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Apple added an orange dot that’s a showstopper for live visuals

284 points by radley 5y ago

szhu 5y ago
This thread has a lot of people arguing for the live visuals use case over protecting privacy or vice versa. Not only are they both important, but I think we can actually have both. To easily solve both the privacy and the live visuals issue, Apple should make it so that the dot is only shown on a display of it is: - the primary display (the one notifications appear on, since that's where the user typically checks for system status), - the built-in display, if any, - the display the cursor is on, or - the display containing the frontmost window. These are the only kinds of displays that make sense to have a persistent privacy indicator on. Anyone who's sitting at a computer is looking at at least one of these displays. The secondary displays that artists use to show fullscreened live visuals always fit none of these criteria.
togaen 5y ago
I don’t understand what the problem is. Why does it matter whether a little orange dot is there or not.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jaywalk 5y ago
  The orange dot will appear on the live output, which is fed to an LED video wall/projector/etc. on or near a stage. Completely unacceptable, and makes Macs entirely useless for live visuals.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > Completely unacceptable But.... why? Why would a little orange dot offend anyone?
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      Because it's not part of the visuals, which should be the only thing on the output. Maybe it's because I've actually run systems for this exact purpose, but I'm kind of surprised at how difficult this seems to be for some to grasp.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        But I don't understand why they're mirroring their desktop to some kind of visual display system? Wouldn't they be using something like a DeckLink for this use-case? Monitor outputs are for monitors - if you want an application-specific video output you can get that and it won't be a desktop so it won't have this problem. If you mirror your desktop then yeah... you get whatever desktop UI chrome is on your desktop.
        ehutch79 5y ago
        Because most of these displays look like monitors to your system. Using the existing rendering pipelines to a full screen monitor is far easier, and less expensive then custom hardware just to move pixels that the built in graphics card is more than capable of
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        Ok so it's a quick hack for video output but they're going to run into problems like this. And for example any notifications, system updates, Launchpad, whatever, would also appear. That's how you end up with goofy things like a sign with a Windows 'need to update now' message. If they were doing it properly with a production video output they wouldn't have this problem.
        jaywalk 5y ago
        You can call it a "quick hack" if you'd like, but I can assure you that all of the potential pitfalls you mention are taken into account by the people who setup and run these systems. You're not going to "gotcha!" people who have actually done this stuff.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    You seem to be confusing two things (well, really just you're being hyperbolic): TRUE: the dot BEING THERE is useless (and undesireable and bad) FALSE: the dot makes Macs useless for live visuals Just because something is 100% bad design, bothersome, 100% negative, and should never have been allowed to happen, does NOT mean it destroys a product entirely. When Mini Coopers were made with the stupidest turn signals ever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282) that doesn't make the car undrivable even though there's ABSOLUTELY no defense of the design.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      The dot absolutely makes Macs useless for live visuals. Nobody worth a damn would ever use a system that required an orange dot to appear on the live output.
      - quadrangle 5y ago
        You can use them for live visuals. You WON'T (and I don't blame you), but you CAN. "Absolutely useless" obviously is intended to be "I'm super mad about this" rather than literally true.
        nullandvoid 5y ago
        You're picking a really odd hill to die on. Is it that hard to imagine that having random imagery (orange dot) showing on your live work (which a client has paid $$$ for) is a complete no-go for professionals (if you ever want to get hired again)?
        quadrangle 5y ago
        Just mildly objecting to the strength of someone's hyperbole is life-threatening? Just because other people are feeling super aggravated about this completely stupid design decision by Apple doesn't mean it's valid to project that on me as if I'm fighting some battle. I don't really care about this. I get it, people are upset about a totally indefensible, short-sighted design that impacts people's ability to use Macs to do presentations that will be accepted in professional contexts. Yes, there's some sense to the hyperbole that says something is "useless" when reality is "this will not be accepted in my field of work". It's still hyperbole. Admitting that it's hyperbole doesn't mean accepting the bad design.
  - buildbuildbuild 5y ago
    My temporary fix has been to use an expensive hardware scaler to crop the output when I run into this. You’d think Apple would have plenty of production experts beta testing, I’m sure this will eventually affect their own live events. Mic input is very useful for receiving timecode to keep production gear in sync.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      Yeah, I considered that when I was reading the article. If your content can still look alright being scaled, that'll work. There is definitely some content that won't be quite so forgiving, though.
      - buildbuildbuild 5y ago
        You’re right. To clarify I’m blacking out the top X pixels to hide the dot, not scaling.
    - modeless 5y ago
      There's a built in accessibility zoom feature in macos, can it also crop out the dot?
- dangrossman 5y ago
  Did you read the article? "In our particular case, this means that this orange dot appears on the stage output, which is totally unacceptable for anyone using macOS as a professional video tool that sends video output to a video projector." Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - quadrangle 5y ago
    Gosh, everyone who was about to be convinced to go buy a Big Mac will lose their appetite! /s
  - bryan0 5y ago
    I'm sure Parent read the article, but the question is why is this a big deal? For someone not in the live visual space, it's not immediately clear that an orange dot in the corner is "totally unacceptable". > Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square. I don't think I would notice or care?
    - dangrossman 5y ago
      > I don't think I would notice or care? Do you think none of the advertisers, or billboard owners, would notice or care? Those are the clients paying the people that read this site to create and run their live visuals. A 5 foot diameter orange dot on top of their ad is not what they signed off on. There is money at stake. Whether you care or not isn't relevant.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        As a New Yorker, I’d love to have that sort of visual feedback on the surveillance of Times Square, a public space. And whether I care is quite relevant.
        5y ago
- khazhoux 5y ago
  I think the context is if you are using Mac to generate visuals that get projected on a screen during performances. I guess now you wind up with an orange dot in top right corner. So presumably you'd see a big orange dot in the right-most screen here: https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/thomyorke-6_preview-e1513280616534.jpg https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
- olyjohn 5y ago
  Looks unprofessional IMO if you were watching a live stream, and there was a permanent orange dot on your video. People may be screen capturing using an external output... Would it bother you if Star Wars had an orange dot in the corner the whole time? People want to make professional videos and live streams, and not have a constant reminder that there's a Mac somewhere involved in the video... and this has hosed people's workflows.
- eropple 5y ago
  Because when you are running video out to a 150" LED wall, that orange dot is a very large dot. And even were it not, you are not building your presentational elements around "having some orange dot on screen". "I mean, jeez. They just left the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, what's the big deal?"
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    The mouse cursor on the side of the screen is stupid indeed. But it doesn't make presentations impossible. I think all the objections here are objecting to hyperbole rather than defending the dot.
    - ehutch79 5y ago
      Not presentations, Think big musicians/festivals.
      - quadrangle 5y ago
        Yeah, I get it. Not gonna be accepted in practice. Could be accepted though, it's not literally useless. Being not as bad as literally-useless doesn't mean anything about the situation is good.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - sixothree 5y ago
    How are you going to a 150" LED wall and not processing the output? I think that's the part I don't get.
    - kfarr 5y ago
      Well they may be processing the output but the raw input has an orange dot so at the very least this is additional labor to configure additional custom processing.
- kinghtown 5y ago
  Visually distracting.. a loss of control in design.. a reminder of Apple when you are displaying unrelated content.. A live show doesn’t need the visual art to have an orange dot. Im surprised you can’t see how that could matter.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  Everyone focuses on the dot and can no longer listen to the content of the presentation? /s My honest guess is that the author of the article is SUPER mad about this out of some principle-of-the-thing about how the design shouldn't do this, and they just ran with that in writing self-righteous nonsense about how this makes presentations impossible or something. It's about as bad as having the cursor show up on the edge of a live presentation slide.
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    "Live presentation" like "the visuals on the video wall behind Mariah Carey while she sings live for 10 million people on TV", not "live presentation" like "your PowerPoint presentation to your 4 coworkers". This is a news site for professional digital musicians and animators. The kind of people that are in charge of making the digital visuals behind a live performance like I described. This is not a "principle of the thing" argument, it's a "this update stops us from doing our job using Mac hardware" argument.
    - quadrangle 5y ago
      Yeah, I get it. Apple's design is stupid and shouldn't have happened. But obviously Mariah Carey CAN sing on TV with a little orange dot. Obviously nobody wants that, and in practice nobody will accept it. But it remains completely possible and would not completely destroy her performance. The hyperbole here is just so extreme.
      - dangrossman 5y ago
        If in practice nobody will accept it, then there's nothing hyperbolic about the article.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > The hyperbole here is just so extreme. You've never been near a show production, have you? I was involved with an amateur theater that had some projections during one of their plays. Even they were very peculiar about what was projected, where, and how. One of the projections was a black-and white archive footage. Yes thank you, I'd love an orange dot there, it doesn't ruin it at all.
- rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
