Turning Claude loose on the firmware of five USB and WiFi peripherals, and finding a command shell in a microphone, a defeatable webcam activity LED, and unauthenticated memory writes over the network.
I still don’t get why webcam LEDs aren’t just wired up to the same power circuit as the camera. Not only would it make it much more secure, but it would also be really simple, and eliminate the need for LED control firmware.
Because we live in bizarro world where a resistor is more expensive than a microcontroller, by a whole 0.0001¢ so 10,000 units they save a whole dollar. You can’t argue with prophet savings like that.
It’s like a religious calling to all C-suite executives. Number have to go up, a flatline is bad. So costs are cut even to the detriment of the product, even though the cost savings are negligible and the detriment to the product significant.
I still don’t get why webcam LEDs aren’t just wired up to the same power circuit as the camera. Not only would it make it much more secure, but it would also be really simple, and eliminate the need for LED control firmware.
Because we live in bizarro world where a resistor is more expensive than a microcontroller, by a whole 0.0001¢ so 10,000 units they save a whole dollar. You can’t argue with prophet savings like that.
heh, prophet savings
It’s like a religious calling to all C-suite executives. Number have to go up, a flatline is bad. So costs are cut even to the detriment of the product, even though the cost savings are negligible and the detriment to the product significant.
yeah i get it, cult of the invisible hand, just a fantastic turn of phrase!
harder to spy on people that way though