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- cross-posted to:
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Yes, yes you should.
Hell, I unplug the damned thing when I’m not using it.
Yes. Technically everything is hackable.
Have there ever been cases where this actually happened?
Yes, several schools have been caught activating cameras in the home, and have punished students for activities seen on those illegally enabled cameras
Nothing happened to the schools
Spying trough the webcam?
Hell yeah. There’s even sellers on hacker forums that sell access to the computers of hot girls. It’s sick but it happens.
Most big time hackers don’t do this though. They’ll have so many computers under their control they don’t waste time on singular targets.
Can you provide any sources?
Not really. Just scour some hacker forums and you’ll find them though. Most RATs (trojans) have the ability to view trough the webcam.
This was over 10 years ago, but it popped into my head as soon as I saw this thread. Over 1,600 rent-to-own stores were found by the FTC to have spyware installed on laptops that enabled the stores to access the webcams. The spyware also included keyloggers.
I would bet money that this type of shit still happens.
Can you cover the lens with sandpaper and rub it for a few minutes? Permanent problems require permanent solutions
This is the energy I’m looking for. Impractical but powerful.
Most people would like to use the webcam occasionally though.
Chapstick + Webcam + Twist Chapstick on Lens + “The camera looks like that even when I clean it” = Problem Solved
Yea that’s just great when I’m needing to do a virtual job interview. Really professional.
Chapstick is removable…
More importantly, run an operating system you can trust.
No operating system is trustable unless you coded it entirely yourself on an air gapped machine with your own hand crafted compiler, and even then you are still exposed to hardware backdoors
You’re confusing “trust” with “can guarantee to beyond a shred of a doubt that the system is not compromised in any way”.
I have Linux Mint installed on my laptop, I just don’t trust M$ Windows with their AI crap.
another cultist
that’s prettt much impossible without going to insane lengths
linux is literally right there and it works for 90% of use cases.
lineageos can get annoying, yes, but thats mostly on the manufacturers.
For some, particularly businesses reliant on software that can’t perform on anything but Windows (and occasionally MacOS), sure. For individuals it is much easier. Installed Linux Mint a few months ago and I set up a VM for the stuff I truly needed some form of Windows for (tried dual booting for a bit but found that inconvenient). None of these are insane lengths, unless the cutoff for that is, “anything above minimal effort.”
deleted by creator
Even if the source is open, you need to understand it to know for real.
Even more importantly, software can be exploited.
And know how to discern obfuscated code
In the past, I had dual booted windows and linux (Ubuntu, I believe), and eventually, windows managed to screw with the bootloader and brick the install. Never tried dual booting again. Windows VM on Linux is a much better solution.
Every single time I boot up my windows install it screws up the boot order and I have to go into UEFI and force it to load GRUB on startup again. Fucking malware.
There’s a reason that my windows install and my linux install are always on separate disks. Can’t fuck up my bootloader if you don’t know it exists.
and what access controls does limux provide forcamera access? because I haven’t seen any such fearure yet. I’m all for linux but it does not help with webcam issues.
to solve this issue you do need to go insane lengths. like apparmor/selinux or whatnot.
Is it really insane though?
Even a decade ago, it took longer to download a Linux distro than it did to make a bootable disc, boot to it, and install.
Seriously, the very first time I installed Linux on anything was maybe twenty minutes of actual effort total, with the rest being waiting for things to download or process during install. I can’t call that crazy lengths. Not everyone is as confident in following instructions and willing to take a risk, but it isn’t some kind of hyper specialized skill, and the very fact of a bootable storage means you can verify a given install would work on your hardware.
Now, changing roms on android? I would agree that doing so is absurdly more difficult than it should be, and there’s more pitfalls that can screw things up. But I didn’t get the impression you meant that.
linux is not secure
Linux?
Absolutely, unless you’re lucky enough to have a laptop with a Physical killswitch on your Webcam + Mic module, then it’s not needed since flipping the Switch physically kills power to the Camera module’s USB header.
Framework Laptops have this Feature.
My Asus has one and I didn’t know about it and FOR YEARS I thought my webcam was broken- it wasn’t even showing up in the device manager. I bought an external webcam, because I figured it was pooched and I had to use a webcam sometimes, but not often enough to care into looking to get it repaired.
This is a story about me being dumb.
