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Vendors must start adding physical on/off switches to devices that can spy on us
- HNKingpin 8y agoThat should be the standard for every device, regardless if it spies on you or not. It's so weird how the above article even had to be written.
- spzb 8y agoMirror as the site's busy pining for the fjords at the moment: https://web.archive.org/web/20190420110129/https://larrysanger.org/2019/04/vendors-must-start-adding-physical-on-off-switches-to-devices-that-can-spy-on-us/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190420110129/https://larrysang...
- zw123456 8y agoNote that a physical switch can be overridden just as easy as a soft switch, the vendor can just put a soft switch in parallel with it and you would never know it. The hard switch could turn off the display, speaker etc. while the processor and radio can stay on.
- cobbzilla 8y agoHopefully this would easily be detected, and the brand damage from the resultant public shaming should be enough of a deterrent. But maybe it's really well hidden and eludes detection, or people just don't care and there is no brand damage, or maybe even there's no "real" brand to damage (OEM crapware).
- close04 8y agoI’d imagine a vendor bothering to put an off switch will know that a simple teardown will show if it actually disconnects the device or just signals software to do it. The effort and expense would be for nothing. Most users would never bother to care about the off switch anyway, and the ones that do will know the truth.
- tonyarkles 8y agoEh, as someone else mentioned the soft switch, you could very easily make this teardown resistant by putting the covert power rail on an inner layer of the pcb with the switching transistor out of the way connected to vias. It’s not teardown-proof, but wouldn’t be obvious with a trivial inspection.
- close04 8y agoPerhaps but this would also remove any pretense of deniability from the manufacturer. If discovered it would just show that they went to great lengths (extra engineering effort to implement and hide) which could only be explained by the conscious decision to make it a back door and bypass it later in software. So the issue would no longer be one of ignorance (no button) but of premeditation (button with hidden bypass).
- snaky 8y agoWhat's the brand damage from the resultant public shaming of e.g. Google Nest Guard' 'hidden' microphone?
- meowface 8y agoThat's different. While still very bad, one is omission, and one is full-on deceit.
- amelius 8y agoHow meaningful is brand damage when a company has a quasi monopoly in multiple markets?
- mises 8y agoNest Guard is a monopoly? Or were you referring to something else? I also think a lot of this is completely non-essential (e.g. Nest Guard). I do not have any such "smart devices" at home, and encourage others to do the same. They provide, in my opinion, very little benefit for a great sacrifice. And all that aside, they're just too dang expensive. I don't see the point of spending $600 on a machine-learning toaster.
- macintux 8y agoI don't think we know yet.
- int_19h 8y agoI think we're still finding that out. Have you noticed the attitude towards large tech companies among the general public lately, especially those whose business models are entangled with privacy issues?
- rgrieselhuber 8y agoWe may be back to building our own devices again.
- samstave 8y agoWe need a Bespoke Laptop Boutique Such that we have an open-ish platform built on a sound foundation of security.
- rgrieselhuber 8y agoSomething that Neal Stephenson predicted in Snow Crash. Artisanal, single-origin laptops.
- acct1771 8y agoPlease! We, as a populace, need to grow our own food and build our own quality things again. If this means everyone is equipped to be an electrical engineer and low-level scripter, awesome for business and tech education in general.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 8y agoYes. You could also plug it into a power strip with a physical switch, but again, the device could have a battery backup!
- neilv 8y agoOf course, the devices most people carry around intimately all day have batteries sealed inside them. Even if the batteries were removable, and there were no secondary battery, a device could still (and perhaps increasingly will) be able to harvest power, or be actively powered wirelessly and even at some distance.
- jimnotgym 8y agoI like the way the lens works on the new Lenovo Thinkpad camera. It slides sideways, thereby blocking the camera. That's how I like to see it done
- wutbrodo 8y agoThat was my first thought when seeing Sanger's initial tweets about this. Someone else replied to the tweet pointing it out, and his response was along the lines of "that's not an off switch, it just blocks it". I'm not really sure why blocking the camera isn't strictly _better_ than a physical off switch, at the very least from a trust perspective
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zrm 8y agoDepending on what the cover is made of, it may not be opaque to infrared, which some cameras support. Also, microphones.
- Scoundreller 8y agoShould be easy enough to test with a remote control. I just learned than IR-transparent plastics are more common than I thought: they reduce heat load and make the plastic last longer.
- ntauthority 8y agoI feel that this is one of the reasons that the IR camera option on ThinkPads does not have the covering functionality.
