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Why would you care about fooling surveillance? The goal is to prevent a potential adversary from getting any video/audio footage, them being aware of you active
by crote 6y ago
Why would you care about fooling surveillance? The goal is to prevent a potential adversary from getting any video/audio footage, them being aware of you actively blocking any attempts is not really relevant.
Besides, the vast majority of users will not be under active attack. Having an on-screen popup when you try to use the webcam telling you that it has been hardware-disabled is quite a must-have. If you don't have something like this, you'll get a lot of support calls which boil down to "you accidentally pressed the kill switch, press it again to re-enable".
- jakobdabo 6y ago> Why would you care about fooling surveillance? For example, when you are "required" [1] to run surveillance software on your computer. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wxvd/students-are-rebelling-against-eye-tracking-exam-surveillance-tools https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wxvd/students-are-rebellin...
- fouric 6y ago...then you just cover the camera and/or mic with a physical cover, such a piece of tape.
- boogies 6y ago> and/or mic How well would tape work on that?
- Vrondi 6y agoThese exam proctoring softwares are only required to be run during the time you are actively taking an exam. The rest of the time, there would be zero issue for a student with hardware disabled camera and microphone.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoThe invasive proprietary software used to prevent cheating cannot be trusted to work only when the students want it work. Its purpose can and will be twisted to fit the agendas of whoever owns the software. It probably introduces several security vulnerabilities into the system just by being installed.
- jackvalentine 6y agoIt's a Chrome extension.
- duskwuff 6y ago> If you don't have something like this, you'll get a lot of support calls which boil down to "you accidentally pressed the kill switch, press it again to re-enable". Yep. This was an extremely common issue in the mid-2000s, when laptops started integrating wireless hardware with hard power switches, often on the side of the laptop where they could easily be toggled by accident.
- varispeed 6y agoBut was it a "fault" of the switch itself or lack of meaningful feedback that the switch was engaged? It seems like they have not implemented it properly and then say it wasn't a good idea, without really giving it a chance.