Maybe that’s why many PCs these days don’t have them, and also why they don’t have network kill-switches anymore. People just got confused and thought something was broken.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I’ve since been issued new laptops for work that have physical covers built in and I’m a big fan of those, though I know it doesn’t disable a mic.
It would give me peace of mind if the switch also slid a cover over the lens. Is there video of people confirming the function of the switch with a voltmeter?
I wish the framework also had a physical switch for the antenna. At least it’s made easy to entirely remove and replace the antenna manually - then using an external antenna has the kill switch of just unplugging it, though it then takes up a port.
If you want that too you could buy one of these covers. I haven’t seen any videos of it but running
dmesg | grep -i "Camera"seems to confirm that it does cut the connections since the devices disappear.Yeah I haven’t seen as many computers with Network/Wireless killswitches, they used to be much more common in the past, so for network cutoff your best bet would probably be to disable or remove the onboard Wifi and use an external Wifi card in one of the expansion slots. Ideally you could use something like this to still have a USB A port but also have a Wifi dongle inside it as well.
I am mostly new to linux and will study on that command.
Regrettably, the camera and microphone switches leave no room next to the lens for the cover in your first link to slide to. I hope a future generation of the screen bezel considers this or incorporates its own lens cover into the camera switch. And thanks for the link to the USB-A/wifi dongle, I hadn’t yet checked out what the makers are up to where expansion cards are concerned!
EFF gives out tiny stickers at conventions for that purpose. I’ve been staring at an EFF sticker for years.
TL;DR
Yes
Also disable all microphones etc. of courseFun fact, every speaker is a microphone and vice versa.
While true, an average speaker isn’t sensitive enough to get quality or understandable sound out of, and that’s assuming software can be rewritten to accept input from them.
This isn’t a realistic privacy concern imo, but it is a novel fun fact, and if you have a 3.5mm jack you can play around with it on a PC
Two questions:
- Does my soundcard have an ADC wired (directly) to my speakers?
- If yes: Why?
Usually/some can define their inputs and outputs as needed. My PC has 2 3.5 mm hand at the back and 2 at the front, they can be configured in any way I want essentially.
if they have an amplifier that does not work anymore, does it?
but otherwise that’s right, and in laptop speakers this is probably not a barrier
Zuckerberg has been doing this for over a decade.
https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-webcam-cover
The answer is yes, obviously duh, yes.
Cover all cameras on all devices.
Related, when we were shopping for a smart TV last year, it was so difficult to find one without a microphone… I already don’t like my phone having a microphone, why would I put it into my bloody TV…
I already don’t like my phone having a microphone
A phone without a microphone. A phone… without a microphone… is not a phone.
Can I ask what you use a phone for?
by that sentence I obviously meant that the hardware has the ability to listen to me at all times, but I guess it needs to be spelled out
Classic missing the thread deliberately for internet clout
What about my cameras?
My Thinkpad has a built-in camera cover. I keep it closed unless I’m specifically using it.
Thinkpads are great that way
This is the way…
I have a 15+ year old lamp on my desk which has a bulb that gets quite hot. Didn’t realize my laptop was directly under it one day. Melted the laptop lid slightly directly where the camera is located.
Everything else works fine except for the camera. I always disabled it in BIOS but now it’s physically disabled. Sometimes the adhd solves problems on it’s own.
I have a cheap garbage windows work laptop without a cover. So I just put a clothesline clip on it at all times.
Oh yeah. Use electrical tape.
I learned the other day my laptop doesn’t even have a camera. I’ve never noticed in the six months of owning it.
Excellent.
what kind of laptop is that? I need it
The Asus G15 Advantage from a couple years ago has fairly high end hardware, it comes without a webcam. As an owner of one they have quirks, but can be pretty decent machines if you can find one for cheap.
I got it on a deal. I would post the link here but that feels inappropriate. I bought it from B&H and it’s a Lenovo i5. Please note that the five has nothing to do with the Intel processor family but rather that’s just the name of the laptop.
I wanted something that was gaming-capable but also admits to the fact that I’m mostly going to do work on the laptop. The ports are in weird locations, and it’s unnecessarily heavy, but I am pleased with it given the main purpose which was to get an effectively desktop replacement that I don’t expect to haul around that often.
Also, if you do decide that’s a laptop that you want, play close attention to the specifications. They reuse the same laptop name. It’s actually a series of laptops that is updated every year or so and they have different build options.