- samstave 8y agoIt would be awesome if the physical sliding of the lens lid was also the physical circuit of the mic. So if closed, the Mic could not EVER function as it would have been physically disconnected.
- croisillon 8y agothe printer/scanner/copier at my workplace needs about 30 seconds when you press the physical switch to actually switch off, it's more of a command than an actual switch
- colejohnson66 8y agoSo does your desktop computer, laptop, and phone?
- croisillon 8y agomaybe but I never switch off my computers physically, I always use a command
- nothrabannosir 8y agoI thought lying about such functionality to consumers would be illegal. I feel that if you sell me a device with the explicit promise that “off means off”, then bypassing that would be.. false advertising? Is that true? Assuming they’d market it that way, originally?
- beenBoutIT 8y agoMost people aren't capable of using a webcam correctly before the addition of a mechanical switch that adds a 50% chance they'll deactivate it and think it's broken. A physical hand-operated integrated cover that slides in front of the camera is a great option for software engineers and HN-level thinkers, but it will only cause grief for the majority of users. Having hidden redundancy would allow Apple's tech support to turn the camera back on when Grandma calls in unable to use FaceTime. How many failed attempts will a typical user make before permanently giving up on a feature, maybe 2?
- Cpoll 8y agoI think people have been sufficiently trained in using off buttons that if you give it the right affordances (visibility, an On/Off label, an LED to show it's on), they'll be able to use it without too much friction. After all, they had to turn on the computer first.
- hombre_fatal 8y agoAn example of this in practice is how the iPhone's bluetooth and wifi disable switches on the fast access menu only work for 24 hours.
- sametmax 8y agoYes but you can't protect yourself against brands being hostile to consumer by asking them for features to protect you. The only protection against that is boycott. No, the goal of the switches is to fend off 3rd party hackers.
- m463 8y agoAlthough this seems like a ridiculous comment, people should realize soft switches are super common. For one (silly but common) example, you can turn off your iphone, but it will turn back on if it's plugged into a charger.
- deytempo 8y agoWouldn’t the packets still need to flow through the kernel?
- nilskidoo 8y agoHow quickly everyone forgets this, and how desperate is the urge to deny how all-encompassing a thing it is: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/26/way-gchq-obliterated-guardians-laptops-revealed-intended/ https://theintercept.com/2015/08/26/way-gchq-obliterated-gua...
- api 8y agoIt would take a law since as it stands it would defeat the purpose of these devices: to spy.
- briandear 8y agoThe purpose of a webcam is to spy?
- api 8y agoI was thinking more of Alexa type devices.
- dymk 8y agoWhere’s it been shown that Amazon Echos spy on you?
- pixl97 8y agoThe purpose of a knife is to cut. You simply trust the wielder of it, perhaps more than you should.
- lisper 8y agoThis entire branch of the discussion is being buried in downvotes, but that is actually a very good analogy. Except in the case of Alexa, it's like you are holding the onion and someone else is slicing it. With a very sharp knife.
- fwip 8y agoAnalogously, the purpose of an Echo is to listen. A sheath is an off-switch for a blade.
- HNKingpin 8y agoDon't think this analogy really applies. I mean you have complete control of the knife - it's a physical tool you hold in your hand. Can't compare this with any electronic device at all, which always does lots of stuff behind your back.
- username223 8y agoMeh. Houses still have windows, and people still have binoculars, but we seem to get by fine with blinds. Tape over your webcam, unplug Alexa, or turn off your phone if you want more privacy. More importantly, there is a social norm that you don't look through people's windows with binoculars. Of course police, spies, or creeps might do it, but that's incredibly rare. Unfortunately, the social norm (and business model) of the modern web is that companies build ever-more-powerful binoculars to constantly stare. That's the real problem we need to fix.
- rolph 8y agothen give them something quite indigestible and toxic to stare at rather than a blank nothing.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago> unplug Alexa, or turn off your phone if you want more privacy. Fully turning off either means have to wait for the devices to boot up whenever you want to actually use them. That time adds up. A mic kill switch would allow the device to be immediately used at the flick of that switch.
- walterbell 8y agoThanks to Purism laptops and phone for taking the lead on kill switches for sensors, https://puri.sm/learn/hardware-kill-switches/ https://puri.sm/learn/hardware-kill-switches/
- btashton 8y agoWhy do I trust my WiFi cards disable pin, but not the "soft button" on my laptop that triggers it via the OS? I get that there is more software when it goes through the OS, but I trust that a whole lot more than the firmware on the WiFi card. This is from the same group that tries to explain how they don't use proprietary firmware blogs by using the Redpine chips just because the blog is already flashed on it rather than loaded into RAM on boot. I wish they would just say it how it is rather than overselling.