  My interpretation from the article is that you might imagine the external display output is a video wall for a concert with a full screen visual show being synced to music or something, thus the simultaneous audio capture going on.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  For the same reason why you may not want to see an orange dot when you watch a movie in a theater and also the reason art galleries don't put orange dots in front of artworks. It is a special case where Macs connected to a projector are used to display live visual. The microphone is on, most likely so that the visuals can respond to sounds, and you get to show an ugly orange dot to your audience. Macs are used a lot in the entertainment industry so it is not an insignificant problem.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    From purely a privacy perspective, that is an interesting comparison. Some art installations that record their observers do have disclaimers that recording is happening, sometimes by law.
  - treesprite82 5y ago
    For a lot of the examples being given in this thread, like billboards and movies, I'd actually welcome an orange dot notifying me that audio is being recorded - since that's not an expectation I'd otherwise have. Though this probably isn't what Apple are trying to do, and would need to be enforced to prevent circumvention. The initial example of live shows (specifically the subset of which where the same device is being used for some kind of audio input and visual output) is so far the most convincing example because the orange dot is redundant there.
    - simonh 5y ago
      It’s not being recorded, the Audi input is being used to generate reactive video responsive to the audio track.
      - treesprite82 5y ago
        I note "some kind of audio input" for that case. Notifying of audio-recording billboards/etc. is a separate case signalled by the dot (which I think could theoretically be a positive, but isn't practically achieved with just this change).
- david422 5y ago
  If you went to the website www.apple.com and there was an orange dot in the corner, how long do you think it would be before Apple changed it?
- fold3 5y ago
  It mostly concern artists that present video such as for art exhibition or VJ live shows I believe. Any unintended visuals would kill the immersion, the aesthetics and looks unprofessional. Like leaving the mouse cursor visible or UI elements. I see that some people above suggested a solution with an extra hardware device but even though a lot of theses creatives are using macs, they aren't especially tech literate outside of their field and have to make do with venue that can use quirky hardware with sometimes very limited time to set up their gears. This dot is a major pita for these users.
mediocregopher 5y ago
I'm all for shitting on apple, but does the orange dot actually obstruct anything? It seems to just be sitting in the notification bar being out of the way.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  This is spelled out very clearly in the article, more than once.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- buildbuildbuild 5y ago
  Visual artists often use secondary monitor outputs to display media on projectors or large LED walls. Secondary outputs are also commonly used in broadcast for keyed font overlays among other things. Power users should be able to disable anything.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  > I'm all for shitting on apple why?
8bitben 5y ago
This is a tough intersection between highly-visible privacy controls and the ability for artists to use their Macs in live performance situations where any overlays could be a distraction. In the Privacy menu in MacOS now, you can authorize applications to do things like use locations services and record the screen. I think it would be reasonable to include an authorization for audio recording and bypass the orange indicator. Or they could turn on the webcam green light when audio input is active?
- minhazm 5y ago
  The webcam light won't work if you're using a laptop in clamshell mode, or even using a Mac Mini/Pro. I think the best middle ground for this is to allow users to grant some permission that allows the app to access the Mic without turning the orange dot on.
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    Why would spyware not request this permission?
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      I think the implication in the post was that the user would be prompted to grant the permission, so they would have to click "Yes" when the spyware asked for permission.
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      Were this to be a permission, there would be no legitimate use case where "hide microphone use indicator" would be a required function. Anything that requires that should be flagged immediately as hostile.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    Or a simple toggle deep in the system settings: "Show indicator when using a microphone or webcam".
- 5y ago
lolpython 5y ago
This isn't good. Most of the live visuals I've seen are in a dimly lit room with a black background. Often this is so that it's hard to see the edges of the screen and the visualization appears to be floating. Having an orange dot in the corner would break the immersion for the audience. It's also going to be larger when projected, maybe a couple inches in diameter.
- skytreader 5y ago
  This is the first explainer in this thread that makes me see the issue. All this time I'm thinking along the lines of "Okay you're, projecting video in a wedding. Now there's an orange dot on the screen. Boohoo." So, apparently, I gotta dream bigger. Like museum AVP or concert/live performance/DJing type of live visuals. Yeah now an orange dot is a showstopper.
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    Why do you need to record sound when presenting some video? I’m a total noob in this, just curious.
    - lolpython 5y ago
      I’m generalizing, but basically: Live visualization takes a live music performance as input and programmatically generates a video that matches said music performance. The video might pulse along with the beat of the music. Or maybe it changes color or shape depending on the “mood” of the audio. The computer driving the visualization receives audio from the live music via a line in, which Apple treats as an active microphone. A simple live visualization would be to display a video showing the waveform of the live audio feed.
adolph 5y ago
I just updated straight from macOS Catalina to Monterey, and one thing that's really bugging me is the Microphone Usage indicator in the top right corner. I have this app called "Background Music" to help amplify the otherwise terrible audio of my earbuds. I know it's using my microphone; I don't need this constant annoying overlay. Anyone know a solution? https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qhbt4n/how_to_disable_orange_dot/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qhbt4n/how_to_disabl...
formerly_proven 5y ago
In the film editing space workstations use dedicated video I/O hardware which fully circumvents the display/video stack of the OS to be able to input/output exactly the pixels you want in exactly the format you want (something that's essentially impossible using OS facilities, much less in a cross-platform manner). This seems like a very good application for those cards (they're not particularly expensive, around 200 bucks [1]). [1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink/techspecs/W-DLK-32 https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink/techspecs... (4K, PCIe) https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techspecs/W-DLUS-13 https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techsp... (less than 100 bucks, but only 1080p on Thunderbolt) (SDK: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/product/capture-and-playback https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/product/capture-a...)
- lolpython 5y ago
  What is this equipment called? It sounds like the opposite of a capture card. edit: looking at your updated post, it is called a "playback card."
  - greenknight 5y ago
    Yep. Used heavily for editing works, colour grading works for tv / film, sound works. Pretty much anything professional, they will discard what the GPU is doing (and inbuilt audio) and use these sorts of external devices. This way, you know EXACTLY what the program is computing, nothing else.
- NavinF 5y ago
  Could you give an example of such a card? (model/name) Also what’s the use case where they can’t export the video and transfer it as a file or byte stream?
  - buildbuildbuild 5y ago
    These are great: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techspecs/W-DLUS-13 https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techsp... Use case: live (minimizing latency), no compression, compatibility with other gear.
ehvatum 5y ago
- rched 5y ago
  > MacOS is a strictly consumer-facing platform for running App Store Apps What are you basing that on? Apple markets these products directly to professionals in a lot of cases. They even sell professional audio software.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  > for running App Store Apps MacOS runs whatever you want it to run if you decide to trust the developer.
- dmd 5y ago
  As a Mac user who doesn't use and has never used any App Store Apps, what the ____ are you talking about?
- tqi 5y ago
  > MacOS is a strictly consumer-facing platform for running App Store Apps, so I’m confused as to who is even objecting to this feature. So true, which is why so many of their products have "Pro" in the name.
treesknees 5y ago
In theses cases, is audio being input into the Mac and that's why it shows up, because they're "recording" into the application generating the visuals? I don't understand why the Microphone notification is there at all if it's just outputting audio/video. Are these applications recording audio? Or is it just a result of the APIs/permissions they end up using? Seems like there should be a compromise where apps that are using line input instead of the physical microphone could be exempt from the dot.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- RandallBrown 5y ago
  Yes, the dot is there to indicate to people that they might be being recorded. There's no way to distinguish if the line input is just another microphone or not so exempting that wouldn't solve the issue Apple is trying to solve.
- dangrossman 5y ago
  The article covered this. "live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like"
  - treesknees 5y ago
    Thanks, I did read the article but missed this part. I had it in my head that it would be something like playing a locally-sourced audio feed through an app, but I suppose input from more complex equipment makes sense.
  - ratww 5y ago
    Is there a line input on newer MacBooks? I thought the jack had just mic input! Also, does anyone knows whether the orange dot shows up when you also use an external USB audio interface? If so this is kind of stupid on the part of Apple. The article also mentions that those apps turn on Microphone capture even when unnecessary, so it seems the dot it's doing its job, although obviously there was a massive oversight, and there should have been a special permission to disable IMO.
kazinator 5y ago
Is this dot anything more than a software feature? If so, its absence doesn't actually prove that sound isn't being monitored. What you want is a dedicated LED that is routed directly to the sound input being on at the circuit board level: like the amplifier is on, or that path is enabled by hardware or whatever. Even then, if the meaning assignment is "LED glowing = sound monitored", you cannot trust it entirely: the LED being off could mean that the LED itself is faulty. But at least you know that the mechanism cannot be tampered with by software.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  yeah, i don't use a screen lock on my computer because a sophisticated attacker would just pull my data off my ssd since the decryption key is stored in memory anyways. it is much more valuable to have an indicator that your mic IS hot than having no indicator at all, not to mention adding an led indicator does fuck all for people who don't buy the $currentYear+1 laptop.
htunnicliff 5y ago
http://archive.today/bi8UU http://archive.today/bi8UU
bragr 5y ago
- capableweb 5y ago
  This has the be the weirdest requirement I've heard from someone who wants to read a blogpost on someones website. Why it matters if it's behind a CDN or not? Problem is that the person hasn't handled even a small amount of usage load before, even the cheapest instance from DigitalOcean + NGINX can handle most loads you throw at it if configured properly for static content, which it almost is by default when you install it.
- Kiro 5y ago
