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Comment by catlikesshrimp | Hacker News Reader

Soldering iron to the rescue. Locate the microphone and unsolder it.

I haven't seen any microphone integrated in the processor.

Yet

M2 and newer MacBooks have an IMU on-board, which is just a funny way of spelling microphone. Admittedly a very low quality one; I'm not sure if you could pick up understandable speech at the 1.6kHz sample rate Bosch's IMUs seem to support.

> M2 and newer MacBooks have an IMU on-board

Why?

> M2 and newer MacBooks have an IMU on-board, which is just a funny way of spelling microphone. Admittedly a very low quality one; I'm not sure if you could pick up understandable speech at the 1.6kHz sample rate Bosch's IMUs seem to support.

Are there examples of using IMUs to get audio data you could point to? A quick search didn't reveal anything.

There's this paper, which made the news at the time I think: https://crypto.stanford.edu/gyrophone/files/gyromic.pdf

And there's this post, which includes an audio clip: https://goughlui.com/2019/02/02/weekend-project-mma8451q-acc...

Going into full paranoid mode, I wonder if some other sensors / components can be used as a makeshift microphone. For instance, a sufficiently accurate accelerometer can pick up vibrations, right? Maybe even the laser in a CD drive? Anything else?

Camera + bag of chips: https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/

Impossible with normal cameras.

"We also explore how to leverage the rolling shutter in regular consumer cameras to recover audio from standard frame-rate videos, and use the spatial resolution of our method to visualize how sound-related vibrations vary over an object’s surface, which we can use to recover the vibration modes of an object."

A condenser microphone is just a capacitor. Your computer is full of them.

They are very low level input and generally need a pre-amp just to get the signal outside the microphone. However conceptually at least they are there and so maybe someone can get it to work.

Well it doesn’t need to be visible to work in contrast to camera. Seriously though, no technological and almost no economic barrier preventing embedding a mic into every wireless communication chip.

Sure, but that requires the manufacturer to be intending to spy, in contrast to someone compromising after the fact.

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