The warm and fuzzy feeling should have gone away immediately upon discovering that it was not a hardware mute, but instead a software-defined feature... no?
I mean, if you can turn the LED off through software, it's really no better than the little menu bar icon that every other laptop has. If it were done all in hardware, that would be cool.
Re:FBI director: Cover up your webcam
by djsumdog on Thursday September 15, 2016 @01:49PM
(#12508212)
MSI laptops too. They have an Fn+Fkey, but when you use it, it disconnects the camera from the USB bus. It disappears from your device listings in lsusb/linux, or device manager on windows.
Re:FBI director: Cover up your webcam
by pricechild on Thursday September 15, 2016 @10:35AM
(#12506474)
Surely that leaves open the possibility Windows7 was always in control and if hacked, could lie to you?
The fact that Windows10 breaks it surely suggests it's a software feature?
Re:FBI director: Cover up your webcam
by fencepost on Thursday September 15, 2016 @11:31AM
(#12506983)
Yes, but....
There's a difference between "I can turn this off as long as the driver is properly installed and has not been hacked" and "I can't turn this off." While the second statement is abstractly true for both, the bar for some software silently and invisibly turning on the microphone is quite a bit higher if it also requires replacing or hacking the audio hardware drivers.
The warm and fuzzy feeling that discovery gave me is why my daily driver is still on Win7 since I almost always have both audio directions muted.