> The microphone is located inside the left speaker grille anyways, so it would be terribly muffled in clamshell mode anyways
I don't think the hardware disable is meant as a UX convenience ("let's always disable it in clamshell mode because it sounds terrible"), as that could have just been done in software. It's meant for people privacy-conscious people who want to see a closed laptop and be able to assume it's not recording.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at this throwaway aside in the article:
> (The camera isn’t disconnected in hardware, because its field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed.)
and thinking to myself that somebody is going to figure out how to record audio given just the "completely obstructed" view of the camera.
There's a long history of attackers reliably detecting logging keys with audio using just inter-keystroke latency and some histograms, or easily figuring out PINs tapped out on a phone screen because the OS doesn't bother putting access to accelerometers or gyroscopes behind an app permission. Attackers get very creative, especially when they're told that something is "impossible".
Recording sound from a video-only device that has been covered, with no hardware modifications would be a really really neat trick! Using Van Eck phreaking against all sorts of hardware is fascinating to me. FM radio broadcast from how RAM gets accessed and things like that. Maybe noise in the camera sensor can be used to pick up noise from the microphone on the motherboard (which is where the microphone is on Apple Silicon devices). I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it seems highly unlikely given everything else in play.
> There's a long history of attackers reliably detecting logging keys with audio using just inter-keystroke latency and some histograms
I wrote some fiction about this. The cosmic microwave background is hiding an audio signal. It's the sound of a keyswitch. Humanity uses the radio astronomy equivalent of these techniques to discover which keystroke caused the big bang.
I don't think the hardware disable is meant as a UX convenience ("let's always disable it in clamshell mode because it sounds terrible"), as that could have just been done in software. It's meant for people privacy-conscious people who want to see a closed laptop and be able to assume it's not recording.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at this throwaway aside in the article:
> (The camera isn’t disconnected in hardware, because its field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed.)
and thinking to myself that somebody is going to figure out how to record audio given just the "completely obstructed" view of the camera.
There's a long history of attackers reliably detecting logging keys with audio using just inter-keystroke latency and some histograms, or easily figuring out PINs tapped out on a phone screen because the OS doesn't bother putting access to accelerometers or gyroscopes behind an app permission. Attackers get very creative, especially when they're told that something is "impossible".