Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com