  A single $5 Digital Ocean droplet should be able to handle tens of thousands requests a second without any CDN or load balancing.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- radley 5y ago
  > http://archive.today/bi8UU http://archive.today/bi8UU thanks @htunnicliff
- WJW 5y ago
  HN: Centralization is the purest form of evil, you should self-host everything! Also HN: If you don't put your site behind a CDN I won't even bother reading it because I will lose interest during the 90+ seconds it takes to load. (And yes I know that these posts are not usually made by the same people, but it still amuses me to see posts with such radically differing views on the front page at the same time)
- vbphprubyjsgo 5y ago
  Well congratulations, you are the one person in the world who bothered to go dig into the network before opening the page and save him one millisecond of CPU time.
- 5y ago
armchairhacker 5y ago
Shouldn't these things be in hardware? Like I know that macbooks have a green LED next to the camera if they are recording. I'm sure there's a way to hack the screen to make the orange dot disappear. At the least you can intercept the output buffer.
lwansbrough 5y ago
The number of people in this thread not understanding the importance of not having any interference in live visuals makes me believe this won’t be fixed by Apple. Absolutely baffling.
- zenexer 5y ago
  If I’m forced to choose between live entertainment and a great privacy feature like this one, the privacy feature is going to win. Artists will get creative and find workarounds; other companies will fill the gap, and other commenters have pointed out cheap hardware that solves this problem.
  - EricE 5y ago
    What is the benefit of forcing the stupid dot on ALL displays?!? How is offering an option for it to ONLY be visible when the menu bar is also visible compromising the notification in any way? There are software solutions like NDI that the hardware solution doesn't fix and why should I have to buy hardware to fix a problem that should have never existed in the first place? It's asinine and really not that complicated - don't show UI shit on displays that aren't showing the menu bar. There is always one display that must have a menu bar - show crap like this there and only there.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    You're clearly not involved in live entertainment, so you're not making that choice. It's also a false choice, because Apple could easily preserve privacy while also making their hardware usable for live entertainment again. Just a couple ideas off the top of my head would be to allow the user to choose which display(s) have the indicator (defaulting to all displays, of course) or adding an additional permission level for applications that are already approved for audio input to not show the indicator. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing situation if Apple is even remotely interested in addressing this use case, which they should be.
    - zenexer 5y ago
      > You're clearly not involved in live entertainment I used to be. > It's also a false choice Yes, yes it is. It's been like this for decades. Entertainers are expected to buy the most expensive hardware available even when they're just getting started. Conform or be stigmatized for using inferior technology. We're talking about an industry in which AudioQuest has no trouble selling passive 3m HDMI cables for upwards of $1k. Maybe this is the first time Apple has stepped on your toes, but it won't be the last. Be prepared to fork over the cash for a specialized dongle you wouldn't need on any other platform, lest that orange dot mar your reputation. Let's be real: this isn't going to harm Apple's sales in the slightest, and they know it. The only way they could possibly harm their reputation in the entertainment industry is by lowering their prices, opening up their ecosystem, and eliminating $1k monitor stands. They know you'll ultimately cough up the dough for an adapter, no matter how much you complain. They know you don't have a choice. They get money from me, a privacy-conscious end user with a choice, and they get money from you, a disgruntled professional without a choice.
nojito 5y ago
How would you disable this without compromising security/privacy?
- capableweb 5y ago
  You allow the user to keep a whitelist of apps they already knew will be using the microphone/line-in/whatever audio source and when those apps use any audio source, don't display the orange dot.
- fouric 5y ago
  The article addresses this: > And it does seem there could be a fix here; you already have to give applications permission to access your mic and camera, and it seems there should be some way for an app to disable the orange dot once its permissions are elevated with opt-in by the user. MacOS already has security mechanisms meant to prevent malware from e.g. installing a rootkit into the kernel, or reading keychain passwords - one of those mechanisms could be used to prevent programs from altering whatever setting controls "show orange notification dot" (which, in a sane design, would be opt-out - or, opt-in to "disable orange notification dot) on their own.
  - nojito 5y ago
    How does that prevent malicious grants of permission? This was a problem with webcams before the light was hardcoded to the power supply.
    - fouric 5y ago
      Hmmm, can you clarify what you mean by "malicious grants of permission"? Do you mean when a piece of software (malware, in this case) tells the OS to give it permission to hide the dot, when the user hasn't consented? If that's the definition you're using - MacOS already guards against that, simply because the orange dot is already being implemented in software in a way that is difficult/impossible for ordinary programs to change (but is controllable by the OS). And, from what I understand, MacOS already has many settings that are OS-controlled - you can't do certain things without authenticating yourself to the OS, and neither can software on your behalf. If that's not quite right, I'll have to ask you to elaborate on what scenario you're thinking of.
asplake 5y ago
Would this impact recording on Screenflow? I won’t be upgrading my main machine until I know for sure.
vbphprubyjsgo 5y ago
This is yet another instance of the OS reuse problem, e.g., where airports, banks, medical terminals, etc have all kinds of unwanted features because the software is based on booting a GUI OS desktop and using hacks to make it display the program. Not valid engineering of course.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  "Not valid engineering of course."??? Yes, it would obviously be much more "valid engineering" to have each of these devices have their own custom, invariably much buggier and crappier, OS.
pahn 5y ago
hm, i just tested this on my macbook and the way it seems to work is certainly breaking live visuals, but at the same time does not protect people from being recorded: if i start an audio recording and then watch a film fullscreen, the orange dot does show, but then vanishes (while still recording the audio). not sure if this is intentional or a bug, but it would certainly render my computer unusable for quite some work i do. audiovisuals almost always are reactive to sound in one way or or another, so you do record the ambient audio for your video or installation be able to react to it.
zwily 5y ago
I think other vendors will start copying the dot, notch-style, so pretty soon live performances without the dot will seem lame.
foreigner 5y ago
Easy - just incorporate the orange dot in to the design. Surround the entire scene with orange dots and then it won't look out of place.
bena 5y ago
That dot is there to let people know that there's a live mic listening to them and possibly recording them in case they don't want that, right? So basically, what this guy is saying is that sometimes he wants to show an app that is listening to the audience, but without letting his audience know that they could be recorded by his application. Here's the crux of his issue. "In the interest of security and privacy, Apple on macOS Monterey has added a prominent orange dot to display outputs when audio capture is active. That renders their machines unusable for live visual performance, though, since it’s also shown on external displays. Dear macOS team – we urgently need a fix here. The basic idea here is sound – to avoid software hijacking your camera and audio input and spying on you, essentially, there’s an orange dot to let you know recording is active. But this essentially makes the Mac unusable for live visuals, since it impacts external projectors and LED walls and the like. (Those applications don’t even need to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like." Here's where I feel he's being disingenuous: "Those applications don’t even need to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like." So they're not using audio, but may be using the microphone or line input to access sound for "reasons". That's called "using audio". He's trying to draw a distinction that doesn't exist. He wants to make it clear he's using audio in a non-privacy-violating way. And I believe that he is. I do believe he's a good-faith actor who is just trying to use audio input to enhance certain presentations. However, it has the same behavior as people who do not act in good faith. This is a prime example of dipshits ruining it for everyone. There can't really be an exception because then that exception just gets used by the bad faith actors in the space. To solve his problem what he really needs is a monitor/projector that doesn't show the top however many pixels required by the menu bar. In a very amateur way, this would be accomplished with a piece of electrical tape over the monitor. For a projector, there could possible be a special lens cap that cuts off the required area. Like a matte lens.
- dangrossman 5y ago
  1- I doubt anyone at Apple intended the orange dot to be broadcast to everyone watching their television during a live musical performance on SNL with visuals in the background. It is not possible for the performance to be recording any of the viewers, so there's no possible "dipshit" to be protected from. 2- The dot appears on secondary displays running full screen video: there is no menu bar to crop off. You can only crop off part of the visuals, or your visuals have to be lower resolution to produce artificial dead area to crop. 3- Apple has never given any indication that they intend to add indicators that someone else is being recorded by my computer. The indicators are for the computer owner, to indicate that software may be recording the owner without their knowledge. The parties are all different than you're supposing.
_ph_ 5y ago
I am all for features which help the user to control the users privacy. Having a LED with the web cam for example is a very good thing. Though it doesn't tell you what is accessing it and recording you against your will... It totally makes sense to display those privacy notifications in the desktop UI. However, when an app goes to full-screen mode, the OS shouldn't interfere with the display by default. There are plenty of szenarios, where the program needs to be able to control every single pixel of the screen.
- dkonofalski 5y ago
  >There are plenty of szenarios, where the program needs to be able to control every single pixel of the screen. In those cases, there are hardware solutions for this. That's not the default in any OS right now. Notifications and menu bars cannot be disabled by apps, for example. They need to be disabled from the OS level.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    Of course menu bars are disabled by default in full-screen mode, notifications can be disabled on Mojave at least. That is the whole purpose of a "full screen mode", that the whole screen content is controlled by the app.
    - dkonofalski 5y ago
      >whole screen content is controlled by the app. That is not the purpose of full screen mode. If that were the case, then notifications and menu bars would be able to be disabled by the app. They're not. They need to be disabled or muted by the user at the OS level.
      - _ph_ 5y ago
        About which OS are you talking? On MacOS and Linux, a program can go to full screen mode without any user interaction. The last time I saw a powerpoint presentation on Windows, it also didn't have a menu bar or task bar in presentation model. So what are you talking about?
