81–90 of 215 posts
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I’ve read this as well but my macbook senses ambient light and adjusts my backlight accordingly. Isn’t this through the camera - with no LED?
No, the ambient light sensing is done with a light sensor on the body - look for the tiny hole drilled into the chassis. It doesn't use the camera.
Dear Apple: for Christmas I'd like physical, no-bullshit power shutoff switches for your camera and microphone on the Macbook Pro. Other devices too—if you can manage it, that'd be great. Sincerely, the people who put tape over their cameras, the people who don't because it's ugly and messes with closing the lid but wish they could, and the people who would be in one of those two camps if they understood the risk (so…
I think I understand the risk, and I definitely would not bother with such a switch even were it available. So maybe I actually don't understand it. What exactly is the risk? Have there been any actual cases of someone being spied on with their laptop webcam that would have been prevented by a switch? I'm only aware of cases where the webcam switch would not have helped (e.g. roommate sets up notebook to record owner…
The use case is that you leave them turned off by default in case someone pwns you, and only turn them on when you need to use them.
This page's content is in a div named "mobile-pusher" with a 400px padding-right, which then gets disabled when loading a JS script from a third-party domain (ffp4g1ylyit3jdyti1hqcvtb-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com). wtf?
that's wpengine's cdn, most likely the host of the blog.
Dear Apple: for Christmas I'd like physical, no-bullshit power shutoff switches for your camera and microphone on the Macbook Pro. Other devices too—if you can manage it, that'd be great. Sincerely, the people who put tape over their cameras, the people who don't because it's ugly and messes with closing the lid but wish they could, and the people who would be in one of those two camps if they understood the risk (so…
I think I understand the risk, and I definitely would not bother with such a switch even were it available. So maybe I actually don't understand it. What exactly is the risk? Have there been any actual cases of someone being spied on with their laptop webcam that would have been prevented by a switch? I'm only aware of cases where the webcam switch would not have helped (e.g. roommate sets up notebook to record owner…
Also, there are many security programs that can seruptitiously take photos or videos using the camera. Usually this is to help in recovery after theft.
Chrome has been doing it since around 2016, it seems.
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You could add a tunnel via iptables to just route one port on localhost to another ip
iptables on your phone? I think you would need to root your phone, if it's Android.
It will still work on localhost, which is nice. It would be nice if it also worked on local IPs, like 192.168. . . Those do not work on Chrome, I think, which make mobile testing a bit more cumbersome.
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From my understanding, Apple has done sort of what you're asking for, they've hooked up the physical wiring of the camera LED to the camera itself, so it is physically impossible to power the camera without the LED being turned on (as opposed to the "turn on LED" being part of firmware logic that could be hacked).
This is a better solution overall, as it's "by default". A hardware switch relies on the user to be privacy conscious. An LED which is physically connected to the camera circuit (!) is immediately noticeable if it turns on unexpectedly.
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As a layperson in this arena, I'm skeptical as to whether it's a great solution. Is it possible to turn the camera on and off very quickly? If so, a smart hacker could do that really quickly and if the owner ever notices they would probably think there is a problem with the electrical rather than thinking they are being monitored.
> Is it possible to turn the camera on and off very quickly? Not particularly. At least on my 2015 rMBP, using code that I wrote (so I know it's not doing anything extraneous), the light is on for about a quarter of a second before the first frame is returned from the camera. This is because the LED is literally showing you when the camera has power (which includes any sort of handshake with the system), not just whe…
It will still work on localhost, which is nice. It would be nice if it also worked on local IPs, like 192.168. . . Those do not work on Chrome, I think, which make mobile testing a bit more cumbersome.
It's fantastic that it works with localhost (and I assume 127.0.0.1?), and it's fantastic that it doesn't work with anything else. This is the best middleground.
Specifically, you need HTTPS for WebRTC, but you obviously have to use a self signed cert because local IP. You can ignore the cert error and load the page, but connecting to the websocket for signaling will still fail because websocket on iOS requires a non-self-signed cert.
Non-HTTPS websocket would work, but not from a HTTPS host. So you're in a situation where you need HTTPS due to WebRTC, but you can't use HTTPS due to websockets.
In trying to push people to HTTPS by disabling features on HTTP, we're making development a _much_ worse experience. I'm not sure that's right.