461–470 of 554 posts
Ideally, the same should also be true of the microphone pre-amp, with its own LED separate from the camera one.
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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 ?
As someone who often speaks gibberish to myself due to ptsd, if someone recorded me in my room they could convince anyone I am utterly insane, beyond any hope. It is a great way to blackmail people with coprolalia or other verbal tics. And yeah, if they had access to my webcam, they would just see a guy staring into the screen or walking back and forth in the room.
Nobody who is themselves sane is going to judge another for random crap they say when they think themselves alone.
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They are hardwired on Macbooks. From Daring Fireball, quoting an email from an Apple engineer. > All cameras after [2008] were different: The hardware team tied the LED to a hardware signal from the sensor: If the (I believe) vertical sync was active, the LED would light up. There is NO firmware control to disable/enable the LED. The actual firmware is indeed flashable, but the part is not a generic part and there ar…
That's backwards. The LED should be connected to camera's power, or maybe camera's "enable" signal. It should not be operable via any firmware in any way. The led also has to be connected through a one-shot trigger (a transistor + a capacitor) so that it would light up, say, for at least 500 ms no matter how short the input pulse is. This would prevent making single shots hard to notice. Doing that, of course, would…
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No, I think it's fairly easy to see that a third of the charge suddenly disappearing is a fairly uncommon behavior. Same for your Windows idea...
"A third" is again fraction/percentage - it's still a representation stuff that depends on charge and charge cycles... and likely previous over charging and heat (Li-Ion doesn't like heat). To put it simply: the charge level, usually, is just a lookup table for voltage (not under load).
I do not know whether the battery is actually experiencing that sudden loss in charge, nor do I care, because in practice the end result is the same...
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> Would a bit of Post-It Note (for minimal adhesion) damage the screen coating if left on most of the time? Possible, I have one IPS monitor with a spot on screen where the color is pale. I had a post-it note there and I guess something bad happened when I tore it off.
I used electrical pvc tape for many years on my macbooks, no damage but I got tired of them leaving glue residue. Switched to post-its about 10 years ago, works perfectly. I've never tried them on a matte or coated screen though.
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or, you can have a physical switch, like the Framework. that also hits your BOM but its not complex!
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
I would not be surprised if the same is true for some other manufacturers, too, but I can only speak definitely to Mac.
The issue is that lids close too closely + tightly now, and so anything more than a piece of tape winds up focusing all the pressure applied to the closed lid on that one spot in the glass, since the cover winds up holding the display slightly off the base of the laptop when in the closed position.
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That's backwards. The LED should be connected to camera's power, or maybe camera's "enable" signal. It should not be operable via any firmware in any way. The led also has to be connected through a one-shot trigger (a transistor + a capacitor) so that it would light up, say, for at least 500 ms no matter how short the input pulse is. This would prevent making single shots hard to notice. Doing that, of course, would…
Cameras are now always on, to reduce the latency to taking a picture or scrubbing video feed. You’d need to wire the led to something tied to the data lines, perhaps.
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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 ?
And the true or not Google or other apps listening then you see ads based on that conversation. I think it's true since far too many times obscure things I've spoken about appear in ads soon after the conversation. So yes I'd say a mic blocking feature you can confirm is working, blocking, is needed.
The other explanation is one of your contacts who were part of the conversation did things that either directly related to thing X, which you spoke about, or something the algorithm see other people do that relates to X, and you got shown ads based on your affiliation to this person.
I've also worked at FAANG and never seen proof to such claims anywhere in the code, and with the amount of people working there who care about these issues deeply I'd expect this to leak by now, if this happens but is siloed...
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And the true or not Google or other apps listening then you see ads based on that conversation. I think it's true since far too many times obscure things I've spoken about appear in ads soon after the conversation. So yes I'd say a mic blocking feature you can confirm is working, blocking, is needed.
> I think it's true since far too many times obscure things I've spoken about appear in ads soon after the conversation People have been making claims like this since at least the early 90s, about TV then, and no one ever credibly claims to have worked on something like this. I've worked with purchased ad data and I've never seen this data or anything that implies that it exists. It seems far more likely that its a t…
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That's backwards. The LED should be connected to camera's power, or maybe camera's "enable" signal. It should not be operable via any firmware in any way. The led also has to be connected through a one-shot trigger (a transistor + a capacitor) so that it would light up, say, for at least 500 ms no matter how short the input pulse is. This would prevent making single shots hard to notice. Doing that, of course, would…
Cameras are now always on, to reduce the latency to taking a picture or scrubbing video feed. You’d need to wire the led to something tied to the data lines, perhaps.
Regardless, that's a pretty strong claim. I'd love to learn more if you have a link that can back you up!