muhehe 5y ago
It's ok. Give it a few weeks, people will get used to it and several apps will pop up on other platforms so you can pretend you have expensive Mac.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Stop waiting on Apple. Turn off SIP, find the function responsible for this, and swizzle it with a no-op. This, in my mind, is exactly what makes SIP brilliant as a default but optional feature. It's fantastic for 95% of Mac users, who can browse the web and write emails confident in the knowledge that their microphone is turned off. The remaining 5% need to do weird crap like run live music shows, and should take advantage of the escape hatch.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Unfortunately, "weird crap like [running] live music shows" is what Apple markets their devices for, and since they're selling machines that have thousand-dollar price premiums over their competitors, I should hope their attitude isn't "fix it for yourself". I know a number of Mac musicians who run live shows and can neither grok what you just suggested or be bothered to disable SIP and lose all their iLok plugins before a show.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > disable SIP and lose all their iLok plugins Wait, what? Does this mean that SIP is now de facto mandatory on macOS, unless you don't use any DRM-encumbered programs?
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      My bad, Freudian slip. I meant enable.
      - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        Sorry, I'm actually confused by the reverse—are there DRM systems which require SIP to be enabled now?! That's awful!
        Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        ...Oh, I reread—I get it. Your code-swizzling plugin/software wouldn't work because you switched SIP back on.
saurik 5y ago
It seems like the core issue is trivial to fix: make the orange dot only appear on the primary display. I don't see any advantage to spamming the orange dot to every single display output, given that the primary display is the one the user is presumably primarily interacting with (somewhat by definition).
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> It seems like the core issue is trivial to fix: make the orange dot only appear on the primary display. Or just have an actual physical LED nearby, maybe in the notch. They're cheap too, we decorate Christmas trees with them these days.
  - gbear605 5y ago
    That doesn’t help for non-laptop devices, or if the laptop is running in clamshell mode.
  - saurik 5y ago
    In addition to the sibling complaint about using a real monitor / closed laptop--which I do constantly, making my primary display a third-party panel from Samsung--I guess I disagree that a fix that would require retrofitting a new LED that didn't exist into a piece of hardware could ever be "trivial" in the way my suggested software update could be (but then again, I am not a hardware person, so maybe there is some kind of cheap, magic LED sticker they make these days that Apple could offer people for free at the Apple Store).
fsflover 5y ago
> The basic idea here is sound – to avoid software hijacking your camera and audio input and spying on you, essentially, there’s an orange dot to let you know recording is active. Instead, I prefer to use devices with a hardware kill switch for camera and microphone, e.g., https://puri.sm/products/librem-14 https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.
willis936 5y ago
Why is microphone and camera usage indicated through a software stack onto a display? Shouldn't there be an LED tied to the power in pin on these peripherals?
- vintagedave 5y ago
  Yes! Just as there is for the camera, there should be a hardware indicator for the microphone (perhaps enabled by software for an external mic; ditto for an external webcam.) One of the best features on Macs for the past couple of decades has been the small green light. They should add this, as hardware, to iPhones and iPads. Software dots on the status bar indicate to me that the OS people view it as a key issue but the hardware folk haven't caught up to the issue yet.
Sidnicious 5y ago
I made a very quick hack to deal with this; it should hide the dot. Improvements welcome: https://github.com/s4y/undot https://github.com/s4y/undot EDIT: As far as I know, the best long-term answer here is for apps that present visuals full screen to "capture" the external display for exclusive use using an API (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/1456259-cgdisplaycapture https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/14562...), but that's not super common right now.
- wanderingstan 5y ago
  Can you explain the approach a bit? Looks like you’re finding the window holding the dot and moving it offscreen?
  - Sidnicious 5y ago
    Yes, exactly. I'm sure there are more elegant answers — plus watching events so that it can hide the window right away instead of running in a loop — but I haven't used the accessibility APIs much lately and this is the first working approach I found.
- ratww 5y ago
  Great work!
- ibejoeb 5y ago
  Is that really all it takes to disable this? I guess if I'm a malware author looking to do surreptitious recording, I'll have to bundle these extra 10 lines of code lol...
  - Sidnicious 5y ago
    You can, but note that as a user you have to open System Preferences and check a checkbox to allow said malware to do this. (Apple locked down the accessibility APIs that let apps easily manipulate each other a few years ago.)
modeless 5y ago
Maybe you could use the accessibility zoom feature to zoom in slightly and crop it out? Silly workaround though.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
Well... that was a mistake on Apple's part. Got to wonder who made this decision and how many people reviewed it before it was deployed. Then again, most people aren't doing audio recording while using Keynote (or Powerpoint). Something like this could very easily fly under the radar across the entire company. This looks like one of those problems where the edge cases are damned obvious in hindsight but aren't noticed until it hits production. Happens to everyone with a non-trivial product. The real problem here is Apple has a history of ignoring these design mistakes for a very long time. Even when they do fix things, they have tendency to hide any mention of it. It will probably be suddenly and quietly fixed months later in some future point update.
madrox 5y ago
People on Windows are about to go through a similar experience as Microsoft removes ways of capturing your desktop without an obnoxious orange border around the window being recorded. The logic is there…you want it obvious and in the user’s face if something malicious is watching them, but it makes benign use cases obnoxious. Stuff like this is bad security design because it punts responsibility to the end user. It doesn’t actually stop anything bad from happening. If your design can’t decide whether to stop a program from capturing the mic, how do you expect my grandma to?
- MikusR 5y ago
  The border is on screen, but not in captured video.
- Diggsey 5y ago
  Except microsoft actually listened to feedback before rolling this out everywhere: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.graphics.capture.graphicscapturesession.isborderrequired?view=winrt-20348#Windows_Graphics_Capture_GraphicsCaptureSession_IsBorderRequired https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.graphics.ca... Plus there's almost certainly some registry key you could change to turn it off on a per user basis.
based2 5y ago
AWS has an IBM blue dot for alerts.
ComputerGuru 5y ago
> And it does seem there could be a fix here; you already have to give applications permission to access your mic and camera, and it seems there should be some way for an app to disable the orange dot once its permissions are elevated with opt-in by the user. The obvious caveat is that a hacker w/ local access can do that themselves to hide their system foothold, which is just par-for-the-course when it comes to physically compromised machines... except I'm willing to bet they're more concerned with "jealous ex" than they are with professional hackers. Apple is trying to add features to protect against the unprotectable instead of just acknowledging that at some point local access means game over; the only way to do that is to make it virtually unbearable to use the OS as a regular user (see UAC in Windows Vista).
exabrial 5y ago
Security Features aren't useful if they can't be disabled for legitimate purposes. Instead they turn into Windows UAC prompts.
mikequinlan 5y ago
An orange dot "renders their machines unusable"??? That seems like an over-reaction.
ComputerGuru 5y ago
This thread has exposed a very weird dichotomy between HN users that believe that they (as owners/operators of the device in question) should ultimately be in control of what their machine outputs - down to the pixel - at least if and when they care to do anything about it, and those that accept it's our role to just take whatever bones the manufacturer's are kind enough to throw our way, apparently unless and until it is an egregious violation of what one considers to be "the" line that shouldn't be crossed. As a hacker without a horse in this particular race (Macs and I parted ways a long time ago), it's definitely interesting to observe the interactions between the two groups in this thread! IMHO the fundamental difference between the two sides is that when it's posited as a dogmatic matter, it's immediately clear whether or not your (perceived) rights have been violated (Can you do X? No => Violation, Yes => Keep chugging along) but for the latter group it becomes not just a question of whether or not X is possible but also whether or not each individual can agree that X should/shouldn't be determined by the vendor/manufacturer (c.f. the recent hullabaloo about on-device scanning). I see similarities to the concept of "I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to do so," which just makes it so much easier to agree on whether or not rights are being infringed, regardless of it's something you'd want to engage in yourself or otherwise.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  What they're missing is that the next feature Apple removes, cripples, or otherwise takes out of their control will be one that they care about. General purpose computing was supposed to be for everybody, not just approved use(r)s. Apple once told me that. It was a long time ago.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  There are at least three ways mentioned in this thread to avoid this orange dot. - The app outputting video can use an OS-level API to capture and fully control the external display. - The Mac owner can use a playback card to output a clean video stream. - The Mac owner can use their root control of the machine to disable the dot. (A short script to do so is currently the top comment.) So really, Apple has not taken away rights here. Clean video output is still possible. They have changed a default, though.
yob28 5y ago
aimor 5y ago
Maybe someone can stick a little reindeer face behind it.
beervirus 5y ago
>showstopper That’s a funny word for “extremely minor visual artifact.”
theshadowknows 5y ago
So...I'm sure I'm not alone when my first thought was "big deal" but then I thought about it and I'm thinking there's two main issues here: 1. we don't want it there and they didn't ask permission or give a way to remove it 2. a tiny orange dot on a monitor will turn into a basketball sized orange ball on a big professional display am I getting the right idea?
strange_things 5y ago
I love how mac and apple is extremely unusable due to small ludacies like this and how people keep trying to make it work... Break the cycle, stop buying Apple!
_ache_ 5y ago
I guess the quickest fix is too change you menu bar color to orange.
perryizgr8 5y ago
Not to worry. Os features usually have a toggle somewhere to disable. After all it is your machine, you have the final control. Don't you?
dreamcompiler 5y ago
Of course the correct security solution is to put a physical switch for the mic (that is not software mediated) on the hardware, together with an LED that behaves like this "orange dot."
alin23 5y ago
I made a Swift app to hide the dot using the method published by Sidnicious: https://lowtechguys.com/yellowdot https://lowtechguys.com/yellowdot