- Dunedan 8y ago> Why do I trust my WiFi cards disable pin, but not the "soft button" on my laptop that triggers it via the OS? I get that there is more software when it goes through the OS, but I trust that a whole lot more than the firmware on the WiFi card. When using a physical kill switch you have to trust the hardware. You don't have to trust the firmware or operating system, as a physical kill switch usually disables the power lines to the device. That's something a remote attacker can't circumvent.
- btashton 8y agoThey are just controlling the W_DISABLE signal which the firmware uses to control the actual radio hardware. It is _not_ a hardware switch in the since that the power is shut-off.
- cmrx64 8y agoAt least in the case of Purism’s Librem 5 (unreleased), it’s not a disable pin, it’s removing power entirely from the wifi peripheral. Which is a step up for sure.
- rurban 8y agoSo how would do that with routers, which in the UK conveniently pass a copy to NSA of all communication, with phone baseband devices (qualcomm), with PC CPU's which all have mandatory "lawful" backdoors? The webcam and microphone is only half of the story.
- tyingq 8y agoIt's too bad there's not a company with enough funding and incentive to make equivalents that don't need to phone home. Ones that are competitive in price, functionality, etc. The recent HN post about Mozilla's IOT offering was encouraging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19695595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19695595
- meowface 8y agoWhile that would be ideal, I don't personally mind the phoning home if it only happens after the wake word and if the cloud service greatly improves the response capabilities it might otherwise have. Yes, the word can be heard by mistake, but that's just the risk trade-off I make. I think a physical off switch would be good. At the moment I just unplug my Alexa if I'm particularly concerned it might hear something sensitive. I know many HN readers are far more privacy-conscious than I am, but that's just how I think about it. I personally consider cybercriminals and people who dislike me far greater privacy and security risks to me than tech giants or even the US government.
- samstave 8y agoWhat about having a home router which had a visual alert to all outbound traffic from connected devices to their locations. Super freaking simple to implement. And if it were a page that you could just toggle the ability of the stream flow by clicking on it... to create the FW rule instantaneously and stop that flow. You pull up a dashboard and see all your threads. If you see a thread from [phone]-->[Facebook] and you can just disable that stream. (Where [Facebook] is a list item of all the known FB addresses etc)
- rudolfwinestock 8y agoJanie Crane: “An off switch?” Metrocop: “She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!” —Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6, “The Blanks” https://www.maxheadroom.com/index.php?title=Episode_ABC.1.6:_%22Blanks%22 https://www.maxheadroom.com/index.php?title=Episode_ABC.1.6:...
- rolph 8y agoa real life blank reg here. I live in an RV operate a MESHNET and do everthing i can to foster a common persons free decentralized infrastructure. As mentioned elsewhere ive been taping cameras and stabbing microphones for years now.
- ddingus 8y agoThank you. Depending on how things go, more of us than we think will join you. Solidarity
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoThank you for your service.
- teddyh 8y ago“Computers know too much.” — Blank Reg
- e9 8y agoTell me more about how I can get involved
- acct1771 8y agoExplore and evaluate meshnet projects, find one that you like, and educate others about them. Set up the hardware, link up with existing mesh if you're in a dense enough area. Push federated services like Matrix and ActivityPub based services like Mastadon, so when it's time to go mesh, people don't laugh when you say "It doesn't reach Facebook/Insta".
- mLuby 8y agoTo suggest an alternative, all devices capable of internet communication must allow their traffic to be decrypted by their owner (how that password gets set is up to the individual device). This would allow owners who care to set up a man in the middle and confirm that all outgoing (and maybe even incoming) traffic to the device is what they expect. Any outgoing message that is not decryptable or not expected would be a red flag (which the vendor could try to explain if it is a non-spy message like an unusual error code). Cryptographically I believe it is possible to encrypt a message such that either the user's key or the vendor's key can decrypt, but I'm not 100% sure.
- swiley 8y agoEasier is to just let the user compile and reflash the firmware themselves. But yeah you could give the user access to the devices private keys and certificate store.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoWhat you’re describing is possible and is done currently in corporate environments by forcing devices to accept a self signed cert that allows companies to spy on their employees traffic. Haven’t seen anything for the home market yet, and I’m not sure how you’d get a consumer IOT device to accept your cert.
