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From all they ways I can be spied, the webcam is the one that concerns me the least. At the end, all they will see is a bearded man staring to the front. May t
by 6t6t6t6 10y ago
From all they ways I can be spied, the webcam is the one that concerns me the least.
At the end, all they will see is a bearded man staring to the front. May they be able to see me naked? Well, probably, but I honestly don't think that they will make a lot of money by selling my naked pictures... My wife tells me that I still look good, but I suspect that she is being nice to me.
What would scare more is that they manage to capture what is on my screen, or install a keylogger, or activate the microphones to hear my conversations, or that they access my hard disks and steal data, including my private keys.
Hey, but putting a sticker on your webcam is a way to show how 1337 your are!
I prefer not to have to bother removing stickers every time I want to do a Skype call.
- rpgmaker 10y agoOn amazon there are cam blockers with a lid that allows you to block and unblock the cam.
- eganist 10y agoIn fairness, you can still capture conversations from a webcam if your mark is speaking right in front of it, regardless of whether microphones are on.
- stephentmcm 10y agoSource? I'd hazard a guess that it's likely only marginally more accurate than lip reading?
- bradbeattie 10y agohttp://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/ http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/
- sillysaurus3 10y agoInteresting technique. This requires 60fps 1280x720 video. People would surely notice the slowdown. I wonder if it's possible to improve on this?
- sllabres 10y agoThis was an interesting thing to see when it came out and keep people aware what is possible. Maybe there is even more possible using this technique. But Nevertheless activating one of the many microphones around (mobile phones, phones, laptops, "echo" like devices, speech controlled televison) would concern me much more then.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- willvarfar 10y agoThe saying is "attacks only get better". Its likely that more can be done with less pixels but more software. But hardware can also get better. Surely the next-gen of laptops have depth-sensing cameras too? Its becoming an integral part of game console motion detection, and normal smartphones will have them too e.g. hype I found by googling: https://3dprint.com/117809/depth-sensing-phone-cameras/ https://3dprint.com/117809/depth-sensing-phone-cameras/
- stephentmcm 10y agoPretty cool. But I'll eat my hat if a regular webcam can pick up enough detail in regular lighting to do this. Plus 90% of the time the webcam will capture a users chest and the wall behind them, hardly useful for visual microphones.
- Shorel 10y agoThe 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.
- T-hawk 10y agoWebcams 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.
- stephentmcm 10y agoThis, unless you are going to open up every device around you and physically isolate all audio recording equipment, I fail to see how covering your webcam is much more than security theatre?
- ctrlalt_g 10y agoIt's not strictly about security. Some people like to close their curtains at night not because they think it makes them safer, but because that level of exhibitionism seems weird to them. It's the same principle.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hkmurakami 10y agoBlue paint tape makes the on/off process at least a bit more bearable.
- noobermin 10y agoWhen you're a person with access to the nation's secrets, it may matter.
- lostlogin 10y agoHaving a camera see your face? This seems unlikely. Invasive, disgusting and gross, yes.
- jonaf 10y agoThis wouldn't work for me, as I store all my passwords on a Post-It note attached to my forehead.
- mikeash 10y agoWritten backwards so you can read it in the mirror, right? They wouldn't be able to read it, since they get a non-mirrored image.
- Larrikin 10y agoI know that what the webcam captures is probably the least important thing a hacker can get but I do it because it is visible. Protecting your privacy should NOT be weird and a sticker over your webcam is a very visible way of showing that to the public. When people ask why I do it, its a good opportunity to educate them on the capabilities of the US government, other nation-state actors, and hackers in general. If they don't believe me and haven't heard of Snowden its simple to show them images of Zuckerberg, the FBI director, and other in tech with taped over webcams to convince them. John Oliver also did a special last year that showed that a lot of people don't really care about the government getting most of their personal information on their computer. But when they think that the government is getting naked pictures of them and their family they're a lot more interested and upset. Bringing up the fact that the government can see them nude in conversation scares a lot more people and they are more inclined to become more privacy conscious. If you use one of the bookmark post-it notes, it makes it easy to remove the sticker and put it back when you're done with your video conversation.
