The Dangers of Sharing Your Screen With Co-Workers (seattletimes.com) 132
"if you must goof off at work, then at the very least manage your notification settings so that your alerts are muted, and aren't broadcast on the big screen when you screen share in the boardroom," warns the New York Times -- offering several examples of what can go wrong.
An anonymous reader quotes their follow-up report: Whether it's happened to you or in front of you, many of us are familiar with the screen-share disaster: the accidental exposure of something private while projecting your screen before a group of colleagues.
The only surefire way to avoid this is to do as the lawyers recommend and keep your personal things on your personal devices and your work things on you work computer. Sonia Farber, a partner and founder of , acknowledges that may not be feasible for everyone. "But, to the extent that you can keep some separation of church and state, you should make every effort to do that," she said.
The Times offers a checklist for "how not to ruin your life (or just die of embarrassment) with a screen share" -- offering common-sense tips like managing desktop notifications and signing out of messaging apps before meetings. (And of course, not leaving open any tell-tale browser tabs.) But have Slashdot's readers seen (or experienced) any screen-sharing disasters in their own lives?
Share your stories in the comments. What are the dangers of sharing your screen with co-workers?
An anonymous reader quotes their follow-up report: Whether it's happened to you or in front of you, many of us are familiar with the screen-share disaster: the accidental exposure of something private while projecting your screen before a group of colleagues.
The only surefire way to avoid this is to do as the lawyers recommend and keep your personal things on your personal devices and your work things on you work computer. Sonia Farber, a partner and founder of , acknowledges that may not be feasible for everyone. "But, to the extent that you can keep some separation of church and state, you should make every effort to do that," she said.
The Times offers a checklist for "how not to ruin your life (or just die of embarrassment) with a screen share" -- offering common-sense tips like managing desktop notifications and signing out of messaging apps before meetings. (And of course, not leaving open any tell-tale browser tabs.) But have Slashdot's readers seen (or experienced) any screen-sharing disasters in their own lives?
Share your stories in the comments. What are the dangers of sharing your screen with co-workers?
VM (Score:4, Informative)
If I have to screen-share, I have a VM for that.
Re:VM (Score:5, Insightful)
If I have to screen-share, I have a VM for that.
Sounds like you're doing your best to make your job as difficult as possible. What's wrong with using the flexibility of the tools at your disposal. There's no reason to share screens when modern conferencing programs let you share individual windows or secondary desktops.
Re:VM (Score:5, Interesting)
Conferencing programs might, but projectors generally don't have the option.
Instead, what one properly does is set the projector as an extended desktop screen. The laptop screen is the main display, the projector the secondary display. If you need to show something on there, you move the window over to the secondary display. Slideshows are easy - every presentation package I've seen has the ability to use a secondary screen for the slide while leaving the application in full view on the primary screen, so you can muck about on your computer while giving your presentation (it's also used to display slide notes to the presenter).
Only amateurs set the projector to mirror the main display. (It also helps to have laptops with non-HDTV resolutions, so if you don't want everything resized awfully on unplugging the projector, you quickly learn to use the secondary display function.)
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Primarily because there ARE so many tools for modern conferencing.
And I work with a myriad of clients. All with their own favorites.
If I'm working on Windows, I'm NOT junking up my primary-use OS with all that crap.
If I'm working under Linux, much of it won't install. And my issues with junking a primary-use OS.
As such, I have a sacrificial VM for all that.
If it blows up on me I lose nothing.
I simply clone the clean base image and spin up again.
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Re:Streamers deal with this (Score:5, Funny)
I find it much simpler to have a double personality. If something happens, just blame the other guy.
Kurt Eichenwald (Score:2)
One obvious recent example is Kurt Eichenwald, who posted a screenshot of a flyer that he claims was anti-semitic. One of the tabs open in the background was for tentacle porn [news.com.au].
Eichenwald was doing some pretty sketchy [pastemagazine.com] things and pissed off a fair number of people. This ensured that the tentacle-porn thing got strewn across the internet far and wide, to the gleeful delight of everyone who hated him.
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He might not know how to disable safesearch. In related news, he has to ask children to open bottles of pills for him, too.
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Or just a second display. Share that screen, not the main display (where your notifications pop).