284 points by radley 5y ago

szhu 5y ago

This thread has a lot of people arguing for the live visuals use case over protecting privacy or vice versa. Not only are they both important, but I think we can actually have both. To easily solve both the privacy and the live visuals issue, Apple should make it so that the dot is only shown on a display of it is: - the primary display (the one notifications appear on, since that's where the user typically checks for system status), - the built-in display, if any, - the display the cursor is on, or - the display containing the frontmost window. These are the only kinds of displays that make sense to have a persistent privacy indicator on. Anyone who's sitting at a computer is looking at at least one of these displays. The secondary displays that artists use to show fullscreened live visuals always fit none of these criteria.

togaen 5y ago

I don’t understand what the problem is. Why does it matter whether a little orange dot is there or not.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jaywalk 5y ago
The orange dot will appear on the live output, which is fed to an LED video wall/projector/etc. on or near a stage. Completely unacceptable, and makes Macs entirely useless for live visuals.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > Completely unacceptable But.... why? Why would a little orange dot offend anyone?
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    Because it's not part of the visuals, which should be the only thing on the output. Maybe it's because I've actually run systems for this exact purpose, but I'm kind of surprised at how difficult this seems to be for some to grasp.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      But I don't understand why they're mirroring their desktop to some kind of visual display system? Wouldn't they be using something like a DeckLink for this use-case? Monitor outputs are for monitors - if you want an application-specific video output you can get that and it won't be a desktop so it won't have this problem. If you mirror your desktop then yeah... you get whatever desktop UI chrome is on your desktop.
      - ehutch79 5y ago
        Because most of these displays look like monitors to your system. Using the existing rendering pipelines to a full screen monitor is far easier, and less expensive then custom hardware just to move pixels that the built in graphics card is more than capable of
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        Ok so it's a quick hack for video output but they're going to run into problems like this. And for example any notifications, system updates, Launchpad, whatever, would also appear. That's how you end up with goofy things like a sign with a Windows 'need to update now' message. If they were doing it properly with a production video output they wouldn't have this problem.
        jaywalk 5y ago
        You can call it a "quick hack" if you'd like, but I can assure you that all of the potential pitfalls you mention are taken into account by the people who setup and run these systems. You're not going to "gotcha!" people who have actually done this stuff.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  You seem to be confusing two things (well, really just you're being hyperbolic): TRUE: the dot BEING THERE is useless (and undesireable and bad) FALSE: the dot makes Macs useless for live visuals Just because something is 100% bad design, bothersome, 100% negative, and should never have been allowed to happen, does NOT mean it destroys a product entirely. When Mini Coopers were made with the stupidest turn signals ever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282) that doesn't make the car undrivable even though there's ABSOLUTELY no defense of the design.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    The dot absolutely makes Macs useless for live visuals. Nobody worth a damn would ever use a system that required an orange dot to appear on the live output.
    - quadrangle 5y ago
      You can use them for live visuals. You WON'T (and I don't blame you), but you CAN. "Absolutely useless" obviously is intended to be "I'm super mad about this" rather than literally true.
      - nullandvoid 5y ago
        You're picking a really odd hill to die on. Is it that hard to imagine that having random imagery (orange dot) showing on your live work (which a client has paid $$$ for) is a complete no-go for professionals (if you ever want to get hired again)?
        quadrangle 5y ago
        Just mildly objecting to the strength of someone's hyperbole is life-threatening? Just because other people are feeling super aggravated about this completely stupid design decision by Apple doesn't mean it's valid to project that on me as if I'm fighting some battle. I don't really care about this. I get it, people are upset about a totally indefensible, short-sighted design that impacts people's ability to use Macs to do presentations that will be accepted in professional contexts. Yes, there's some sense to the hyperbole that says something is "useless" when reality is "this will not be accepted in my field of work". It's still hyperbole. Admitting that it's hyperbole doesn't mean accepting the bad design.
- buildbuildbuild 5y ago
  My temporary fix has been to use an expensive hardware scaler to crop the output when I run into this. You’d think Apple would have plenty of production experts beta testing, I’m sure this will eventually affect their own live events. Mic input is very useful for receiving timecode to keep production gear in sync.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    Yeah, I considered that when I was reading the article. If your content can still look alright being scaled, that'll work. There is definitely some content that won't be quite so forgiving, though.
    - buildbuildbuild 5y ago
      You’re right. To clarify I’m blacking out the top X pixels to hide the dot, not scaling.
  - modeless 5y ago
    There's a built in accessibility zoom feature in macos, can it also crop out the dot?
dangrossman 5y ago
Did you read the article? "In our particular case, this means that this orange dot appears on the stage output, which is totally unacceptable for anyone using macOS as a professional video tool that sends video output to a video projector." Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- quadrangle 5y ago
  Gosh, everyone who was about to be convinced to go buy a Big Mac will lose their appetite! /s
- bryan0 5y ago
  I'm sure Parent read the article, but the question is why is this a big deal? For someone not in the live visual space, it's not immediately clear that an orange dot in the corner is "totally unacceptable". > Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square. I don't think I would notice or care?
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    > I don't think I would notice or care? Do you think none of the advertisers, or billboard owners, would notice or care? Those are the clients paying the people that read this site to create and run their live visuals. A 5 foot diameter orange dot on top of their ad is not what they signed off on. There is money at stake. Whether you care or not isn't relevant.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      As a New Yorker, I’d love to have that sort of visual feedback on the surveillance of Times Square, a public space. And whether I care is quite relevant.
      - 5y ago
khazhoux 5y ago
I think the context is if you are using Mac to generate visuals that get projected on a screen during performances. I guess now you wind up with an orange dot in top right corner. So presumably you'd see a big orange dot in the right-most screen here: https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/thomyorke-6_preview-e1513280616534.jpg https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
olyjohn 5y ago
Looks unprofessional IMO if you were watching a live stream, and there was a permanent orange dot on your video. People may be screen capturing using an external output... Would it bother you if Star Wars had an orange dot in the corner the whole time? People want to make professional videos and live streams, and not have a constant reminder that there's a Mac somewhere involved in the video... and this has hosed people's workflows.
eropple 5y ago
Because when you are running video out to a 150" LED wall, that orange dot is a very large dot. And even were it not, you are not building your presentational elements around "having some orange dot on screen". "I mean, jeez. They just left the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, what's the big deal?"
- quadrangle 5y ago
  The mouse cursor on the side of the screen is stupid indeed. But it doesn't make presentations impossible. I think all the objections here are objecting to hyperbole rather than defending the dot.
  - ehutch79 5y ago
    Not presentations, Think big musicians/festivals.
    - quadrangle 5y ago
      Yeah, I get it. Not gonna be accepted in practice. Could be accepted though, it's not literally useless. Being not as bad as literally-useless doesn't mean anything about the situation is good.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- sixothree 5y ago
  How are you going to a 150" LED wall and not processing the output? I think that's the part I don't get.
  - kfarr 5y ago
    Well they may be processing the output but the raw input has an orange dot so at the very least this is additional labor to configure additional custom processing.
kinghtown 5y ago
Visually distracting.. a loss of control in design.. a reminder of Apple when you are displaying unrelated content.. A live show doesn’t need the visual art to have an orange dot. Im surprised you can’t see how that could matter.
quadrangle 5y ago
Everyone focuses on the dot and can no longer listen to the content of the presentation? /s My honest guess is that the author of the article is SUPER mad about this out of some principle-of-the-thing about how the design shouldn't do this, and they just ran with that in writing self-righteous nonsense about how this makes presentations impossible or something. It's about as bad as having the cursor show up on the edge of a live presentation slide.
- dangrossman 5y ago
  "Live presentation" like "the visuals on the video wall behind Mariah Carey while she sings live for 10 million people on TV", not "live presentation" like "your PowerPoint presentation to your 4 coworkers". This is a news site for professional digital musicians and animators. The kind of people that are in charge of making the digital visuals behind a live performance like I described. This is not a "principle of the thing" argument, it's a "this update stops us from doing our job using Mac hardware" argument.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    Yeah, I get it. Apple's design is stupid and shouldn't have happened. But obviously Mariah Carey CAN sing on TV with a little orange dot. Obviously nobody wants that, and in practice nobody will accept it. But it remains completely possible and would not completely destroy her performance. The hyperbole here is just so extreme.
    - dangrossman 5y ago
      If in practice nobody will accept it, then there's nothing hyperbolic about the article.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > The hyperbole here is just so extreme. You've never been near a show production, have you? I was involved with an amateur theater that had some projections during one of their plays. Even they were very peculiar about what was projected, where, and how. One of the projections was a black-and white archive footage. Yes thank you, I'd love an orange dot there, it doesn't ruin it at all.
rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
My interpretation from the article is that you might imagine the external display output is a video wall for a concert with a full screen visual show being synced to music or something, thus the simultaneous audio capture going on.
GuB-42 5y ago
For the same reason why you may not want to see an orange dot when you watch a movie in a theater and also the reason art galleries don't put orange dots in front of artworks. It is a special case where Macs connected to a projector are used to display live visual. The microphone is on, most likely so that the visuals can respond to sounds, and you get to show an ugly orange dot to your audience. Macs are used a lot in the entertainment industry so it is not an insignificant problem.
- kube-system 5y ago
  From purely a privacy perspective, that is an interesting comparison. Some art installations that record their observers do have disclaimers that recording is happening, sometimes by law.
- treesprite82 5y ago
  For a lot of the examples being given in this thread, like billboards and movies, I'd actually welcome an orange dot notifying me that audio is being recorded - since that's not an expectation I'd otherwise have. Though this probably isn't what Apple are trying to do, and would need to be enforced to prevent circumvention. The initial example of live shows (specifically the subset of which where the same device is being used for some kind of audio input and visual output) is so far the most convincing example because the orange dot is redundant there.
  - simonh 5y ago
    It’s not being recorded, the Audi input is being used to generate reactive video responsive to the audio track.
    - treesprite82 5y ago
      I note "some kind of audio input" for that case. Notifying of audio-recording billboards/etc. is a separate case signalled by the dot (which I think could theoretically be a positive, but isn't practically achieved with just this change).
david422 5y ago
If you went to the website www.apple.com and there was an orange dot in the corner, how long do you think it would be before Apple changed it?
fold3 5y ago
It mostly concern artists that present video such as for art exhibition or VJ live shows I believe. Any unintended visuals would kill the immersion, the aesthetics and looks unprofessional. Like leaving the mouse cursor visible or UI elements. I see that some people above suggested a solution with an extra hardware device but even though a lot of theses creatives are using macs, they aren't especially tech literate outside of their field and have to make do with venue that can use quirky hardware with sometimes very limited time to set up their gears. This dot is a major pita for these users.

