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Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

I really think we need a physical microphone shut up switch similar to that we have for webcam shutter available in most laptops now to prevent this kind of intruding stupidity.

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Or maybe we shouldn't run spywares on our devices and stick to FLOSS? I know, that's not very 2022...

It’s also fundamentally not possible for the vast majority of people, and I think you know that.

So all you are doing is making the rest of the community look bad, by essentially doing zealot preaching: you’re telling the people who don’t have a choice that they’re stupid for not doing exactly what you do.

Signal is open source and has reproducible builds.

Yes, and that's cool. Signal is an awesome piece of software but not a competitor in many of Zoom markets.

If you are a student at a university using zoom then there's no other realistic way to participate and learn today. I also can't imagine many employers makng an exception for a single employee.

Except signal doesn’t have conference room hardware and has low group size limits, so doesn’t solve the problems that zoom, webex, etc solve.

I’m also going to get that while bullshit (I trust signal’s crypto a hell of a lot more than more or less any other company) I would bet they don’t have some arbitrary set of certificates or whatever for doctors to be able to use them

Which meeting software doesn't support web nowadays? I think even Zoom does it once you break through their dark patterns.

Why is it about "the people" doing something? I am not making a choice to use zoom, my employer does. And for my employer it would totally be possible to setup jitsi/blue button/whatever instead.

Similarly, if I attend a virtual meeting elsewhere those people choose what software to host it with.

So feel free to "preach" to companies instead of people.

Open Source software is not immune to backdoors, and can also be hacked. I am afraid simple solutions such as “use only trusted software” just are not good enough in 2022.

We need defence in depth, and a physical switch would be one of the best protection mechanism.

Just like developers learnt the hard way that user input should not be trusted, users need to realise that software should not be trusted either.

It's not a physical switch but MS Powertoys have a system wide mic and camera toggle UI now. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/video-con... For 90s kids, the Powertoys name should bring back fond memories. My only gripe is that instead of 'Microphone On' it should say 'Microphone is On' - I always forget if it's indicating the state or indicating it will go to that state if I press it. I'm 90% sure it's the former as I type this

Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.

Have you heard about Phantom Power?

Good thing! Yields superior audio quality (because it means there is a powered pre-amp right next to the microphone's recording point) and allows to physically turn off microphones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_power

If you are using a USB microphone (and/or webcam), you can effectively do that with one of these:

4-Port USB 3.0 Hub Power Switches https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TPMEOYM

Or simply by unplugging the mike?

At which point the system will helpfully switch to the built-in mic.

As it might/probably will happen by turning off the USB port.

I can disable the on-board sound card in the BIOS settings on my Thinkpad (T440p), so unplugging the USB headset should do the trick (but then there's no music either).

This. I do my work on a clamshell laptop, got a similar gadget (bus powered, with LED indicators) when I got an external webcam.

Windows/browser permissions don't have device level granularity AFAICT, so I can't allow access to only an external cam/mic, but I can disable the internal ones in the OS for full tinfoil hat compliance.

Most importantly off is actually off when a button cuts the power.

I do something similar but it doesn't help me with the built in microphone in the laptop. I'd have to disassemble the bezel and possibly snip a wire. It's much easier to Macgyver disable a webcam than a Microphone, even if you've got one of those webcams that can see through plastic with infrared. Best I can do so far is disable the device in device manager.

Although I wonder if the bios on this HP let's you disable it...

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