in this day and age how come we don't see laptops carry a physical on/off switch for the microphone and camera?
My laptop is long pass the warranty so I did it myself.
FBI director: Cover up your webcam
101–110 of 307 posts
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
This wouldn't work for me, as I store all my passwords on a Post-It note attached to my forehead.
Written backwards so you can read it in the mirror, right? They wouldn't be able to read it, since they get a non-mirrored image.
Unfortunately, I only use palindromic passwords made up of symmetric letters, so they're readable both directly and in the mirror.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#103in this day and age how come we don't see laptops carry a physical on/off switch for the microphone and camera?
This is the day and age of removing headphone jacks to make a phone slimmer, taking away your disk drive, etc. Most companies care more about aesthetics than functionality at this point.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#104From all they ways I can be spied, the webcam is the one that concerns me the least. At the end, all they will see is a bearded man staring to the front. May they be able to see me naked? Well, probably, but I honestly don't think that they will make a lot of money by selling my naked pictures... My wife tells me that I still look good, but I suspect that she is being nice to me. What would scare more is that they ma…
>May they be able to see me naked? Well, probably, but I honestly don't think that they will make a lot of money by selling my naked pictures...
We all do weird things or at least act slightly differently when we feel alone (being naked is one of those). Your records can be easily used to put a little pressure on you to do something little, not big. Why do you think you're so important to FBI CIA KGB? Regular fraudster will send you your photos and say that your boss/wife/friend will see it, and though there is 'nothing really wrong' on these, you'll pay or feel unprotected, or your party will.
That said, far too many people do have personally secret behavior like cheating, gambling, smoking, jerking off (oops, said it), having sex, private speech, strange comments that can be abused out of context (e.g. n-word while playing role in gta:sa). So many ways to get f-ed up.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a black laptop. I put a tiny piece of black electrical tape over it. I do lots of calls, but I've never seen a good reason to use video except perhaps with one's SO.
GitLab is a remote only company with 100+ team members. Most of my calls are with video, the nonverbal language adds to the conversation for me. It's not 90% but I prefer video to audio if possible.
I worked for a remote company and I recall only having my camera enabled for the first week or so. After that it was off pretty much permanently. I didn't notice a difference with it on or off. It didn't seem to matter and everyone else did more or less the same thing.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#106I use a MacBook Pro as my daily driver, but I recently purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad to play around with. Sometimes I forget how awesome it is to have a repairable and modular computer. I didn't want the webcam or microphone in the ThinkPad… so I took 30 minutes and removed it. Easy as that.
Well,to be fair you could just open the MacBook Pro and unplug the ribbon for the webcam. iFixit will have instructions. Removing it entirely granted is another matter, involving opening the screen, but you'd have to do the same on any modern laptop with an integrated camera wouldn't you?
For my mac I just used a knife to open screen and shoved black paper strip before camera.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#107Every electronic communication device (laptop, mobile, tablet, etc) should have 1 hardware switch per sensor (camera, mic, motion/acceleration, etc) which disables the sensor.
Why manufacturers still haven't introduced this is beyond me.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does everyone strip down in front of thier computers? When I'm done using my laptop I close it.
...do I have to spell it out for you?
Please spell it out for me. Seems being 0001 1001 years old hasn't opened up my mind to such basic concepts.
Also, what about the front camera on my phone?
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#109If you're so concerned about having your webcam subverted, it seems like the first step would be to insist on a hardware LED that can't be subverted in firmware. If nothing else, it would serve as a canary, indicating that your machine has been thoroughly compromised.
How can you tell if it can be subverted? Here's a paper about subverting the Apple Mac camera led indicator from userland: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2...
If the LED were simply wired in series somehow with the mic power supply I imagine it would be easier to tell. The problem with the Mac LED indicator was that it was controlled by a microcontroller that was ultimately accessible via user land. It's harder to surreptitiously bypass a simple electrical circuit.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#110From all they ways I can be spied, the webcam is the one that concerns me the least. At the end, all they will see is a bearded man staring to the front. May they be able to see me naked? Well, probably, but I honestly don't think that they will make a lot of money by selling my naked pictures... My wife tells me that I still look good, but I suspect that she is being nice to me. What would scare more is that they ma…
You're displaying a common trope I see sometimes with security: > "because this particular thing does affect me personally, it doesn't matter. And because it doesn't matter to me it doesn't matter at all" Blackmailing people with pictures taken from webcams is not theoretical. It happens[0] and it's good advice to tape up your cam. It may not affect you personally, but it may affect your wife, daughter, or sister in…
> "This particular thing doesn't matter because I don't need it. And because I don't need it, nobody needs it at all"
This is all that I hate about stackoverflow.