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> "Designed to protect your privacy, Mac notebooks have a camera indicator light to let you know when the camera is on. ... Published Date: July 02, 2020" Perh

• toxik 6y ago
  Fud, these don’t work anymore.
  • electrotype 6y ago
    these
  • OrangeKnucles 6y ago
    Something new will come that will work.
  • zdragnar 6y ago
    The fact that they worked at all is an indication that something similar may work in the future. It's not like apple has never had a regression in software.
    • gist 6y ago
      Risk to the average apple customer is? Do you think that most people need to worry about this? Point Apple is making is it's not needed for the vast majority of their users and if you feel better use a piece of paper. So let's stipulate it can happen (because well it can happen). That would take both someone being targeted en masse (prior to apple having a fix in place) and it making a difference to the person or people it happened to. Is that really a big enough risk to spend time worrying about?
    • NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      Gruber has an article about this; he mentions someone who is a former Apple engineer saying it's now implemented entirely in hardware. https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/on_covering_webcams https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/on_covering_webcams
  • ziddoap 6y ago
    Not to presume what the OP was meaning, but I'm guessing they were pointing to these cases as a "it has been vulnerable before, it may be vulnerable again. But a cover is not exploitable in this way" rather than "these exploits work".
  • iso1631 6y ago
    Which ones do? Which bugs, loopholes, backdoors, etc allow the camera to get through my cover (I upgraded to sliding plastic from electrical tape at the start of lockdown and there was a need for an actual camera)
  • jamra 6y ago
    Do you expect him to post links to zero day exploits? If it's actively targeted and done so consistently and sequentially, it is reasonable to expect that it _could_ be happening now.
  • adrianmonk 6y ago
    I don't think they are saying that a vulnerability currently exists. I think they are saying that people don't trust these lights because they have a bad track record. It could be that the current implementation is better, but how is an end user supposed to know it's better? It's kind of a matter of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
    • gist 6y ago
      > that people don't trust these lights because they have a bad track record. No tech people who think about and obsess about this type of 'risk' don't trust the lights. Most Apple customers vast majority don't think and don't care.
      • stouset 6y ago
        I would wager money that precisely zero of the "tech people who think about and obsess about this type of 'risk'" have had their privacy compromised as a result of an Apple laptop misrepresenting the on/off state of the camera. It's been twelve years since a vulnerability in this was reported, and by all reports the LED power state is now implemented in hardware. It's long since time to obsess over other sources of risk, instead of the dead ghosts of previous ones.
        • uniqueid 6y ago
          An opaque piece of tape used to disable a camera is one of few components a user can completely understand. Apple is probably correct to tell users to rely on Apple's security features, but those features are way more complicated than a piece of tape.
• NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  >2013: iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/36569 https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/36569 ... applies only to older Mac notebooks from like 2008 period which are long since obsolete according to Apple's announced support policy. >2016: Your Mac’s Camera Can Be Hacked https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/your-macs-camera-ca.. https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/your-macs-camera-ca.... ... refers specifically the exploit above. >2016: Former NSA employee: This hack gains access to your Mac's webcam https://www.cnet.com/news/mac-webcam-hack-ex-nsa-employee/ https://www.cnet.com/news/mac-webcam-hack-ex-nsa-employee/ ... is an attack that depends on the camera already being in use by another application and therefore has nothing to do with the camera indicator.
  • dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    The problem is in the design: by not providing a hardware switch, all we have is trust. As we can see from the past, unfortunatly it's not enough.
    • GuiA 6y ago
      I had a laptop with a physical switch for WiFi/Bluetooth in 2006 or so (with a matching orange/blue light that would turn up when you toggled it). The problem was that this was actually all done by a software driver - when I booted into Linux with the laptop I was surprised to find that the bluetooth/wifi modules were on regardless of the switch's position. At the end of the day, unless you have a really nice microscope, solid understanding of electrical engineering, and a few tens of thousands of hours ahead of you, you have to trust whoever you're buying the hardware from that it will do what they say it will. No amount of hardware efforts can solve the fundamental human trust problem.
      • dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
        I had another laptop with a hardware switch and a corresponding LED, and it worked exactly as it should - the hardware was completely inaccessible under Linux. So yes, it can be done and it's not rocket science.