- exelius 8y agoStick all your IoT stuff in a private VLAN and use a MITM proxy to decrypt / recrypt everything. I have yet to find a consumer device of any sort that lets you easily swap out SSL certs. Even the devices where it’s possible to set up LetsEncrypt will usually get overwritten by firmware updates.
- mLuby 8y agoRight, but how do you decrypt the vendor's encryption? That's why I think you'd need to be able to provide a second key, because if vendors give out their decrypt key they may as well send it all in plaintext.
- amelius 8y agoThis sounds similar to the "do not track" setting in browsers ... which was respected by almost no websites. Why would it work this time? (Physical switch or not)
- lukeschlather 8y ago"Do not track" is kind of fundamentally misguided because it's physically impossible to verify and amounts to just another bit of tracking information. Physical switches are physical and auditable and if the switch is audited to work, it works.
- polskibus 8y agoSuch suggestion seems like something that could be whispered to EU commissioners as a protection for consumers.
- fwip 8y agoIn the meantime, unplug your device when you're not using it. Or spend $3 on an inline-USB switch, so you can be sure that the switch actually does what it says on the tin.
- Tepix 8y agoA vendor who doesn't like it could just make it very inconvenient to use the on/off switch, for example by making it take a very long time until the device becomes available after it has been turned off using a switch. Thus users would be strongly discouraged to use the switch.
- swiftcoder 8y agoThe 1st-generation Echo has a hardware microphone cut-off, but I've never seen confirmation that the Dot (or any later variants of Echo) continue to have a hardware cut-off. I'd hazard a guess that once the public seemed relatively unconcerned about Echo snooping on them, the hardware cut-off would have been removed for cost reductions (alongside the twist-to-adjust volume control).
- tonto 8y agoThis doesn't even mention location data from phones which is so persistently on and hard to disable, yet any usage of maps requires it. I want it off after that...
- kekebo 8y agoAs a workaround if you're on Android you can use Tasker to toggle GPS based on selected apps opening or closing, works rather well
- sanbor 8y agoEven with data off, wifi off and gps off mobile phones interact with towers and carriers are often required to keep logs of your location for a while in case they are required https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/problem-mobile-phones#1 https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/problem-mobile-phones#1
- rolph 8y agoIts about time this idea has caught some traction, ive been taping over cameras, and stabbing microphones with a safey pin and stating the absence of lens covers for years.
- narrator 8y agoTVs and other gadgets that have no microphones or video cameras embedded in them should have a certification like "organic". "NoSpy Certified" or a similar trademark would be appropriate right next to the UL and CE marks.
- monocasa 8y agoWell, 'organic' as a certification doesn't really mean anything. And UL was kind of a joke from having dealt with them personally.
- yayadarsh 8y agoThis is absolutely untrue. "Organic" is a regulated term by the USDA, requiring verification from an accredited certifying agency.
- monocasa 8y agoUSDA organic allows non organic pesticides and herbicides. It's a joke of a standard.
- BenjiWiebe 8y agoReally? Growing up on a farm, and having friends/acquaintances who were either organic or interested in going organic, I don't recall that pesticides and herbicides were allowed. The so-called "organic pesticides" and "organic herbicides" I've seen are mostly just all natural snake oil...
- tgb 8y agoHere's the list of non-organic substances allowed by USDA [1] and hopefully it means more to you than it does to me. [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=06b088e611c5f18a4d02ca9945a1c3dd&rgn=div8&view=text&node=7:3.1.1.9.32.7.354.2&idno=7 https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=06b088e611c...
- rdl 8y ago“Must” according to who? Should, in many cases, sure. I’d rather physically removable sensors rather than off switches, though. Cameras on laptops are far from my greatest concern. Microphone on cellphone is a much bigger concern, as well as perpetual passive metadata plus sensitive data on third party servers required for normal functioning of most services.
- kerng 8y agoIt's interesting that no laptop vendor seems to have made a physical webcam cover included by default- to me that seems like a no brainer that most customers would benefit from. Edit: Thanks for all your comments. It seems that there a few vendors that do offer webcan covers by default now. Definitely will have to check those out.
- anbop 8y agoI have seen several laptops with physical slide covers. Didn’t note the brand.
- helgie 8y agoSome thinkpads have them.
