371–380 of 554 posts
I can see why some people might be concerned about the camera, but I'm far more concerned by the microphone. There's far more sensitive and actionable information that can be gathered from me that way! I'm glad that macOS started putting a light in the menubar when the microphone is in use, but I'd prefer to have unhackable hardware for that instead.
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While true, the amount of power would be too low, LEDs also have quite high forward voltage (~3V for blue ones) and they are current driven devices. That suggestion would require pass all the current through the LEDs. LEDs don't like to be reverse biased either. Overall, it's a rather appalling idea. On top of the fact that LEDs can fail short. More also you'd want a hold up time for the light (few seconds at least),…
They have high forward voltage /drop/ which is a useful property. You drive them with constant current for constant brightness and improved lifespan which is most pertinent for LED light bulb replacements than it is for a simple signal status light. Fixed delay before standby isn't hard to enforce either. Even so this whole attack vector isn't solved with this. How long should the light stay on for after the camera i…
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Am I the only one that is not worried at all about the camera and super concerned about microphones ? The camera may see me staring into the screen, woo hoo. The microphones will hear everything I discuss, incl. confidential information. There is no physical microphone cover there, is it ?
Modern (2019-ish? forwards?) MacBooks have physical disconnect for microphones when the lid is shut.
On a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, it's easily possible record video with the webcam LED off. I did not verify newer generations of the X1 Carbon. Lenovo put a little physical switch—they call it "ThinkShutter"—that serves to physically obstruct the webcam lens to prevent recording. It's supposed to have only two positions: lens obstructed or not. But if the user accidentally slides it halfway, you can still record video…
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You can buy/print and stick a physical «webcam cover»[1] manually on your notebook or phone. My current notebook, manufactured in 2023, has very thin bar on top of screen with camera, so I need a thin, U-like attachment for the switch, which is hard to find. [1]: https://www.printables.com/model/2479-webcam-cover-slider
Am I the only one that is not worried at all about the camera and super concerned about microphones ? The camera may see me staring into the screen, woo hoo. The microphones will hear everything I discuss, incl. confidential information. There is no physical microphone cover there, is it ?
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Then you're lacking fantasy. For example, I'd not be happy having my voice auto-transcribed by some malware as I authenticate to my bank providing my SSN etc (which as an authentication method is of course horribly insecure, but that's a different discussion). Of course, this will vary from person to person, but as mentioned above, just being able to mechanically cover a camera when required makes it less of an issue…
I'm with you. I can recover from nudes of me being on the Internet. That night even help me filter out friends that aren't really friends. If someone drains my accounts, I'm definitely screwed.
You ring your bank and it's reversed almost instantly. Your photos on the internet you have no way of doing anything about them, they are there forever.
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> I can imagine lots of people calling customer service "Q: why doesn't my camera work?", "A: Did you open the cover?" In some over-engineered world, when the camera cover is engaged the webcam video feed would be replaced by an image of the text "Slide camera cover open" (in the user's language) and an animation showing the user how to do so.
We have that on the most recent generation of Framework Laptop. When the hardware privacy switch is engaged, the image sensor is electrically powered off and the camera controller feeds a dummy frame with an illustration of the switch.
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> The LED should be connected to camera's power, or maybe camera's "enable" signal. Wiring it in like this is suboptimal because this way you might never see the LED light up if a still photo is surreptitiously captured. This has been a problem before: illicit captures that happen so quickly the LED never has time to warm up. Controlling the LED programmatically from isolated hardware like this is better , because th…
Pray read the third paragraph of my reply :) It specifically mentions a way to make the LED be lit for long enough.
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> The LED should be connected to camera's power, or maybe camera's "enable" signal. Wiring it in like this is suboptimal because this way you might never see the LED light up if a still photo is surreptitiously captured. This has been a problem before: illicit captures that happen so quickly the LED never has time to warm up. Controlling the LED programmatically from isolated hardware like this is better , because th…
The mentioned one shot circuit does precisely that, in hardware for less cost and 100% non-overridable. The only time that isolated hardware approach is benefitial in terms of costs would be when you already have to have that microcontroller there for different reasons and the cost difference we are talking about is in the order of a few cents max.
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M2 and newer MacBooks have an IMU on-board, which is just a funny way of spelling microphone. Admittedly a very low quality one; I'm not sure if you could pick up understandable speech at the 1.6kHz sample rate Bosch's IMUs seem to support.
> M2 and newer MacBooks have an IMU on-board, which is just a funny way of spelling microphone. Admittedly a very low quality one; I'm not sure if you could pick up understandable speech at the 1.6kHz sample rate Bosch's IMUs seem to support. Are there examples of using IMUs to get audio data you could point to? A quick search didn't reveal anything.
And there's this post, which includes an audio clip: https://goughlui.com/2019/02/02/weekend-project-mma8451q-acc...