Cube Privacy Via Gibberish

fury88 writes "CNN is running a story on a new device created by Herman Miller to help with lack of privacy in the cube life. It's apparently a device that will spit out gibberish when you are talking on the phone. You record a few words as instructed by the device and when you are having conversations that may be private, it will spit out sounds that sound like a clone of yourself all talking at once. Frankly I have to think this would be annoying after awhile. As if dealing with your project manager sitting next to you wasn't enough, now you get to hear several versions of your Project Manager talking at once. Talk about insanity!"

Old news

[glesga_kiss]

This idea has been around for years; it's why many banks and governments offices that deal with the public play musak over a speaker system. It's not for the listening pleasure; it's to make it hard to overhear other customers private conversations.

Already Done with White Noise Generators

[Griim]

We already have white-noise generators in the ceiling of my dept, a call centre for a major corporate communications company. They do a nice job of dampening office echo, and creating a nice background noise that's also ideal for falling asleep to.

Other departments sound so quiet after this one. I prefer it.

Sounds like rubbish to me

[wellybog]

Let me get this right - if you play two conversations from the same person, people listening in will not be able to make head or tail of it?

All you would need to do is see the lips of the person talking and your brain would do the rest for you...

Re:Doubtful...

[Imsdal]

"Muzak" is actually a registered trademark by a company with the same name, and not "general background music".

The idea behind it isn't to stop people from listening in on private conversations, but rather to put people in a suitable mood. The latter tends to mean "willing to shop" in department stores, which I would guess is the main use of it.

Personally, I hate the idea behind this. Either it doesn't work, in which case it is annoying as hell, or it does work, in which case it's, if not unethical at least provocative (to me, YMMV).

But what I hate even more is that a lot of public places thought that playing "mood music" was a generally good idea without any other thought behind it. Stop polluting my ears now, please!

Also, Muzak has a website that is even more annoying than their sound pollution. Use at your own risk. (No, I won't provide a link. I hate them.)

Hindi is a good option..

[ayjay29]

I worked on a team with a bunch of Indian programmers, and they used to call the build team in Mumbi a lot. The conversations basically went likt this:

Aapko achaa lagaa?
Usse mat Sql Server chuuo.
Tumhein chhot lag Visual Studio sakti hai.
Sone kaa samay ho stored procedure gayaa hai.
Hum humeshaa tumhaaraa parivaar rahenge out of memory exception.
Hum tumhein kabhei nahin email chodenge sourde safe.
Kyaa tumhein tatti karni hai?
Tumhein kahaan dard ho breakpoint rahaa hai?

We never really new if it was business related or id they were just chatting with their mates and throwing in a bit of tech lingo here and there.