- dsfyu404ed 10y agoI agree. It's more of a statement than a meaningful security measure.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoThere should be a term for this. Maybe something like 'security theatre'.
- majewsky 10y ago"Security theater" is an established term, but usually refers to useless security measures implemented by organizations (companies or governments) to soothe the public (their employees/citizens/guests), rather than to actions of individuals onto themselves.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
- Natsu 10y agoI have a black laptop. I put a tiny piece of black electrical tape over it. I do lots of calls, but I've never seen a good reason to use video except perhaps with one's SO.
- sytse 10y agoGitLab is a remote only company with 100+ team members. Most of my calls are with video, the nonverbal language adds to the conversation for me. It's not 90% but I prefer video to audio if possible.
- Natsu 10y agoI do quite a bit of remote work, but I'm the opposite. I don't find it helpful in the slightest, I'd rather see someone's screen.
- vhost- 10y agoI worked for a remote company and I recall only having my camera enabled for the first week or so. After that it was off pretty much permanently. I didn't notice a difference with it on or off. It didn't seem to matter and everyone else did more or less the same thing.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoYou're displaying a common trope I see sometimes with security: > "because this particular thing does affect me personally, it doesn't matter. And because it doesn't matter to me it doesn't matter at all" Blackmailing people with pictures taken from webcams is not theoretical. It happens[0] and it's good advice to tape up your cam. It may not affect you personally, but it may affect your wife, daughter, or sister in a much more sinister way. Believe it or not this kind of thing can ruin someone's life. [0] http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240209018/US-teen-hacker-pleads-guilty-to-webcam-blackmail http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240209018/US-teen-hacker...
- mschuetz 10y ago> "This particular thing doesn't matter because I don't need it. And because I don't need it, nobody needs it at all" This is all that I hate about stackoverflow.
- lostlogin 10y agoYou don't know SO rage until you get a case of a small, inconsequential problem which is of vital importance to you. After heaps of searching someone else has posted the same issue on SO. Then reposted a while later with "Don't worry, fixed".
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoThat's just a bot someone made. It scrapes SO, constructs a model of question text and generates new questions from the model. Then, after a random number of days it posts that "Don't worry, fixed" you've seen.
- quirkafleeg 10y agoWhat would be the point of that? What he's describing is something that also happened (with far greater, more rage-inducing frequency) on tech forums before SO existed.
- abysmallyideal 10y agoWhen the FBI interrogate, they have people whose expertise is to use your entire body language including facial expressions, etc... to gather information. Giving an attacker the ability to monitor your body language while they have full control of your computer is extremely dangerous as they have established a closed loop to interact with you without your consent or knowledge. As the FBI also excell in this kind of subversive intelligence gathering, it figures they would be wary of being on the other end of it. An example is if a chinese, Russian, corporate spy had them on the other end without their knowledge. Edit: Another topic is the issue of criminals who use extortion. This is far more common than you likely realize or aware of. Where we are the criminals and intelligence saboteurs/spies are alot more sophisticated, and use computer hacks as part of their planning to extort and blackmail their targets.
- wruza 10y ago>May they be able to see me naked? Well, probably, but I honestly don't think that they will make a lot of money by selling my naked pictures... We all do weird things or at least act slightly differently when we feel alone (being naked is one of those). Your records can be easily used to put a little pressure on you to do something little, not big. Why do you think you're so important to FBI CIA KGB? Regular fraudster will send you your photos and say that your boss/wife/friend will see it, and though there is 'nothing really wrong' on these, you'll pay or feel unprotected, or your party will. That said, far too many people do have personally secret behavior like cheating, gambling, smoking, jerking off (oops, said it), having sex, private speech, strange comments that can be abused out of context (e.g. n-word while playing role in gta:sa). So many ways to get f-ed up.
