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Comment by greglindahl | Hacker News Reader

I use a cut-out piece of postit note for the camera, and a small piece of etape for the microphones -- seems stable, and both are pretty easy to take off without leaving too much spooge behind.

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Does tape actually provide enough impedance to prevent surveillance through your microphones? Seems like all an attacker would have to do is amplify (and possibly filter) the audio a bit.

I turned up the mic all the way, did a skype test call. I could hear myself if I shouted (input level=0). If I talked at a normal volume level, it was audible (and the input level showed as 2/15. I might try a couple of layers of tape...

EDIT: Yeah, 2nd layer of tape = 0 input level even if I shout really, really loudly. You can't imagine how much my coworkers are enjoying this experimentation!

I wondered about tape along with a suitable sound-dampening material, so this "seat-of-the-pants" experiment is of interest to me.

I'd want something more certain for a higher security situation, but this might do me for some "casual" use cases.

Skype has a noise gate - any play on the microphone below a certain level is cut off. Someone with direct access to your microphone can listen without the noise gate and might still hear.

I put a piece of paper over the camera, then tape over that. That doesn't leave glue on the lens.

What about internal microphones on MB's?

osascript -e 'set volume input volume 0' doesn't really produce the expected result…

plug a square card reader in the jack.

Doesn't physically turn off the internal microphone. I've found out the hard way: I have a headset with a hardware mic switch. If this switch is in the "off" position when headphones are put into the jack, the mic built into my mac still operates.

This is with a mid-2012 macbook model.

Plus on MacBooks there is a second microphone to gather surrounding noise to improve sound quality. I don't think there is any non intrusive way to stop it from activating either.

That's because the switch probably makes it look to the mac as if there's no microphone at all.

You can, for example, set up an aggregate audio device in the audio input/output config panel to enable all inputs and outputs to work at the same time. So it's not unreasonable to think that the internal mic could be activated even with something plugged into the jack.

Well I was playing around a bit more, and I was able to disable the(or a, not sure how many are in 2010 MBPs) internal mic by taking an old audio input jack (cutting the wires), plugging it in (so it looks like a nub sticking out), going to the audio settings and setting the audio port from "Sound Output" to "Sound Input" and the internal mic picked up no readings. Still trying to figure out how to do that from the command line.

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