5 ms·
They say that "The camera is not disconnected in hardware because its field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed."
by voctor 8y ago
They say that "The camera is not disconnected in hardware because its field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed."
- kristofferR 8y agoAnd since the webcam in Macs electrically can't get power without also powering the green notification LED, it's impossible for malicious actors to activate the webcam silently while the lid is open.
- repolfx 8y agoIs that still true? I read some time ago that the LED used to be hardware controlled, but switched to being software controlled at some point.
- Johnny555 8y agoI wonder how long it will be until someone manages to figure out how to use image processing to read the noise seen by the camera sensor while the lid is closed and turn it into audio. Kind of like this: http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804 http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibr...
- unwind 8y agoThat's certainly an interesting thought, but do note (from the linked article): In some of their experiments, the researchers used a high-speed camera that captured 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second.. I haven't checked, but I would be surprised if Apple uses cameras that are capable of that as normal user-facing webcams in their laptops ... Recovering meaningful audio signal (which usually has lots of data above 1 kHz) from the <100 Hz sampling done by a camera seems difficult, Nyquist and all, right?
- Johnny555 8y agoFrom the next paragraph: In other experiments, however, they used an ordinary digital camera. Because of a quirk in the design of most cameras’ sensors, the researchers were able to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video recorded at a standard 60 frames per second.