Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FBI director: Cover up your webcam

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–307 of 307 posts

Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam

#301

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dkersten wrote: post #184
quirkafleeg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops. Thanks. I had a fear I was just missing a joke, but I have seen bots used on forums for no immediately obvious/spammy reason and I've also seen people genuinely imagine strange motives for relatively explicable things.

This is probably one of the reasons jokes are very much discouraged on HN. They pollute the conversation and add confusion. I too didn't notice that it was meant to be a joke.

It's a joke. I thought it was obvious, I'd have laughed if someone else had made it and I didn't think it's polluting anything, not tucked away in this side-thread-ish.

Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam

#302

Post by T-hawk »

Shorel wrote: post #298
bradbeattie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/

The range of the human voice goes from 85hz to 255 Hz, and that means a webcam should record at about 500hz to be able to capture enough information to reconstruct voice with good quality. Because webcams record at 60hz (max), they can only capture enough data to reconstruct sound at 30hz, way below the human voice range.

Webcams record faster than 60 Hz. Sound perturbs the recorded image every scanline, not just every frame. The techniques that reconstruct audio from video do it by looking not frame by frame, but line by line. 60 Hz times 720 vertical resolution is 43200 Hz and way more than enough data.

Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam

#303

Post by 6t6t6t6 »

jdavis703 wrote: post #235
greenspot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blackmailing people with pictures taken from webcams How can one blackmail a person with webcam pictures where the person just stares into a screen? If you mean NSFW pics I don't think they're done with a computer's webcam cam. Nowadays, people use phones for that use case.

I'm not naked when I'm using the computer. When I am naked my laptop is closed and most likely in my bag. I guess a lot of people keep their laptop open on their nightstand or something?

A lot of people mastubates in front of their computer.

Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam

#304

Post by nannal »

mdrzn wrote: post #222
nannal wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://filebin.ca/2v9C6MeDhDop/funnylist.txt

I love this. How did you generate it?

crunch 1 4 wuoxvnmWUIOHXVNM180 >> sillylist; while read name; do export name=$name; echo $(echo $name; echo $name|rev)|sed s/' '//g; i=$(($i+1)); done Bash isn't pretty but it does work.

Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam

#305

Post by internaut »

throwaway7767 wrote: post #199
celticninja wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect most people who currently tape over their camera would do the same for their microphone if it was as easy. But there's no easy, quick way to do it that allows to re-enable it when needed.

You just rip the mic/cam pair out with pliers and use an independent usb webcam when you actually need it.

Worked like a charm.

Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam

#306

Post by meowface »

takeda wrote: post #19
waterphone wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a bad thing to do, it's just hypocritical of him to value his own privacy but tell everyone else they need to give up theirs and let the FBI and NSA have access to everything they want to keep private.

Similarly Hilary advocates for banning encryption yet makes her staffers using Signal application to encrypt their correspondence. Our government is full of hypocrites.

That's much worse and far more hypocritical than Comey's remark.

Re: FBI director: Cover up your webcam

#307

Post by awesomerobot »

maxerickson wrote: post #295
awesomerobot wrote: post #208

Also remove your microphone and don't use a keyboard? If I were hacking you I'd _much_ rather log your keystrokes or hear what you're saying. The number of scenarios where having a visual would be useful would be incredibly low by comparison. Putting a sticker over your webcam is like putting a lock on a screen door.

Most screen doors I can think of do have locks. Even quite home made ones often end up with a hook that kids can't reach.

That's my point. It does one thing, but it's by no means security.
Post reply on HN