6 ms·
Note 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
by zw123456 8y ago
Note 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?