131–140 of 990 posts
The alternative, the led, is not that good. Even if it's 100% hardware controlled, just a brief flash is enough to take a picture of you.
Besides, on current versions of macOS, you need to grant permissions to an app before it can use the camera.
People are suggesting just using tape, but the issue is when you want to un-cover it frequently (which is probably more common now than a few months ago). For a couple dollars you can get a thin, nice-looking little plastic cover that you can actually slide out of the way when you need to use it. Most of these are thin enough not to be a problem, but they vary, and even the really thin ones usually don't quite let yo…
TBH the thing I’ve noticed is just how fast people stopped turning cameras on during Webex. Before the nearly everyone at my company what was WFH or was joining from their laptop rather than a video conferencing room had their camera on. Within like a week of the lockdown people stopped and I can imagine why you stopped dressing, stopped shaving heck I can hear bedsheets on some of the calls I attend. Pretty much now…
This seems like a pretty mild warning for folks who might stick a bulky cover on their camera and press down / pack their laptop tightly and now have wedged part of the screen open with the cover. I'm a fan of using painters tape.... pretty low profile, easily removed, stays on really well. Also the weird blue glow you get when the camera is on tells you pretty quick "Hey there's a cover on there" where sometimes wit…
But it's also a sign about Apple not doing a good wrt. making their premium products robust. With many other Laptops in that price range you would either have to use a very fat cover or apply a amount of pressure which might damage your laptop anyway. I just tried it (carefully) with my laptop and the screen has enough "play"/"flex" to handle it just fine. PS: Fun fact as far as I remember a number of webcams with LE…
While this is still true for many laptops, it hasn't been true for MBP for at least the past 5 years (cannot be bothered to find the exact year), even if someone has full root access to the machine. I say that, because the camera LED on MBPs these days is hardware activated, not software. So if the camera is active on hardware level, the LED indicator will go green, no matter what.
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The problem is in the design: by not providing a hardware switch, all we have is trust. As we can see from the past, unfortunatly it's not enough.
I don't see how that fixes the problem; if you don't trust Apple to build in hardware safeguards around the camera indicator light, why would you trust them with a hardware switch?
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The problem is in the design: by not providing a hardware switch, all we have is trust. As we can see from the past, unfortunatly it's not enough.
I had a laptop with a physical switch for WiFi/Bluetooth in 2006 or so (with a matching orange/blue light that would turn up when you toggled it). The problem was that this was actually all done by a software driver - when I booted into Linux with the laptop I was surprised to find that the bluetooth/wifi modules were on regardless of the switch's position. At the end of the day, unless you have a really nice microsc…
People are suggesting just using tape, but the issue is when you want to un-cover it frequently (which is probably more common now than a few months ago). For a couple dollars you can get a thin, nice-looking little plastic cover that you can actually slide out of the way when you need to use it. Most of these are thin enough not to be a problem, but they vary, and even the really thin ones usually don't quite let yo…
I fold and drape a microfiber cloth(like for screen or glasses cleaning) over it when I'm not using the camera.
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For me it's not about blackmail, it's about making sure the camera isn't accidentality enabled unexpectedly during a meeting. The worst that would happen is I'd look kinda unprofessional slurping up some noodles, but having the camera covered allows me to be confident I'm not presenting unless I intend to.
Does that happen often? We've been 100% Microsoft Teams since March so I'd say that in several hundred calls and conferences since then I've never activated the webcam without intent.
> "Designed to protect your privacy, Mac notebooks have a camera indicator light to let you know when the camera is on. ... Published Date: July 02, 2020" Perhaps Apple missed these? 2013: iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/36569 2016: Your Mac’s Camera Can Be Hacked https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/your-macs-camera-ca... 2016: Former NSA emp…
> Designed to protect your privacy, Mac notebooks have a camera indicator light to let you know when the camera is on. ... The main problem with that isn't that it is possible to disable the LED. The problem is that the LED is like a smoke detector, when it alerts you it's already too late, you are on fire (or your photo/video has already been taken). An indicator LED doesn't protect your privacy, it only tells you w…
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>2013: iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/36569 ... applies only to older Mac notebooks from like 2008 period which are long since obsolete according to Apple's announced support policy. >2016: Your Mac’s Camera Can Be Hacked https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/your-macs-camera-ca... . ... refers specifically the exploit above. >2016: Former NSA…
The problem is in the design: by not providing a hardware switch, all we have is trust. As we can see from the past, unfortunatly it's not enough.
Source: write firmware for a living, and write drivers for physical switches.
I was very skeptical of the camera covers, but then through conversations with some of my co-workers, I realized that they weren't being used because people were worried about spies secretly turning on the camera. It was 90% of the time just peace of mind that their camera was actually off, instead of having to find the sometimes hard to see options in video chat programs etc.
1. I don't want to broadcast myself during a meeting when I'm not prepared, or perhaps leave a meeting open by accident.
2. If a bad actor does access my camera, I won't necessarily notice the indicator light, especially if I'm not actively using the computer at that moment.
3. I don't trust the indicator light to be permanently unhackable.