The New York Times is hosted as seattletimes.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The New York Times is hosted as seattletimes.co (Score:5, Informative)
The Seattle Times subscribes to - and republishes - stories from the New York Times (and other places) - that's what happened here. I regularly see gardening stories in the Seattle Times which are completely worthless because they're actually written by someone living in a completely different east coast climate zone. Oh, and last fall they had a headline story about a huge (but harmless) spider invading houses and scaring people... a spider which only lives on the US east coast.
I understand why they purchase stories from elsewhere, but before publishing they should at least vet whether the stories make any sense for the Puget Sound audience...
Anyway, back on topic: I read about four paragraphs of the linked story - you shouldn't bother. It's drivel written by someone pretending to be a writer - it would be a better fit as a Facebook post or in a supermarket magazine targeting women.
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I honestly don't think that's what happened here. Editor says, "...warns the New York Times" and then gives a link to seattletimes.com.
It's not that difficult to understand this fuckup.
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Or perhaps a great way to get around the NYT paywall.
Kurt Eichenwald is the classic example (Score:2)
A notable example: Kurt Eichenwald having a tab for for a tentacle porn site visible in his browser [avclub.com].
Re: (Score:3)
Haha, a few decades ago, while in a school lab with Sun workstations, we could wait until the teacher was looking at a student screen and popup a porn site on the screen.
It would basically go like this:
1) open shell
2) export DISPLAY=(ip of the target)
3) $ netscape http://pornsite.com/ [pornsite.com]
4) hit control-C to make the browser window disappear. For the teacher, it looked like the target student had raised the window by mistake then, minimized or killed the window by himself.
Funny thing is that even the teacher did
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Funny thing is that even the teacher didn't have a clue. I guess the systems were pretty open back then.
Back then, yes. :-) Every Linux distro I know of now has had 'xhost -' as part of its startup. If you can set your DISPLAY to an IP and its X server accepts that, well you have just as much access to everything, including devices, as a regular user does. You can watch their screen, keylog, etcetc.
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True enough, I run my browser under a different username locally and I have to do xhost +SI:localuser:<username> so my browser user can access the X display on the same machine.
Many other ways (Score:2)
If you're giving a presentation, you can turn wifi mode off. Or use a separate account (Win + Linux both allow this, I'm sure Mac does too).
Lots of ways other than total segregation, which isn't a bad idea but is really not practical.
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Try actually doing this before you recommend it. Many shared screen tools are based on a network connection, not a video cable plugged into the laptop.
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"If you're giving a presentation"
Usually a video cable....
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"If you're giving a presentation"
Usually a video cable....
Miracast [wikipedia.org] is becoming pretty popular for presentations it is directly built into about half of our conference room monitors, allowing the presenter to be anywhere in the room untethered by a cable.
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At least on Windows, a Miracast display looks just like a wired display to the rest of the system. PowerPoint automatically puts you into the mode where Windows 10 notifications are silenced, but a lot of other applications have their own ad-hoc notification mechanisms (Thunderbird, I'm looking at you!) and don't respect the silence command.
At work, you can often see a few meeting rooms' Miracast targets from one room. This isn't a problem except in one room that you would expect to support Miracast, but
Re: (Score:2)
That setup would not include telecommuters. Many people use tools like Webex for just such presentations.
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Solved problem? (Score:1)
My MacBook turns on do not disturb automatically when I connect to a TV or Projector. I thought this problem was solved 5 years ago.
Times have Changed (Score:3, Informative)
There was a time, when knights were bold and engineers were men (I mean there were no women engineers), that some presentations would be spiced with pictures of naked young ladies thrown in here and there. Kept people awake. No naked selfies of the presenter though (which is perhaps what TFA is about) or anything else for the gays, thank God.
Re:Times have Changed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Shoot, it was like that when I went through Marine Corps boot camp back in ‘74.
[John]
Embarrasing as it gets (Score:5, Funny)
I once saw an uber-boss who, unadevertly let us see a black window with letters.
It ended up being a vim session from some code she was debugging.
Imagine the tremendous embarrassment: a boss doing something useful!
Re: (Score:2)
You should have yelled at her for it [youtube.com].
Re:Embarrasing as it gets (Score:5, Funny)
Surely the greater shame is using Vim when EMACS is far superior.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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you can exit vim? How?
