Aren't these attacks primarily for Windows? Would using Linux (say Arch) mitigate these? Edit: Shouldn't we be more concerned about phones and tabs?
Nice attempt at humor :-)
FBI director: Cover up your webcam
141–150 of 307 posts
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#142From 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…
I know that what the webcam captures is probably the least important thing a hacker can get but I do it because it is visible. Protecting your privacy should NOT be weird and a sticker over your webcam is a very visible way of showing that to the public. When people ask why I do it, its a good opportunity to educate them on the capabilities of the US government, other nation-state actors, and hackers in general. If t…
> its a good opportunity to educate them
Am I the only one to receive disarming responses when trying to educate anybody over this matter? The vast majority of people (and when I say "vast majority" I mean everybody but two or three people tops, so far) I tried to explain things to don't care. All they have to say are things like "Where is your tinfoil hat?", "This is conspiracy theory", "If they want to spy us there's nothing we can do" and the never old "I have nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide."
Even when you provide material from authoritative sources you still risk being told "Bullshit, go figure who wrote this".
My laptop is black and I keep a piece of black electrical tape over it so it's mostly unnoticeable if you aren't close enough. I do this to avoid giving explanations because from my experience it is pointless.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#143The webcam cover up is interesting to me because it's the only "weird privacy thing" I've seen regular, non-technical people do. A good amount of people at my university, most of which use social media liberally and don't care about encryption, cover their camera up.
This is only idle speculation but: A web cam resembles an eye staring at you all the time. This makes people feel weird, like something is staring at them. The threat to privacy is right in their face and on a gut level. That's the reason so many people cover them even when they won't take other basic online privacy precautions.
Also just in general, people understand what a camera does. It's much harder to understand the implications of abstract "data" going off onto the internet.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't know SO rage until you get a case of a small, inconsequential problem which is of vital importance to you. After heaps of searching someone else has posted the same issue on SO. Then reposted a while later with "Don't worry, fixed".
That's just a bot someone made. It scrapes SO, constructs a model of question text and generates new questions from the model. Then, after a random number of days it posts that "Don't worry, fixed" you've seen.
What would be the point of that?
What he's describing is something that also happened (with far greater, more rage-inducing frequency) on tech forums before SO existed.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#145In case anyone's looking for something a little bit more sophisticated than a sticker to put on his/her webcam: https://soomz.io/detail/webcam_covers_a10 Been using it for a while and it works like a charm. (Though on a phone it does tend to attract a bit of dirt and the color wears off over time. If you keep your phone in the pocket of your pants, that is.)
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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.
You don't know SO rage until you get a case of a small, inconsequential problem which is of vital importance to you. After heaps of searching someone else has posted the same issue on SO. Then reposted a while later with "Don't worry, fixed".
Also the mandatory upvoted comment 'why are you using vb6'.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just a bot someone made. It scrapes SO, constructs a model of question text and generates new questions from the model. Then, after a random number of days it posts that "Don't worry, fixed" you've seen.
What would be the point of that? What he's describing is something that also happened (with far greater, more rage-inducing frequency) on tech forums before SO existed.
I believe it is a joke.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. It's more of a statement than a meaningful security measure.
That webcam might have a microphone. Your laptop has one too. Neither have a little LED to tell if they're on (the one on most cameras isn't hard wired to the sensor. You can sometimes turn it off in the drivers). There's a microphone in your phone, in your tablet, your PS4 controller, your land line (why do you still have one of those?!), that USB gaming headset you left plugged in, your fitbit, your overpriced voic…
We never used to tape up cameras, now we do. Perhaps one day we will cover microphones or disable them even though we don't now.
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#149Laptops have a LED showing when webcam is in use
Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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