• apecat 6y ago
  Recent Apple laptops have a separate SoC dedicated to secure boot as well as making sure macOS has no direct control over that camera indicator light, and more https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/29/what-apples-t2-chip-does-in-your-new-macbook-air-or-macbook-pro https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/29/what-apples-t2-ch... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Silicon#T_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Silicon#T_series
  • aboutBen 6y ago
    If the T2 chip is compromised, then separate SoC protection is moot. The only true protection is a physical covering (like in the Lenovo) or physical kill switch (like the Purism laptops).
    • Closi 6y ago
      At that stage though all bets are off - the hackers have access to everything you have typed, all your files, all the audio from your microphones, your credit card details, those photos of you and your partner on the hard drive... Yet the camera on a laptop is the thing that we need to cover? It’s a weird security model, that’s all. Besides, on a MacBook it sounds like the webcam light is almost impossible to circumvent because of the implementation.
      • y7 6y ago
        For those photos of you and your partner you made the conscious decision to take them, perhaps even weighing the risks of them being compromised at some point. This is very different from a video feed being captured of you unknowingly. That goes for both the impact of such a compromise, and the feeling of the risk of being watched. Almost impossible just means it requires lots of money/dedication, but still a T2 chip compromise is scalable and can be done remotely, which is fundamentally different from physically compromising hardware.
      • GekkePrutser 6y ago
        Well Purism laptops have hardware switches for the microphones too. But it's not even just for hackers. Zoom had the SUPER annoying habit of turning your cam on when the meeting organiser selected that everyone should cam. This led to several colleagues being unaware they were being shown at that time. One was even lying in bed and called in from her phone. That's her business, it was 8pm at her location. But now everyone knows. A hardware slider would have prevented all of these real-world problems.
• livre 6y ago
  > Designed to protect your privacy, Mac notebooks have a camera indicator light to let you know when the camera is on. ... The main problem with that isn't that it is possible to disable the LED. The problem is that the LED is like a smoke detector, when it alerts you it's already too late, you are on fire (or your photo/video has already been taken). An indicator LED doesn't protect your privacy, it only tells you when it has already been breached.
  • mannykannot 6y ago
    ...and it only tells you that if you are looking at it at the time.
    • iso947 6y ago
      Indeed. Think of the “American Pie” situation. Laptop open playing Spotify to get you in the mood, then bop, on goes the camera thanks to a bug in zoom. Are you going to notice?
  • DanBC 6y ago
    The problem with a physical cover is that if the bad guys can install software on your computer that can access the camera without setting off the LED they can also install just about anything they want. At that point nothing on the computer can be trusted.
    • jdbernard 6y ago
      How is thisa problem with the hardware cover? It's a problem with the security model in general.
  • valuearb 6y ago
    On new Macs the light is a minimum 3 seconds even for a single frame photo. Anyone monitoring you has to turn the light in just to see if you are there, and what you are doing, and will likely have to watch for hours to catch any incriminating footage. You will have plenty of notice.
• tlrobinson 6y ago
  There should be roughly ~0 cost (maybe a few cents?) to tie indicator LEDs to the camera and microphones's power supplies, and make it independently auditable by anyone with a multimeter (and maybe a magnifying glass?) Is there a database of laptops that do this correctly? I guess you'd also want the microphone physically disconnected when the cover is closed, or at least have the LED visible when the cover is closed.
  • esprehn 6y ago
    Chromebooks all do this, it's a requirement that the LED is on if the camera is on from within the camera module itself. There's no software involved.
• zitterbewegung 6y ago
  If you read to the bottom of the directions it says you can use a sticker. So this looks like its targeted to the plastic camera covers that can be turned on and off.
  • OriginalPenguin 6y ago
    Yes, tearing off a small piece of a post-it note seems ideal.
• m463 6y ago
  Maybe apple needs to address customer concerns. Possibly move the ambient light sensor to the side, leave more space for tape/cover, or add a hardware cutout switch.
• verytrivial 6y ago
  And The Hindenberg was "designed" to ferry passengers across the sky in luxury. They've chosen their words very carefully.
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    The ferrying part was arguably fine. It’s the landing part that they have to work on.
• deleted 6y ago
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