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A comment on The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam. Parent comment

Re:The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam by mkl on Saturday April 09, 2016 @02:07AM (#11460159)
Some Lenovo ThinkCentre all-in-one PCs have a physical sliding webcam cover, and you can see at a glance what position it's in. Microphones are harder to handle in such a low tech way, though.
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Re:The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam by Kliment on Saturday April 09, 2016 @02:26AM (#11460191)
Shorting the two wires of the mic together with a low-value resistor will do what you want, or you can have a physical disconnect switch. It's very easy to modify a mic in this manner if desired. You can even have the switch built into the sliding webcam cover. On digital mics it's a bit more complex to mute without disabling, but the brute force solution is to disconnect their power line in the same manner. Then again, you now have to watch out for things like accelerometers in the board or hard disk which can reconstruct keypresses or act as a very low quality microphone.
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Re:The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam by mclovinit on Saturday April 09, 2016 @03:14AM (#11460317)
That last point is interesting. Even with an RF detector, an accelerometer may act as a cheap room bug. Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars? Now I'm scaring myself.
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Re:The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam by userbinator on Saturday April 09, 2016 @11:20AM (#11461628)
Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars?

AFAIK the airbag accelerometers are designed to detect much larger accelerations than e.g. the ones in a smartphone, and are thus essentially completely insensitive to anything lesser than a huge impact -- spurious airbag inflation is one of the things the manufacturers really, really don't want to happen.

Many of them are just mechanical switches actuated by a weight, with no active electronics (makes sense for such a safety device to be as simple as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI

And even when not impacting anything, a car is not exactly a quiet and vibration-free environment either...

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Re:The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam by mclovinit on Saturday April 09, 2016 @05:17PM (#11463382)
Very good points.
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Re:The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam by jimhefferon on Saturday April 09, 2016 @06:47AM (#11460758)
> things like accelerometers

Personally, I am not worried about quite sophisticated attackers. When securing my house I'm worried about run-of-the-mill burglars, and this is like that.

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