A request/demand to all gadget makers | Hacker News Reader

A request/demand to all gadget makers

14 pointsthrownear7 comments

If your gadget contains a mic or a camera, provide a hardware indicator (for example. A small led besides the camera or mic) to indicate that the corresponding recording device is active.

I want to request the tech crowd that we boycott all (new?) devices that does not comply with this simple requirement.

View on HN

If the indicator is programmable, it's no more accurate than anything else. Physical disconnection is the closest thing to certainty.

No, not programmable. That was what I meant "hardware indicator". Maybe I should have said "hard wired". If the device is active (even if there is nothing receiving the output), it should be indicated without exception.

The screen is hardware. It's wired to the camera. Both are independently addressable via software. Making a small screen consisting of only a single LED and moving it close to the camera doesn't change that...so long as the two are hardwired and one or both are programmable, there's no certainty.

Short of removing the camera from the device, physical disconnection is the next best thing. To put it another way, a camera can shoot at 1/2000 of a second. That's quick enough that a person will miss the blink of an LED even if it's activated 10 times as long as the shutter is open. So any indicator is going to have to programmed to show future and/or past events to conform to the human time frame...or as some might say is the case with all things photographic, it has to be programmed to tell a lie to be useful. It's just a matter of whose lies it tells.

>so long as the two are hardwired and one or both are programmable, there's no certainty.

I don't quite follow you. What I meant was something like this. Connect the LED in series to the power supply to the camera, so that you cannot even power the camera without turning the LED on.

> Making a small screen consisting of only a single LED and moving it close to the camera doesn't change that...so long as the two are hardwired and one or both are programmable, there's no certainty.

This doesn't make any sense. Do you not know what "hardwired" means?

Rig the light so that it is turned on any time the camera is transmitting to the CPU. This is a physical interface, not a software one. You can hack the camera software any way you like, but anything that receives an image from the camera will activate the light.

> Short of removing the camera from the device, physical disconnection is the next best thing. To put it another way, a camera can shoot at 1/2000 of a second. That's quick enough that a person will miss the blink of an LED even if it's activated 10 times as long as the shutter is open.

So activate it longer than that. Why is this a problem? You can easily wire the light to activate for a minimum of one second (or more, if you like) any time the camera transmits even a single frame.

That doesn't work, for microphones, provide a physical switch and for cameras, provide a physical cover.

Nice idea

Reply on news.ycombinator.com