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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

This is something I always ask people with those little "camera blockers" attached to their laptops: "How do you block the microphone?" and "Which is worse? Recording video of you all day, or recording audio of you all day?

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That's a good point. I think it varies from person to person.

Part of my reason for blocking video is I can never figure out when videoconferencing tools will default to transmitting video, which I never want, before I have a way to turn it off.

Also, I don't think I'm a high profile enough target that somebody would bother sifting through everything I say in front of my laptop for something interesting.

Capturing images every minute or so and looking for something embarrassing (someone showing lots of skin) seems much easier for malware to automate.

>I don't think I'm a high profile enough target that somebody would bother sifting through everything I say in front of my laptop for something interesting.

The threat model is closer to automated transcription, global history search, and parallel construction.

I think that would be hard to pull off in the US, where I live. There are enough paranoid infosec people that would spot the data transmission or CPU usage.

But certainly no harm done in muffling or ripping out a mic if you're concerned!

Not if it’s intermittent / on-demand and hiding within existing traffic.

Why would anybody bother trying to hide traffic? Lots of apps already waste bandwidth and CPU to exfiltrate a wide variety of data, often sending it straight to Facebook[1]. They simply relabeled it "analytics",

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...

I am amazed at the general level of understanding regarding this sort of thing. People simply don't know enough, on average, to even make an informed decision about this stuff.

They think the FBI is gonna sit and watch or listen to a recording. They have no idea this is gonna sit as text in a database forever to be searched against later.

There are startups that automate listening to devices. See www.deepgram.com

Lenovo lets you order a ThinkPad with neither camera nor microphone, and USB webcams are small and fit easily in a bag or backpack.

My son worked in a chip fab for a couple of years. The only devices allowed in there must be certified to have no cameras, including phones. They issue modified phones with out working cameras to employees. All devices must have a big certification sticker on the back. Just thought it was interesting.

It's not "would you rather be recorded in video or audio?", it's "would you rather be recorded in just audio, or in both video and audio?".

It's easy and quick to put some tape over the webcam, so unless you use it all the time, there's very little reason not to to so.

Disabling the microphone is harder and maybe not worth the effort.

You crimp the internal microphone with a pair of pliers.

So how do I block the microphone on my MacBook?

Zuckerberg released a photo once where he had a piece of tape over the microphone hole on the size. I don't know what the effect is, but it would be easy to test.

It would muffle it slightly. It would still give an attacker perfectly usable sound.

The muffled sound is enough to prevent acoustic keylogging from working properly though.

https://www.davidsalomon.name/CompSec/auxiliary/KybdEmanatio...

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