- svrtknst 8y agoI saw a laptop recently (within the year, I think) that had the camera situated under one of the buttons IIRC, so that it was naturally covered when not in use
- kweks 8y agoHuawei Matebook X (dubbed the 'chin cam')
- basetop 8y agoI put electric or duct tape the laptop webcams and have done so ever since my first laptop with a webcam. Only way to be sure you aren't being recorded other than opening up the laptop and physically removing the webcam.
- pdq 8y agoHuawei has: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/25/17050098/huawei-matebook-x-pro-webcam-mwc-2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/25/17050098/huawei-matebook-...
- bookofjoe 8y agoI bought an aftermarket webcam cover that slides open or closed. After a few days, I realized I was always checking to see that it was closed. I went back to using a piece of black electrical tape because that way I KNOW it's blocked without having to check. Besides which it's cheaper. Anything to lower the cognitive load.
- svrtknst 8y agoWhile physical switches would be nice, and I generally am a fan of them, IMO they still require trust in the manufacturer. If I don't trust their software switches, why would I trust their hardware switches?
- HNKingpin 8y agoYou should be able to see the effects, no? At least in cameras (the light won't be flashing).
- askvictor 8y agoMicrophones are much more the worry; you can't cover them up like a camera, and are omnidirectional.
- Scoundreller 8y agoMacBook airs have tiny holes near the microphone. If it’s plugged, it’s very difficult to hear what’s going on. Other macs may be like this too.
- Nasrudith 8y agoWell the thing is they are absurdly fine electronics. It is trivial to reroute so that the switch applies to the LED and not the camera itself (and some other trickery based upon reading its state while keeping it covertly operational). Said lie could still be detected in other ways of course but it wouldn't be a simple and complete fix.
- NikkiA 8y agoTo be fair, if I wanted to build covert surveillance I could also trivially make the switch appear to turn off the camera to commercial camera software but not actually disconnect from my covert software that I provide to TPTB.
- svrtknst 8y agoMaybe - Unless the bypass circumvents that. NSA did exactly that on Samsung (Tizen) TVs a few years back. One of their hacks, IIRC, was that they turned off the standby light so it would appear the TV was shut off.
- Hydraulix989 8y agoCareful! It's just as easy to make a faux off switch that actually just triggers it to disable itself in software. The switch needs to actually cut ALL power going to the camera hardware. I remember some webcams having LEDs that were controlled in software so hackers were able to turn the LED off in code while still recording with the camera the entire time. For now, I will still have my physical webcam cover on because hackers can't stop it from working without physical access to my machine. That said, there isn't much interesting to watch if you really wanted a live feed of my webcam (other than frustrated looks on my face while I'm debugging the work issue du jour).
- rotrux 8y agoHow do we enforce this? We want the federal government to start investigating factories & banning imports of electronic devices with X sensor and Y connectivity capabilities? Do we sue Best Buy unless it changes all its suppliers immediately? The precedents set by categorizing and condemning could create more harm than good. Like so many other privacy articles I read, this one has its heart in the right place, but it treats reality and implementation as an afterthought.
- WalterBright 8y agoAlso a physical switch to enable writing to the flash rom. That way, malware infections to standalone devices won't survive a reboot.
- Scoundreller 8y agoBetter yet, some kind of physical flag when a write is being attempted. When it flags unexpectedly, you know the logs are worth looking at. Pirates used to install locks on their satellite receivers to prevent countermeasures, or at least defer problematic updates.
- phh 8y agoMost chromebooks have that actually. First stage bootloader is shipped read-only (and then there is a secure boot chain), but can be rewritten. It's actually a screw, and it's not totally trivial to access though.
- HALtheWise 8y agoAm I the only one who has far more sensitive content visible on the screen and filesystem of my computer than through its camera? I feel like, at least for the threat models that I consider likely, if someone manages to hack my laptop and get (for example) microphone access, the thing I am most worried about is that they will use acoustic analysis of keystrokes to recover my banking password, not that they will hear me... singing in the shower, I guess? Based on my understanding of current laptop OS's, just directly making a key-logger the straightforward way is easier anyway, so I'm not that concerned. I fear that the sense of security people feel from putting tape over their webcam might be hiding much more realistic threats.
- _bxg1 8y agoIn any security conversation, the vector one should care about is the path of least resistance.
- jammygit 8y agoIf the keystroke analyzer was an automated script, being used by some script kiddie who found it on the internet in the near future, the path of least resistance ends up with a really really large number of lanes.
- idlewords 8y agoUse a password manager!
- nine_k 8y agoSettup 2FA, e.g. TOTP — then even directly observing you typing in both the password and the token won't do much.
