[GuiA]

I had a laptop with a physical switch for WiFi/Bluetooth in 2006 or so (with a matching orange/blue light that would turn up when you toggled it). The problem was that this was actually all done by a software driver - when I booted into Linux with the laptop I was surprised to find that the bluetooth/wifi modules were on regardless of the switch's position.

At the end of the day, unless you have a really nice microscope, solid understanding of electrical engineering, and a few tens of thousands of hours ahead of you, you have to trust whoever you're buying the hardware from that it will do what they say it will. No amount of hardware efforts can solve the fundamental human trust problem.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T480. Its webcam switch is a slider that covers the webcam lens. You don't need a fancy microscope, or a solid understanding of EE, or tens of thousands of hours. You need the ability to see the slider cover the lens. Takes all of half a second and at least 1 eye.

[stjohnswarts]

Yeah but it's just as easy to put some black tape over most laptop cameras. Evidently apple decided to not consider that option

[drdaeman]

Plot twist: the slider material could be opaque in the visible spectrum but transparent in IR.

/s

[valuearb]

And the hackers still win, cause no one remembers to slide it shut after a call, and they can hack the led so there is no physical indicator when they are watching.

[macintux]

I honestly can't remember the last time I used my camera during a company meeting, and I've been working remotely since March.

So, there's definitely value to a built-in cover; in my case it would stay shut permanently.

[valuearb]

A piece of tape does that without the security theatre of a cover.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

I prefer aluminum foil under the tape that's over the lens so it can be flipped up out of the way easily but still block the view. But the cover does the same thing and doesn't take the effort of putting in a piece of tape.

[basch]

It would be pretty impressive for someone to get the camera to work through a physical cover.

[brlewis]

It would be mildly impressive if a manufacturer made a fake cover with a switch to detect when it's "closed" and make the main camera stream filtered to look like the cover is real, while having a 2nd back-door unfiltered stream. Of course this could be detected by someone who took the unit apart.

[int_19h]

On Thinkpads, the cover has a prominent red dot painted on it, that ends up in the location where camera lens would normally be. And, of course, you can visibly see the edge of the cover move as you slide it. So I don't know how you'd fake that.

[gmantg]

Just pick a material that's opaque only in visible spectrum.

[grogenaut]

At this time we specifically bought computers with modules for radios that we could pull. Toshiba was happy to supply this to us.

[im3w1l-alt]

It's like the halting problem. It's hard to decide whether a given switch works in the general case. But it's possible to design an obviously correct breaker.

Edit: the gnarly thing might be ensuring it doesn't harvest power through data wires or store power in covert capacitors or batteries.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

I had another laptop with a hardware switch and a corresponding LED, and it worked exactly as it should - the hardware was completely inaccessible under Linux. So yes, it can be done and it's not rocket science.

[GuiA]

Yes, what you describe is trivial - and it would be similarly trivial to design a module that appears to respect the switch (regardless of Linux/Windows) and yet records things surreptitiously, only to offload it at a later date.

Remember the amount of effort VW was willing to expand to cheat emissions testing.

[jimnotgym]

That's why I like the old Thinkpad with the physical cover and the LED

[Angeo34]

>tens of thousand of hours >electrical engineering Yea gluing a piece of tape is a piece of art even Marx wasn't able to.

[GuiA]

The question isn't whether you can add a cover to the product after the fact, it's whether you can trust a switch on a product to do what the manufacturer says it does.