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seperate... (Score:1)
Back when I was able to work, I was even very reluctant to give my employer my phone number! If they wanted me to use a phone or computer at work, the employer provided it, and I didn't use it for anything but work. Employer-owned devices stayed at work. My personal devices are just that: Personal. That means not to be used during work hours or for anything work-related. I did take my cell phone to work, in case of a breakdown on the highway (I lived 20 miles away from work). It was turned off during
Solved Problem (Score:2)
We have an in-house messaging system that allows you to select any online and logged in employee and either share your screen with them or request to view their screen. ( Remote control of screen is also possible if you specifically allow it once a screen share is established. ) This is damned handy for walking a co-worker though a procedure.
Instead of an all or nothing approach, you can choose what you want to share.
Entire desktop or just specific windows / applications. Example: Of the bazillion window
That happened to me (Score:1)
Big, meeting with all our departments. Had to show something on the web, forgot I was looking at NSFW stuff an hour before and BAM! There it was, projected on the conference wall.
Next thing you know, I receive dozens of emails every day asking me what the best sites are for furry, mlp and futanari porn... It's really annoying!
Well, here's one with all of that: e621.net (NSFW, obviously)
Reply all (Score:2)
to email is another horrible mistake just waiting to happen.
Seen that a few times. Makes me shudder.
This is /. (Score:2)
If your background isn't goatse then you're doing it wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
That is just awesome. Hahaha, that reminds me of Bill Gates Windows '98 BSoD video [youtube.com] for some reason. That one just never gets old =p
Personal messages among co-workers... (Score:4, Informative)
I was giving a presentation to higher-ups AND to senior people we were the clients of. My big mistake was setting up the projector before setting up the presentation. The link to the presentation was in my mail, but when I went to get it, a colleague had just sent me a mail with a funny/sexy picture which got displayed on the big screen X-{
Nobody said anything, but I think everybody saw it.
Moral: set up your presentation *before* you connect to the projector (and shut off your mail etc. when you project, of course). Also keep NSFW in your personal accounts, because hey, that's the definition of NSFW.
Re: (Score:3)
I thought it meant "Not Safe For Wife"!
We need more acronyms!
No sympathy (Score:4, Insightful)
Employers treat employees pretty badly, but is it really asking so much to expect people to behave like professionals while at the workplace?
Waste of time (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't turn off adblock, silly rabbit! Turn off style sheets. Content will display. They have to for accessibility. ;)
On Firefox that is: View->Page Style->No Style
Extend Desktop (Score:4, Informative)
Try out "Extend Desktop" instead of "Clone Displays". In addition to generally keeping popups from presenting, it gives the presenter a screen for non-presentable activities, such as taking notes or doing some quick research.
Re:Extend Desktop (Score:5, Informative)
And your typical presenting programs should recognize that and use your laptop screen for showing a big timer, the slide notes, and a miniature of the next slide up. PowerPoint Advanced Skill.
Re: (Score:2)
AFAIK, Keynote already does that.
Good story (Score:5, Funny)
A coworker of mine was hosting a presentation on his laptop, but left on his Outlook notifications. Every time he received an email, a bubble would pop up over the right lower corner of the presentation for a few seconds with the subject of the incoming email. People's eyes are naturally drawn to things like that, so I knew everyone was reading his email subject lines, just as I was.
I took out my mobile device and sent my coworker an email with the subject line, "Dave, you should turn off your Outlook notifications so ppl do not read them."
I got big laughs.
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A memorable screenshare incident (Score:2)
A few years back, there was a new member on my team that had very recently transitioned from a QA role elsewhere in the company to a development role on my team. This new member was very outspoken and a little naive. In my opinion he was a bit out of his depth, which is understandable given that he was in a new role. However, this new member insisted on sharing his thoughts about absolutely everything during team meetings when a more prudent course for someone so new might have been to observe the process
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Got a baby doll in front of my students (Score:1)
My wife shared my mail address for some time (years ago, living in a 3rd-world country, yeah, she didnâ(TM)t have a mail address). Years later I was teaching a class and had my mail casually opened in a tab. I decided to lookup something in my mail to show my students and there it was a message from a popular bidding site (MercadoLibre): YOU GOT YOUR BABY DOLL FOR 5 BUCKS!