- lucb1e 8y ago> far more sensitive content visible on the screen and filesystem of my computer than through its camera I mean, yeah, being hacked (and thereby compromising your screen/HDD's contents) is an issue in the first place and keyloggers are only a few lines of code, but I don't think there is anything wrong with controlling the parts that you can control. You can't make a physical "no keyloggers for this piece of text, please" switch, but at least they can't hear you talk to a close friend or watch you walk by as you get into the shower (though the latter is a bigger risk for women than for the more common HN visitor, I guess). You're not the first comment I see wondering why we even want this, and it's really weird to see. Why would we not want this?! I don't think that, just because we have webcam stickers, we suddenly stop caring about malware altogether. I think even (metaphorically) my mom understands that if you tape your webcam, a virus can still steal the bank login that is happening on her computer. Even if she doesn't really get the concept of a process, malware, and a web browser in the first place, taping a cam does not make everything on a computer virus-proof.
- dwheeler 8y agoI would dearly love to have this. If it's controlled by software, then it is subvertible in a way that pure hardware solutions should be invulnerable to.
- tyfon 8y agoI wonder if/when the vendors of those home assistants will be required by law to activate on a list of confidencial sounds like screams, gunshots etc. Maybe not in one year, but in five.. ten? If they get proper penetration it would be a tempting target for various governments for differing reasons.
- Mirioron 8y agoAnd regulation will require that you have one in your home, just like a fire alarm. The future is bleak.
- Proven 8y agoThey don't have to do shit. The thing is info harvesting subsidizes the cis of hardware and as we well know from the Android phone market (and how privacy oriented phones have been doing) there simply isn't enough demand to even justify a 3 cent plastic hardware switch. They sell 1 million devices, 10K people use the hardware switch, and 100K people have a support issue because they mistakenly turned their WiFi off. So why would they include it? If it's valuable to you, buy a niche device - it'll cost you and extra $50 or whatever, but hey you'll have your privacy.
- jtr1 8y agoI agree with the author's aims, but for the average person the difference between a hardware and software switch is likely immaterial. To the uninitiated, there's not a great reason to trust that Alexa's "mute" button does what it says. To gain trust, I think we need tactile physical interventions: a built-in webcam cover and a slider over the microphone. If it doesn't exist already, I'd imagine there's a market for a nicely designed phone case that includes both.
- jsilence 8y agoThe USB spec has a part where USB devices can be turned on and off by software on a USB hub. Unfortunately almost no USB-Hub implementation/device supports this part of the spec. I have been looking into this for a while with the goal of watchdogging and powercycling unreliable USB devices. The seemingly only USB hub at that time was unfortunately not on sale any more, even back at that time. Maybe this could be a nice kickstarter, a smart USB hub that can be integrated into the smart home/IoT world. I'd buy it. Since it is separate software, not the webcam software, that is switching the webcam off, we would not have to trust the webcam software maker to fullfill the promise.
- sudoaza 8y agoI would totally buy into this, recently i found two really disturbing facts that made me uninstall Instagram, - first that while its open it listens to what you say and then shows you adds based on that (no i didnt search for the same thing or could be an expected interest of me) - second i found that my location was briefly turning on and back off by itself, on one of those on/off and instagram notification arrived, after uninstalling that never repeated. We need control back on our devices. I friend went so far as to add a physical on/off on he's macbook. I went out of my way to get a mobile i can root easily. There is a market for this.
- jondumbau 8y agoCan anyone else comment or corroborate this? I don't disbelieve you but it's a gigantic if substantiated and would definitely get me to leave the platform.
- upofadown 8y ago>Another “clever” solution is to use a software off switch, like this (for Windows). But it simply turns your webcam’s driver on and off. The OpenBSD people have recently made microphone off the default at the kernel level. You need to have root access to turn it on again and you need to take an explicit action to have it come on at boot. That is actually sort of secure as people don't run as root in *nix environments when they are doing things that can get them cracked (i.e. run web browsers). Turning the microphone on should really be an admin level thing... Perhaps what we want isn't a switch but a button. You can activate it but it is off by default. There really needs to be a obvious light as well...
- HocusLocus 8y agoFrankenstein knife switches ornate polished brass actuators webcams with closable eyelids (and eyelashes, eyelash mites) then in hacker movies the eyelid can spring open
- pragmaticpandy 8y agoThis is badly needed for public USB c chargers—a switch that disables the data pins but allows charging.