mediocregopher 5y ago

I'm all for shitting on apple, but does the orange dot actually obstruct anything? It seems to just be sitting in the notification bar being out of the way.

CharlesW 5y ago
This is spelled out very clearly in the article, more than once.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
buildbuildbuild 5y ago
Visual artists often use secondary monitor outputs to display media on projectors or large LED walls. Secondary outputs are also commonly used in broadcast for keyed font overlays among other things. Power users should be able to disable anything.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
> I'm all for shitting on apple why?

8bitben 5y ago

This is a tough intersection between highly-visible privacy controls and the ability for artists to use their Macs in live performance situations where any overlays could be a distraction. In the Privacy menu in MacOS now, you can authorize applications to do things like use locations services and record the screen. I think it would be reasonable to include an authorization for audio recording and bypass the orange indicator. Or they could turn on the webcam green light when audio input is active?

minhazm 5y ago
The webcam light won't work if you're using a laptop in clamshell mode, or even using a Mac Mini/Pro. I think the best middle ground for this is to allow users to grant some permission that allows the app to access the Mic without turning the orange dot on.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Why would spyware not request this permission?
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    I think the implication in the post was that the user would be prompted to grant the permission, so they would have to click "Yes" when the spyware asked for permission.
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Were this to be a permission, there would be no legitimate use case where "hide microphone use indicator" would be a required function. Anything that requires that should be flagged immediately as hostile.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Or a simple toggle deep in the system settings: "Show indicator when using a microphone or webcam".
5y ago

lolpython 5y ago

This isn't good. Most of the live visuals I've seen are in a dimly lit room with a black background. Often this is so that it's hard to see the edges of the screen and the visualization appears to be floating. Having an orange dot in the corner would break the immersion for the audience. It's also going to be larger when projected, maybe a couple inches in diameter.

skytreader 5y ago
This is the first explainer in this thread that makes me see the issue. All this time I'm thinking along the lines of "Okay you're, projecting video in a wedding. Now there's an orange dot on the screen. Boohoo." So, apparently, I gotta dream bigger. Like museum AVP or concert/live performance/DJing type of live visuals. Yeah now an orange dot is a showstopper.
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  Why do you need to record sound when presenting some video? I’m a total noob in this, just curious.
  - lolpython 5y ago
    I’m generalizing, but basically: Live visualization takes a live music performance as input and programmatically generates a video that matches said music performance. The video might pulse along with the beat of the music. Or maybe it changes color or shape depending on the “mood” of the audio. The computer driving the visualization receives audio from the live music via a line in, which Apple treats as an active microphone. A simple live visualization would be to display a video showing the waveform of the live audio feed.

adolph 5y ago

I just updated straight from macOS Catalina to Monterey, and one thing that's really bugging me is the Microphone Usage indicator in the top right corner. I have this app called "Background Music" to help amplify the otherwise terrible audio of my earbuds. I know it's using my microphone; I don't need this constant annoying overlay. Anyone know a solution? https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qhbt4n/how_to_disable_orange_dot/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qhbt4n/how_to_disabl...

formerly_proven 5y ago

In the film editing space workstations use dedicated video I/O hardware which fully circumvents the display/video stack of the OS to be able to input/output exactly the pixels you want in exactly the format you want (something that's essentially impossible using OS facilities, much less in a cross-platform manner). This seems like a very good application for those cards (they're not particularly expensive, around 200 bucks [1]). [1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink/techspecs/W-DLK-32 https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink/techspecs... (4K, PCIe) https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techspecs/W-DLUS-13 https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techsp... (less than 100 bucks, but only 1080p on Thunderbolt) (SDK: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/product/capture-and-playback https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/product/capture-a...)

lolpython 5y ago
What is this equipment called? It sounds like the opposite of a capture card. edit: looking at your updated post, it is called a "playback card."
- greenknight 5y ago
  Yep. Used heavily for editing works, colour grading works for tv / film, sound works. Pretty much anything professional, they will discard what the GPU is doing (and inbuilt audio) and use these sorts of external devices. This way, you know EXACTLY what the program is computing, nothing else.
NavinF 5y ago
Could you give an example of such a card? (model/name) Also what’s the use case where they can’t export the video and transfer it as a file or byte stream?
- buildbuildbuild 5y ago
  These are great: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techspecs/W-DLUS-13 https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techsp... Use case: live (minimizing latency), no compression, compatibility with other gear.

ehvatum 5y ago

rched 5y ago
> MacOS is a strictly consumer-facing platform for running App Store Apps What are you basing that on? Apple markets these products directly to professionals in a lot of cases. They even sell professional audio software.
pvarangot 5y ago
> for running App Store Apps MacOS runs whatever you want it to run if you decide to trust the developer.
dmd 5y ago
As a Mac user who doesn't use and has never used any App Store Apps, what the ____ are you talking about?
tqi 5y ago
> MacOS is a strictly consumer-facing platform for running App Store Apps, so I’m confused as to who is even objecting to this feature. So true, which is why so many of their products have "Pro" in the name.

treesknees 5y ago

In theses cases, is audio being input into the Mac and that's why it shows up, because they're "recording" into the application generating the visuals? I don't understand why the Microphone notification is there at all if it's just outputting audio/video. Are these applications recording audio? Or is it just a result of the APIs/permissions they end up using? Seems like there should be a compromise where apps that are using line input instead of the physical microphone could be exempt from the dot.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
RandallBrown 5y ago
Yes, the dot is there to indicate to people that they might be being recorded. There's no way to distinguish if the line input is just another microphone or not so exempting that wouldn't solve the issue Apple is trying to solve.
dangrossman 5y ago
The article covered this. "live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like"
- treesknees 5y ago
  Thanks, I did read the article but missed this part. I had it in my head that it would be something like playing a locally-sourced audio feed through an app, but I suppose input from more complex equipment makes sense.
- ratww 5y ago
  Is there a line input on newer MacBooks? I thought the jack had just mic input! Also, does anyone knows whether the orange dot shows up when you also use an external USB audio interface? If so this is kind of stupid on the part of Apple. The article also mentions that those apps turn on Microphone capture even when unnecessary, so it seems the dot it's doing its job, although obviously there was a massive oversight, and there should have been a special permission to disable IMO.

kazinator 5y ago

Is this dot anything more than a software feature? If so, its absence doesn't actually prove that sound isn't being monitored. What you want is a dedicated LED that is routed directly to the sound input being on at the circuit board level: like the amplifier is on, or that path is enabled by hardware or whatever. Even then, if the meaning assignment is "LED glowing = sound monitored", you cannot trust it entirely: the LED being off could mean that the LED itself is faulty. But at least you know that the mechanism cannot be tampered with by software.

jackson1442 5y ago
yeah, i don't use a screen lock on my computer because a sophisticated attacker would just pull my data off my ssd since the decryption key is stored in memory anyways. it is much more valuable to have an indicator that your mic IS hot than having no indicator at all, not to mention adding an led indicator does fuck all for people who don't buy the $currentYear+1 laptop.

htunnicliff 5y ago

http://archive.today/bi8UU http://archive.today/bi8UU

bragr 5y ago

capableweb 5y ago
This has the be the weirdest requirement I've heard from someone who wants to read a blogpost on someones website. Why it matters if it's behind a CDN or not? Problem is that the person hasn't handled even a small amount of usage load before, even the cheapest instance from DigitalOcean + NGINX can handle most loads you throw at it if configured properly for static content, which it almost is by default when you install it.
Kiro 5y ago
A single $5 Digital Ocean droplet should be able to handle tens of thousands requests a second without any CDN or load balancing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
radley 5y ago
> http://archive.today/bi8UU http://archive.today/bi8UU thanks @htunnicliff
WJW 5y ago
HN: Centralization is the purest form of evil, you should self-host everything! Also HN: If you don't put your site behind a CDN I won't even bother reading it because I will lose interest during the 90+ seconds it takes to load. (And yes I know that these posts are not usually made by the same people, but it still amuses me to see posts with such radically differing views on the front page at the same time)
vbphprubyjsgo 5y ago
Well congratulations, you are the one person in the world who bothered to go dig into the network before opening the page and save him one millisecond of CPU time.
5y ago

armchairhacker 5y ago

Shouldn't these things be in hardware? Like I know that macbooks have a green LED next to the camera if they are recording. I'm sure there's a way to hack the screen to make the orange dot disappear. At the least you can intercept the output buffer.