Share the application, not your monitor (Score:2)
Whenever I WebEx, I always make sure to share only the application, not everything that appears on the monitor. This occasionally slows me down switching from application to application, but I always know precisely what other people are going to be seeing on their screens.
Tan all day. Jan all day. (Score:2)
I remember this one time I accidentally forwarded a picture of my boss and I at Sandles, Jamaica to everybody in the company. She was sunbathing naked.
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He was the regional manager at Dunder-Mifflin in Scranton, PA so no, he wasn't punished for that or any of the other incidents that were much worse.
Unintentional Easter Eggs (Score:2)
During a college presentation, a classmate included a screenshot of their Windows desktop in one of their Powerpoint slides or whatever. The window only covered part of the screen, so there was a folder on the desktop, clearly visible, labelled 'Tranny Vids'.
I did my own presentation and a dorm-mate kept laughing whenever I went to a new slide. I asked him later if I left behind any easter eggs, and he said "on every slide!"
Doh.
Just use 2 accounts (Score:2)
Matter closed (Score:2)
If it's that embarrassing, don't do it on your work computer.
If you're a freelancer and you use your own machine, have separate user accounts for work stuff and crossdressing midget porn. That was just a hypothetical example.
Workspaces (Score:2)
This problem disappears when you use Linux style Workspaces. You used to be able to use them in Win 7. Windows 10 workspaces are horrid but still do the job.
ChomeBook solution (Score:2)
My personal solution (which I do not expect to fit everyone) was to get an Asus Chrome book. I had a work Mac at home, and it started going wrong. I realised I would have no internet access of my own if it went, so I looked at getting a tablet, or something. I could get a ChromeBook for £230 at the time, which was cheaper than any equivalent tablet before you added the case and the keyboard. I have been using it for my home and commuting stuff every since. No camera, so you can't accidentally broadca
Pregnancy disclosure (Score:1)
Friggin' der... (Score:2)
The company machine is theirs and isn't for your personal use, as so many people argue here. If you're self-employed, you're an idiot of you don't have two machines.
BYOD (Score:2)
Many workplaces are moving towards bring your own devices. Right now mine gives me a couple of bucks a month to host their email on my phone and there’s discussion on doing the same for laptops/desktops.
Personally I snagged a second phone and only host company email on it and any other company business on it (like company phone calls). But not everyone will go that far.
Microsoft 365 is available to us without being logged into the company network. Same with WebEx and MS Teams. And even our Jira system
I was a suit for Mobil Oil ... (Score:2)
... a systems analyst ca. 1990. We were looking at "just-in-time-inventory," to reduce storage space for things the refinery seldom needed, and to replace that stuff with high-volume tools, fittings, and instruments.
The Internet was new and I remember using Netscape to browse, and I was searching with Webcrawler.
In a large conference room, I was slated to show how the Internet (1200 baud US Robotics modem) could help in gathering information.
On the big screen, I projected the search for "just in time invent
WebEx lets you choose what to share (Score:2)
Containerization and VM's (Score:2)
2) You should keep multiple browsers and use containers in that browser.
3) Make sure you always use TOR and VPN's when navigating to non-work sites.
4) Use remote servers when possible for all non-work related material, and connect to them over TOR.
5) Backup and Wipe your data / information before any meeting or time you need to share information.
Disasters of screen sharing (Score:2)
Yes. Yes, I have a story. And it is the funniest thing I have seen this century;
Permit me to share The Saga of Morgan [youtube.com]
Three examples: (Score:2)
turn it all off (Score:2)
yes, it's annoying as hell, popups everywhere, drives me nuts, it even worse as there are also sound notifications, so you don't only get popups with personal stuff in them, but there are pings and poofs and jingles during the whole presentation as well.
that is the reason i turn off all those things, even if i'm not presenting i don't want to know every mail that comes in, or who comes on/offline and that they are IM'ing me etc etc.
works very well, except for... damn patch-reboot popups :|
now those are anno
My Most Embarrassing (Score:1)
I was giving a presentation without realizing that one of my tabs was open on Slashdot. Coworkers lost respect for me that day.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you certain those were real? Perhaps he was angling for a raise/promotion.