Eva Galperin from the EFF, though, offers the best solution. She points out that tech companies can’t turn over what they don’t have.

    It’s the collection. It’s the lack of end-to-end encryption. It’s all the information they keep about all of us forever. If they didn’t do that, it wouldn’t exist to be turned over.

    They made a choice, and anyone using their services to communicate private information made theirs.