lwansbrough 5y ago

The number of people in this thread not understanding the importance of not having any interference in live visuals makes me believe this won’t be fixed by Apple. Absolutely baffling.

zenexer 5y ago
If I’m forced to choose between live entertainment and a great privacy feature like this one, the privacy feature is going to win. Artists will get creative and find workarounds; other companies will fill the gap, and other commenters have pointed out cheap hardware that solves this problem.
- EricE 5y ago
  What is the benefit of forcing the stupid dot on ALL displays?!? How is offering an option for it to ONLY be visible when the menu bar is also visible compromising the notification in any way? There are software solutions like NDI that the hardware solution doesn't fix and why should I have to buy hardware to fix a problem that should have never existed in the first place? It's asinine and really not that complicated - don't show UI shit on displays that aren't showing the menu bar. There is always one display that must have a menu bar - show crap like this there and only there.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  You're clearly not involved in live entertainment, so you're not making that choice. It's also a false choice, because Apple could easily preserve privacy while also making their hardware usable for live entertainment again. Just a couple ideas off the top of my head would be to allow the user to choose which display(s) have the indicator (defaulting to all displays, of course) or adding an additional permission level for applications that are already approved for audio input to not show the indicator. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing situation if Apple is even remotely interested in addressing this use case, which they should be.
  - zenexer 5y ago
    > You're clearly not involved in live entertainment I used to be. > It's also a false choice Yes, yes it is. It's been like this for decades. Entertainers are expected to buy the most expensive hardware available even when they're just getting started. Conform or be stigmatized for using inferior technology. We're talking about an industry in which AudioQuest has no trouble selling passive 3m HDMI cables for upwards of $1k. Maybe this is the first time Apple has stepped on your toes, but it won't be the last. Be prepared to fork over the cash for a specialized dongle you wouldn't need on any other platform, lest that orange dot mar your reputation. Let's be real: this isn't going to harm Apple's sales in the slightest, and they know it. The only way they could possibly harm their reputation in the entertainment industry is by lowering their prices, opening up their ecosystem, and eliminating $1k monitor stands. They know you'll ultimately cough up the dough for an adapter, no matter how much you complain. They know you don't have a choice. They get money from me, a privacy-conscious end user with a choice, and they get money from you, a disgruntled professional without a choice.

nojito 5y ago

How would you disable this without compromising security/privacy?

capableweb 5y ago
You allow the user to keep a whitelist of apps they already knew will be using the microphone/line-in/whatever audio source and when those apps use any audio source, don't display the orange dot.
fouric 5y ago
The article addresses this: > And it does seem there could be a fix here; you already have to give applications permission to access your mic and camera, and it seems there should be some way for an app to disable the orange dot once its permissions are elevated with opt-in by the user. MacOS already has security mechanisms meant to prevent malware from e.g. installing a rootkit into the kernel, or reading keychain passwords - one of those mechanisms could be used to prevent programs from altering whatever setting controls "show orange notification dot" (which, in a sane design, would be opt-out - or, opt-in to "disable orange notification dot) on their own.
- nojito 5y ago
  How does that prevent malicious grants of permission? This was a problem with webcams before the light was hardcoded to the power supply.
  - fouric 5y ago
    Hmmm, can you clarify what you mean by "malicious grants of permission"? Do you mean when a piece of software (malware, in this case) tells the OS to give it permission to hide the dot, when the user hasn't consented? If that's the definition you're using - MacOS already guards against that, simply because the orange dot is already being implemented in software in a way that is difficult/impossible for ordinary programs to change (but is controllable by the OS). And, from what I understand, MacOS already has many settings that are OS-controlled - you can't do certain things without authenticating yourself to the OS, and neither can software on your behalf. If that's not quite right, I'll have to ask you to elaborate on what scenario you're thinking of.

asplake 5y ago

Would this impact recording on Screenflow? I won’t be upgrading my main machine until I know for sure.

vbphprubyjsgo 5y ago

This is yet another instance of the OS reuse problem, e.g., where airports, banks, medical terminals, etc have all kinds of unwanted features because the software is based on booting a GUI OS desktop and using hacks to make it display the program. Not valid engineering of course.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
"Not valid engineering of course."??? Yes, it would obviously be much more "valid engineering" to have each of these devices have their own custom, invariably much buggier and crappier, OS.

pahn 5y ago

hm, i just tested this on my macbook and the way it seems to work is certainly breaking live visuals, but at the same time does not protect people from being recorded: if i start an audio recording and then watch a film fullscreen, the orange dot does show, but then vanishes (while still recording the audio). not sure if this is intentional or a bug, but it would certainly render my computer unusable for quite some work i do. audiovisuals almost always are reactive to sound in one way or or another, so you do record the ambient audio for your video or installation be able to react to it.

zwily 5y ago

I think other vendors will start copying the dot, notch-style, so pretty soon live performances without the dot will seem lame.

foreigner 5y ago

Easy - just incorporate the orange dot in to the design. Surround the entire scene with orange dots and then it won't look out of place.

bena 5y ago

That dot is there to let people know that there's a live mic listening to them and possibly recording them in case they don't want that, right? So basically, what this guy is saying is that sometimes he wants to show an app that is listening to the audience, but without letting his audience know that they could be recorded by his application. Here's the crux of his issue. "In the interest of security and privacy, Apple on macOS Monterey has added a prominent orange dot to display outputs when audio capture is active. That renders their machines unusable for live visual performance, though, since it’s also shown on external displays. Dear macOS team – we urgently need a fix here. The basic idea here is sound – to avoid software hijacking your camera and audio input and spying on you, essentially, there’s an orange dot to let you know recording is active. But this essentially makes the Mac unusable for live visuals, since it impacts external projectors and LED walls and the like. (Those applications don’t even need to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like." Here's where I feel he's being disingenuous: "Those applications don’t even need to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like." So they're not using audio, but may be using the microphone or line input to access sound for "reasons". That's called "using audio". He's trying to draw a distinction that doesn't exist. He wants to make it clear he's using audio in a non-privacy-violating way. And I believe that he is. I do believe he's a good-faith actor who is just trying to use audio input to enhance certain presentations. However, it has the same behavior as people who do not act in good faith. This is a prime example of dipshits ruining it for everyone. There can't really be an exception because then that exception just gets used by the bad faith actors in the space. To solve his problem what he really needs is a monitor/projector that doesn't show the top however many pixels required by the menu bar. In a very amateur way, this would be accomplished with a piece of electrical tape over the monitor. For a projector, there could possible be a special lens cap that cuts off the required area. Like a matte lens.

dangrossman 5y ago
1- I doubt anyone at Apple intended the orange dot to be broadcast to everyone watching their television during a live musical performance on SNL with visuals in the background. It is not possible for the performance to be recording any of the viewers, so there's no possible "dipshit" to be protected from. 2- The dot appears on secondary displays running full screen video: there is no menu bar to crop off. You can only crop off part of the visuals, or your visuals have to be lower resolution to produce artificial dead area to crop. 3- Apple has never given any indication that they intend to add indicators that someone else is being recorded by my computer. The indicators are for the computer owner, to indicate that software may be recording the owner without their knowledge. The parties are all different than you're supposing.

_ph_ 5y ago

I am all for features which help the user to control the users privacy. Having a LED with the web cam for example is a very good thing. Though it doesn't tell you what is accessing it and recording you against your will... It totally makes sense to display those privacy notifications in the desktop UI. However, when an app goes to full-screen mode, the OS shouldn't interfere with the display by default. There are plenty of szenarios, where the program needs to be able to control every single pixel of the screen.

dkonofalski 5y ago
>There are plenty of szenarios, where the program needs to be able to control every single pixel of the screen. In those cases, there are hardware solutions for this. That's not the default in any OS right now. Notifications and menu bars cannot be disabled by apps, for example. They need to be disabled from the OS level.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Of course menu bars are disabled by default in full-screen mode, notifications can be disabled on Mojave at least. That is the whole purpose of a "full screen mode", that the whole screen content is controlled by the app.
  - dkonofalski 5y ago
    >whole screen content is controlled by the app. That is not the purpose of full screen mode. If that were the case, then notifications and menu bars would be able to be disabled by the app. They're not. They need to be disabled or muted by the user at the OS level.
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      About which OS are you talking? On MacOS and Linux, a program can go to full screen mode without any user interaction. The last time I saw a powerpoint presentation on Windows, it also didn't have a menu bar or task bar in presentation model. So what are you talking about?

muhehe 5y ago

It's ok. Give it a few weeks, people will get used to it and several apps will pop up on other platforms so you can pretend you have expensive Mac.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

Stop waiting on Apple. Turn off SIP, find the function responsible for this, and swizzle it with a no-op. This, in my mind, is exactly what makes SIP brilliant as a default but optional feature. It's fantastic for 95% of Mac users, who can browse the web and write emails confident in the knowledge that their microphone is turned off. The remaining 5% need to do weird crap like run live music shows, and should take advantage of the escape hatch.

