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A comment on Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera. Parent comment

Re:Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera by milesvp on Friday July 10, 2020 @04:40PM (#23796198)
Just so you know, switches in something as complicated as a laptop have a good chance at being connected to a processor , with firmware being the thing that determines what the switch does. So you still need trust, even with a physical switch.

Source: write firmware for a living, and write drivers for physical switches.

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Re:Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera by DoofusOfDeath on Friday July 10, 2020 @05:16PM (#23796574)
That's a good point. I'm guessing that people calling for a "hardware switch" implicitly mean one that cannot be overridden by firmware.

I.e., a traditional switch inline on the circuit(s) connecting the camera / microphone to the rest of the system.

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Re:Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera by saagarjha on Friday July 10, 2020 @09:42PM (#23798675)
On MacBooks Apple says their microphone disconnect is "done in hardware alone", so it might be that closing the lid disconnects something physically.
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Re:Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera by philwelch on Friday July 10, 2020 @05:10PM (#23796492)
It doesn’t need to be a switch. My current work laptop is an HP. It has a little plastic camera cover that slides back and forth to cover the camera.
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Re:Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera by amelius on Friday July 10, 2020 @09:55PM (#23798758)
It should be implemented with the same robustness as if the user's life depended on it.

As an analogy, you wouldn't implement a car brake by running it through some firmware. Instead, you'd preferably make a direct physical connection between the pedal and the actual brake.

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