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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but wonder... did the light come on?

My understanding is that kids were told that this was a common malfunction and not to worry about it.

This whole thing has struck me as beyond creepy. I'm embarrassed both as a technologist and as a former educator. That this was allowed to happen is just horrifying.

I remember an article from when this story broke about how the administrators bragged about a script they wrote that would turn the camera on, but block it's output so if a user saw it was on and then loaded a program to see what was display they would see nothing.

Apparently the also ran this randomly so it would flicker every now and then...

purely despicable.

Huh, I guess I had thought they'd disabled the light somehow...

I think the light may be in hardware. It is on the OLPC.

They're Macs, Apple is wise about this and it's in the hardware and cannot be disabled without doing physical "surgery" to the hardware.

Well that's certainly the way it ought to be, if you ask me.

Even for a hardware implementation, the LED will be driven by an output pin of the onboard microcontroller. If the webcam firmware is flashable over USB it could be remotely disabled by software.

It probably flickers very briefly, so your eye might not even see it (just a guess).

Edit: give it a try, report back: http://www.intergalactic.de/pages/iSight.html

This might be relevant too: http://macosx.com/forums/1427678-post3.html

The light stays on for a full second and is a bright green LED - impossible to miss if you're looking at the screen.

Looks like many of these pictures were taken when the kids were not looking at the screen.

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