Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Now all you have to do is warn users that the one LED is important and means something. Not like all the other LEDs that are on all the time and are mostly pointless.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/webcam-spy-settleme...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386599,00.asp

> When the school district investigated the case, it found other incidents of webcam spying, and notified the students involved, including Levin. According to the lawsuit, filed in Eastern Pennsylvania District Court, Levin's younger brother commented on a light near the webcam that appeared to go on and off at odd times. His mother "dismissed the idea as absurd," but it appears he was right.

View on HN

"Now all you have to do is warn users that the one LED is important and means something. Not like all the other LEDs that are on all the time and are mostly pointless."

No longer plastering devices with semi-pointless LEDs would help. Harddrive activity? Wifi? Bluetooth? I don't think all these lights are really necessary. Throw one on the power cable maybe, and a few to backlight the keyboard, but otherwise only use them as indicator lights for things that are actually important to the standard user.

Hey, I find the hard drive light very helpful in determining whether my system is thrashing for virtual memory, or likely stuck on some CPU-bound process.

99% of computer users have no idea what you just typed.

HDD light blinking? That means it's working correctly. Am I right?

>HDD light blinking? That means it's working correctly. Am I right?

In a lot of ways that is correct. Generally, when something is thrashing the hard drive it is making actual progress on its task, and its task is relativly short lived. This means that if your computer is going slowly, and the HDD LED is active, you can likely wait for the HDD LED to quiet down. In contrast, when your computer is going slowly (or not responding at all) and your HDD LED is off, it is much more likely that something is wrong and won't resolve itself.

Sure, but that remaining 1% is who those 99% go to when their computer isn't working properly.

In anycase, if I wanted to know if my drive was being trashed, I'd look at command like 'top'.

If people can perform remote admin on machines 1000s of miles away without the need of green LEDs, I'm sure consumer tech will do just fine.

The problem is that getting top to start can take a long time if it's actually thrashing heavily enough.

I'd agree that the LED is nonessential with HDDs -- you can just listen; and then you can even make out whether it's doing a lot of seeking or long continuous accesses, but you can't do that with SSDs.

We are the one percent? (sorry)

That's the only LED that I actually miss on my MacBook. So much so that I have a virtual LED for this in the menubar. That and the batter indications LEDs older MacBooks used to have. The rMBP is missing those as well, not sure why they got rid of that.

This is probably better implemented as a system tray icon.

I have a computer without a hdd indicator light and sometimes I miss it (like when I am fullscreened and a sudden lockup caused by unswapping lots of stuff occurs), but ultimately I haven't found it to be a big deal.

Things like this are sort of like seatbelts and helmets: you usually don't need it, but when you need it, you REALLY need it.

May be solution could be putting all useful for troubleshooting and annoying in everyday use LEDs under special cover.

NO, that is the wrong way to go. HDD is important (especially if you have an SSD) because it shows when it's being accessed, Wifi is even more important because you're communicating over the network when that one activates, and if it's doing so without any reason to then you should suspect something going on (like malware infection). Ditto for BlueTooth. If they're implemented well, hardware indicators are impossible to fake.

One of my biggest gripes is how MS removed in Win7 the little connection icon in the system tray that shows when data is sent/received (it even split send/recv into two separate indicators, rather clever I think.) IMHO the trend of "simplification" is going too far. How about educating the users instead of making them more ignorant by hiding anything that they "wouldn't know about" (and making it harder for them to even start wondering about - and thus possibly learning)?

A Wi-Fi indicator is pretty useless for most users to detect malware infection because there's so much else that might be using the network at any given moment on a modern system. Likewise, I can't remember the last time I needed an HD access indicator. Don't need more things blinking at me conveying nothing useful/actionable.

But generally the webcam light is placed near the webcam itself, away from all the other LEDs you mentioned.

Well, on MacBooks it’s the only LED. Ok, that’s slightly misleading, there is another one on the charging cable (indicating whether the device is connected to power and whether or not it is charging).

This to me seems more like an application of Occam’s razor. Hardware or Software malfunctioning seems much more likely than someone spying on you.

There was one in the front of the case. They had to use lasers to poke tiny holes in the aluminum.

http://www.grafik.com/blog/2011/11/apple-sleep-function/

But yes, it's nice that they don't have a bunch of LEDs for everything.

Now all you have to do is warn users that the one LED is important and means something.

There is already a common pop-culture shorthand for "now recording," the blinking red light. That's cheap and simple, and everyone already knows what it means, particularly when it's on a camera.

The real question, in my mind, is how the world-renowned user-experience and user-interface experts at Apple decided to use anything else.

A blinking red light would be fairly annoying for long video conferences and calls.

Malware that spontaneously lights the LED without activating the camera so the user becomes accustomed to a false indicator. Or have the LED turn anytime the machine is left idle (but still on) in order to burn out the LED.

Is it feasible to burn out the LED? Those things have lifespans of up to 100,000 hours, which means it's likelier the computer itself would be broken or obsoleted before the LED itself burns out.

Indicator LEDs usually just dim (unnoticeably) over time. Catastrophic failures do occur, but tend to be more likely with high-power torch/backlight LEDs that are driven hard to produce the most light rather than indicators which are operated at "visible but not too bright" levels. I have a keyboard from '86 and its numlock LED is still working perfectly fine after nearly 3 decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com