smoldesu 5y ago
Unfortunately, "weird crap like [running] live music shows" is what Apple markets their devices for, and since they're selling machines that have thousand-dollar price premiums over their competitors, I should hope their attitude isn't "fix it for yourself". I know a number of Mac musicians who run live shows and can neither grok what you just suggested or be bothered to disable SIP and lose all their iLok plugins before a show.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > disable SIP and lose all their iLok plugins Wait, what? Does this mean that SIP is now de facto mandatory on macOS, unless you don't use any DRM-encumbered programs?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    My bad, Freudian slip. I meant enable.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      Sorry, I'm actually confused by the reverse—are there DRM systems which require SIP to be enabled now?! That's awful!
      - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        ...Oh, I reread—I get it. Your code-swizzling plugin/software wouldn't work because you switched SIP back on.

saurik 5y ago

It seems like the core issue is trivial to fix: make the orange dot only appear on the primary display. I don't see any advantage to spamming the orange dot to every single display output, given that the primary display is the one the user is presumably primarily interacting with (somewhat by definition).

phkahler 5y ago
>> It seems like the core issue is trivial to fix: make the orange dot only appear on the primary display. Or just have an actual physical LED nearby, maybe in the notch. They're cheap too, we decorate Christmas trees with them these days.
- gbear605 5y ago
  That doesn’t help for non-laptop devices, or if the laptop is running in clamshell mode.
- saurik 5y ago
  In addition to the sibling complaint about using a real monitor / closed laptop--which I do constantly, making my primary display a third-party panel from Samsung--I guess I disagree that a fix that would require retrofitting a new LED that didn't exist into a piece of hardware could ever be "trivial" in the way my suggested software update could be (but then again, I am not a hardware person, so maybe there is some kind of cheap, magic LED sticker they make these days that Apple could offer people for free at the Apple Store).

fsflover 5y ago

> The basic idea here is sound – to avoid software hijacking your camera and audio input and spying on you, essentially, there’s an orange dot to let you know recording is active. Instead, I prefer to use devices with a hardware kill switch for camera and microphone, e.g., https://puri.sm/products/librem-14 https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.

willis936 5y ago

Why is microphone and camera usage indicated through a software stack onto a display? Shouldn't there be an LED tied to the power in pin on these peripherals?

vintagedave 5y ago
Yes! Just as there is for the camera, there should be a hardware indicator for the microphone (perhaps enabled by software for an external mic; ditto for an external webcam.) One of the best features on Macs for the past couple of decades has been the small green light. They should add this, as hardware, to iPhones and iPads. Software dots on the status bar indicate to me that the OS people view it as a key issue but the hardware folk haven't caught up to the issue yet.

Sidnicious 5y ago

I made a very quick hack to deal with this; it should hide the dot. Improvements welcome: https://github.com/s4y/undot https://github.com/s4y/undot EDIT: As far as I know, the best long-term answer here is for apps that present visuals full screen to "capture" the external display for exclusive use using an API (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/1456259-cgdisplaycapture https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/14562...), but that's not super common right now.

wanderingstan 5y ago
Can you explain the approach a bit? Looks like you’re finding the window holding the dot and moving it offscreen?
- Sidnicious 5y ago
  Yes, exactly. I'm sure there are more elegant answers — plus watching events so that it can hide the window right away instead of running in a loop — but I haven't used the accessibility APIs much lately and this is the first working approach I found.
ratww 5y ago
Great work!
ibejoeb 5y ago
Is that really all it takes to disable this? I guess if I'm a malware author looking to do surreptitious recording, I'll have to bundle these extra 10 lines of code lol...
- Sidnicious 5y ago
  You can, but note that as a user you have to open System Preferences and check a checkbox to allow said malware to do this. (Apple locked down the accessibility APIs that let apps easily manipulate each other a few years ago.)

modeless 5y ago

Maybe you could use the accessibility zoom feature to zoom in slightly and crop it out? Silly workaround though.

kayodelycaon 5y ago

Well... that was a mistake on Apple's part. Got to wonder who made this decision and how many people reviewed it before it was deployed. Then again, most people aren't doing audio recording while using Keynote (or Powerpoint). Something like this could very easily fly under the radar across the entire company. This looks like one of those problems where the edge cases are damned obvious in hindsight but aren't noticed until it hits production. Happens to everyone with a non-trivial product. The real problem here is Apple has a history of ignoring these design mistakes for a very long time. Even when they do fix things, they have tendency to hide any mention of it. It will probably be suddenly and quietly fixed months later in some future point update.

madrox 5y ago

People on Windows are about to go through a similar experience as Microsoft removes ways of capturing your desktop without an obnoxious orange border around the window being recorded. The logic is there…you want it obvious and in the user’s face if something malicious is watching them, but it makes benign use cases obnoxious. Stuff like this is bad security design because it punts responsibility to the end user. It doesn’t actually stop anything bad from happening. If your design can’t decide whether to stop a program from capturing the mic, how do you expect my grandma to?

MikusR 5y ago
The border is on screen, but not in captured video.
Diggsey 5y ago
Except microsoft actually listened to feedback before rolling this out everywhere: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.graphics.capture.graphicscapturesession.isborderrequired?view=winrt-20348#Windows_Graphics_Capture_GraphicsCaptureSession_IsBorderRequired https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.graphics.ca... Plus there's almost certainly some registry key you could change to turn it off on a per user basis.

based2 5y ago

AWS has an IBM blue dot for alerts.

ComputerGuru 5y ago

> And it does seem there could be a fix here; you already have to give applications permission to access your mic and camera, and it seems there should be some way for an app to disable the orange dot once its permissions are elevated with opt-in by the user. The obvious caveat is that a hacker w/ local access can do that themselves to hide their system foothold, which is just par-for-the-course when it comes to physically compromised machines... except I'm willing to bet they're more concerned with "jealous ex" than they are with professional hackers. Apple is trying to add features to protect against the unprotectable instead of just acknowledging that at some point local access means game over; the only way to do that is to make it virtually unbearable to use the OS as a regular user (see UAC in Windows Vista).

exabrial 5y ago

Security Features aren't useful if they can't be disabled for legitimate purposes. Instead they turn into Windows UAC prompts.

mikequinlan 5y ago

An orange dot "renders their machines unusable"??? That seems like an over-reaction.

ComputerGuru 5y ago

This thread has exposed a very weird dichotomy between HN users that believe that they (as owners/operators of the device in question) should ultimately be in control of what their machine outputs - down to the pixel - at least if and when they care to do anything about it, and those that accept it's our role to just take whatever bones the manufacturer's are kind enough to throw our way, apparently unless and until it is an egregious violation of what one considers to be "the" line that shouldn't be crossed. As a hacker without a horse in this particular race (Macs and I parted ways a long time ago), it's definitely interesting to observe the interactions between the two groups in this thread! IMHO the fundamental difference between the two sides is that when it's posited as a dogmatic matter, it's immediately clear whether or not your (perceived) rights have been violated (Can you do X? No => Violation, Yes => Keep chugging along) but for the latter group it becomes not just a question of whether or not X is possible but also whether or not each individual can agree that X should/shouldn't be determined by the vendor/manufacturer (c.f. the recent hullabaloo about on-device scanning). I see similarities to the concept of "I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to do so," which just makes it so much easier to agree on whether or not rights are being infringed, regardless of it's something you'd want to engage in yourself or otherwise.

CamperBob2 5y ago
What they're missing is that the next feature Apple removes, cripples, or otherwise takes out of their control will be one that they care about. General purpose computing was supposed to be for everybody, not just approved use(r)s. Apple once told me that. It was a long time ago.
snowwrestler 5y ago
There are at least three ways mentioned in this thread to avoid this orange dot. - The app outputting video can use an OS-level API to capture and fully control the external display. - The Mac owner can use a playback card to output a clean video stream. - The Mac owner can use their root control of the machine to disable the dot. (A short script to do so is currently the top comment.) So really, Apple has not taken away rights here. Clean video output is still possible. They have changed a default, though.

yob28 5y ago

aimor 5y ago

Maybe someone can stick a little reindeer face behind it.

beervirus 5y ago

>showstopper That’s a funny word for “extremely minor visual artifact.”

theshadowknows 5y ago

So...I'm sure I'm not alone when my first thought was "big deal" but then I thought about it and I'm thinking there's two main issues here: 1. we don't want it there and they didn't ask permission or give a way to remove it 2. a tiny orange dot on a monitor will turn into a basketball sized orange ball on a big professional display am I getting the right idea?

strange_things 5y ago

I love how mac and apple is extremely unusable due to small ludacies like this and how people keep trying to make it work... Break the cycle, stop buying Apple!

_ache_ 5y ago

I guess the quickest fix is too change you menu bar color to orange.

perryizgr8 5y ago

Not to worry. Os features usually have a toggle somewhere to disable. After all it is your machine, you have the final control. Don't you?

dreamcompiler 5y ago

Of course the correct security solution is to put a physical switch for the mic (that is not software mediated) on the hardware, together with an LED that behaves like this "orange dot."

alin23 5y ago

I made a Swift app to hide the dot using the method published by Sidnicious: https://lowtechguys.com/yellowdot https://lowtechguys.com/yellowdot