- akerro 10y ago1. Use Facebook 2. Use DropBox 3. Use Skype 4. Use Google services, always logged in 5. Use Windows 10 6. Use Google Chrome 7. Tape webcam ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Sylos 10y agoThat's what typically happens for people who have no grasp of data. They understand what a camera is, that it takes pictures and that they don't want something to be able to take pictures of them at any given time. They do not understand the whole clusterfuck of data that's drawn about them from every other service and how it can be put together to reconstruct details about them that they do not want others to know about.
- drvdevd 10y agoThe other issue with the webcam taping is that it is becoming less and less of a viable way to even keep yourself from being video recorded. For example, what about the cameras on your smart phone? If we aren't there already, the direction of technology seems to me to be: "cameras all around, everywhere, 360 degrees all the time." Ubiquitus video/audio recording and real time processing. So what are we left with in terms of privacy? I believe we can only hope to control how data is used in this aggregate sense to some extent or other. If even that.
- xapata 10y ago> Ubiquitus video/audio recording and real time processing. ... So what are we left with in terms of privacy? A new sense of what privacy is. It is increasingly rare that someone should have a sense of privacy or anonymity while in a public place. It's reasonable to worry about government abuse of power from monopoly access to the full aggregation of surveillance data (even if that data was not originally intended as surveillance). Many people advocate for damming the flood of data, but this is futile. A more effective solution is to end the monopoly of access -- public aggregation of surveillance data. Twitch for everything. Don't worry quite yet. Wait until we all have wearable cameras.
- 10y ago
- deftnerd 10y agoIt's gotten to the point where I only feel totally comfortable using machines I've hardened myself. My hardened laptop is an older Thinkpad laptop with LibreBoot to replace the BIOS, microphone and speakers and camera disconnected internally, removed the wireless cards, encrypted the partitions, and use Whonix as the OS. I've password protected the BIOS and it's set to boot only from the hard drive and I've also epoxied the screw heads in place as well as put globs of epoxy over all the ports other than USB in order to protect against hardware devices that can access memory through DMA vulnerabilities. It was mostly an exercise in "how secure can I get". I'm not sure what else is possible. If someone manufactured and sold a more modern hardened laptop, I would be interested in buying it.
- tychuz 10y agoI'd rather use my closed source safe operating system like Windows instead of having open source stuff with hearthbleed like stuff open for every hacker, thanks.
- avaloneon 10y agoYou might be interested in something like ORWL[1], which is arguably the most secure consumer PC I've ever heard of. It has tamper-resistant features, full disk encryption, and a secure co-processor which does things like disable the USB data paths when the system locks. Admittedly, though, it's not a laptop. As far as laptops go, the librem 13[2], with Qubes OS and coreboot would be a pretty good bet. If you haven't already, definitely take a look at Qubes OS[3]. It offers security by compartmentalizing different workspaces in different vm's managed by Xen so, in theory, even a kernel exploit isn't getting very far into the system. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/design-shift/orwl https://www.crowdsupply.com/design-shift/orwl [2] https://puri.sm/librem-13/ https://puri.sm/librem-13/ [3] https://www.qubes-os.org https://www.qubes-os.org
- syshum 10y ago>>I prefer not to have to bother removing stickers every time I want to do a Skype call. I solve that by never talking to anyone ;)
- adam12 10y ago> but I honestly don't think that they will make a lot of money by selling my naked pictures I'm thinking you might shell out a few bucks to keep someone from posting pics of you doing something embarrassing while naked.
- Kenji 10y agoYou make the common mistake of thinking that partial security is no better than no security because you can still get compromised. Spoiler alert: It is.
- themartorana 10y agoWatching you - even bored, bearded, naked you - through your camera is the literal incarnation of 1984.
- tedmiston 10y agoThere are some covers that slide instead of stickers so it's still easy to use when needed.
- gjolund 10y ago"People who say they don't care about privacy because they have nothing to hide are like people who say they don't care about free speech because they have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden