Lawmakers are once again turning up the legal heat on smart glasses. Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Ciresi (D-Montgomery) has introduced a bill that would require every pair of smart glasses “manufactured, sold, and used” in the state to have a “visual indicator” that tells others when they’re recording.
That’s not good enough. You can easily get around such things.
they will totally make it easy to disable and just call it unsupported user modification which will also let them get out of warranty claims
Again, if they are “smart”, they can be hacked. That light can be disabled, and even covered.
Sure it can. Murder is illegal, but i can still buy a gun and shoot someone. If you hack your glasses to not comply with this law, you will get whatever punishment the law prescribes.
Not if the power to the recording mechanism must run through the light. There is an electrically engineered way to make sure the light must be powered on before the recording mechanism if it is wired between the power supply and the electronics.
Nothing to hack. Just a wire/circuit and an LED.
That’s how the iSight camera in all MacBooks work. That camera cannot be powered on without first powering on the notification LED. It’s integrated into the circuit. Powering on the camera must first power on the LED, and there is no way around that. It’s physically impossible.
You can still cover the LED. I don’t trust these things or the creeps that buy them. They should be illegal.
Not every WebCam circuitry is designed with your safety and privacy in mind.
If it makes you feel better, cover it up.
I get to choose my web cam and if I cover it. I have no control over what the owner of these glasses does with them - or whatever they capture. These are practically custom made for upskirt creeps and god knows what else.
I was just using WebCams as a contemporaneous technological example. Not to equate the two, as they are, as you have illustrated, extraordinarily different in their contextual applications.
These glasses creep me the absolute fuck out, and have for over a decade, ever since Google glasses first came out. I think they should just be outright outlawed, but that’s not the world we live in.
Just bypass the diode with a jumper?
As some hacker with a piece of malware, how do you propose to do that?
I thought the issue was with chumps choosing to mod their own device to record others.
??? not sure how you got there
No, the issue was “can some hacker take control of my WebCam without me knowing? “
Not if it’s wired with a notification light in the way, I have suggested.
If you wanna hack your own device, whatever dude
I wanna see you do that when all the wiring is integrated into a pair of glasses. And it can’t be obvious afterwards that they were tampered with.
Once you sacrifice one pair you’ll learn how to mod the next one cleanly. Unless the led is somehow integrated into actual IC or something.
Wouldn’t be surprised if ease of modding wouldn’t become a feature to bank on the creep and stalker market though.
Two tiny pieces of electrical tape will negate that light.
Although black nail polish does still exist.
If you still don’t trust it, I would recommend a Band-Aid or a sticky note… WebCams are something I happen to use every day and still find very very useful. Black nail polish is far too permanent for me.
But you do you
They meant nail polish on the LED not the camera.
Just cut the wire and run a new one past the light directly to the camera.
The user owns this device and can make physical alterations.
If this is a nearly microscopic, integrated circuit, you understand that’s a difficult thing to master, especially if you’re trying to attack merely with software, remotely
If this is, say, the integrated WebCam in your laptop, a piece of malware can’t exactly do what you’re proposing
And, unless the physical owner of the device is, themselves, trying to undermine their own security, I don’t see the logic in what you’re proposing. However, it is technically possible. But that’s not exactly the point of what I’m saying.
So, yes, as the owner of my laptop, I could undermine the security of that simple circuitry, but I have no motivation to do so. And any remote attacker would only have the resource of software to do so, and would be limited by what software could do— which would be limited by the, presumably, uncorrupted physical circuitry.
You can hack it by rewiring it.
How can you do that with malware?
I don’t think malware is the concern (although it is a concern).
The main concern spying on people in public. The light is not to inform you that it’s recording — it’s to inform others. But if it you can just rewire it or paint over it, then it doesn’t really help the technology protect other’s privacy.
It could still be ‘hacked’ in the truest sense of the term. Just on a hardware level instead of pure software. How hard some people will work to be surreptitious creeps should never be underestimated.
You know, I’m sure we’re both very intelligent people who have thought about this problem for a long time.
Instead of arguing, I think we should both focus on energies on working towards a collective solution.
(it sounds like a fun game of “darts“ when we both try to infiltrate each other’s systems, but played over a few drinks at a bar, some other time)
Hah, fooled them again! I am among the dumbest people this side of the Tordesillas line.
That said, I’d be happy to work with you.
Tordesillas line
OK, you got me with this one. I consider myself reasonably well educated, but even I had to go look this one up and do a little reading. And even though I think I got the gist a bit, I don’t think I quite understand what you meant in the context of this conversation, lol.
I guess that, not being a European, the cultural impact of the statement is a bit lost on me— but if you were in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, and we were navigating some beef between the Tompkins Projects, Clinton Hill, and the south side of the Willy B, I’d fill you in.
That said, I’d be happy to work with you too!
The fucking DANGER these glasses represent is so disgusting. So many women are going to end up recorded without their permission, stalked, and harassed. That thing about being able to find the name of the person you’re looking at? Yeah just because they say they’re not going to let that happen means they’ve already put the tech in place. Why stop at showing just the name? Social media will be just a click away. No doubt in my mind some nasty chud will hack the glasses with AI to unclothe everyone he’s looking at.
Dystopian af
Don’t care: light or not, I don’t want somebody pointing a camera at me at all times in a civilized society. If anything, this legislation could normalize creeps with cameras that are constantly pointed at you.
We haven’t even gotten to phase two of enshittification, and these things still haven’t exhibited value.
Unfortunately, we’re all getting used to having cameras pointed at us at all times. Ring cameras, flock cameras, tesla cameras, etc., etc. We already live in the Panopticon. There is no opt-out, and government personnel can access many if not all of these sources, and target specific people for chronic surveillance. Things will only get worse, unfortunately.
Pops cap off black marker
Finally a decent law that actually helps people keep their privacy. Estonia should adopt this too.
Ok and why wouldn’t a creep just cover that light with tape or paint?
Back in the day there were various bits of legislation to make apparent that then-novel camera phones were taking pictures. I remember phones with shutter sounds that could not be disabled by design.
Of course, they could be disabled by methods not in the design.
