Hacker News Reader

Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Apple is intentionally forcing the shutter sound, to prevent secret upskirt shots. I know several phones have had shutter sounds that cannot be disabled, and some countries have required it. In that case Apple might reject apps that use this trick.

View on HN

End user can use the mute switch to turn off the sound. This question is about doing it programmatically.

In Japan, the iPhone will always have the shutter sound even with mute on. You can't disable it or mute it. Even if you didn't buy the phone in Japan, the iPhone will do that in Japan.

I've been to Japan, and my iPhone didn't make any shutter sounds while I was there.

Now the question is - how would the iPhone even know that's in Japan? :) GPS? I think OS X uses the time zone for these things, e.g. to block certain WiFi channels due to legal requirements.

Well, it is a phone... It's going to have access to geo data from the local cell phone towers, no timezone hacks necessary. In fact I believe the iPhone adjusts your active timezone automatically according to the geo data collected from the local cell tower, hence why your phone time changes when you touch down after a long flight.

Actually the time update is not based on inference from location data, but rather it is actively transmitted by the cell network as part of the GSM standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NITZ

Though it's possibly worth pointing out that time/date is not a _requirement_ to the standard and not all networks implement it. It's possibly also worth pointing out that most recent Android devices seem to use NTP at the OS level rather than relying on GSM broadcast info.

As the other poster said, time has it's own standard. In terms of your reply to OP, it's even simpler. The network identifier for an operator broadcast by the cell tower consists of a network code and a country code :)

Actually blocking WiFi channels is done through the 802.11d information element in WiFi beacons which specify what the country the access point is in.

Maybe it is also transmitted that way, but changing the time zone from Australia from New Guinea has repeatedly fixed my OS X WiFi issues when a Chinese roommate used an illegal channel (in Australia).

It will be connected to a telco network, right? That's how it knows in what country it is. In Europe it is quite common to cross countries borders and as soon as you get connected to your neighbours telco you get a text welcoming you to the country.

But then they'd have to come up with a different solution for the iPod touch :)

Are you sure? I thought regulation-specific stuff like this was baked into the firmware via flags that checked the hardware model number.

For example: my iPhone 5, which I bought in China, cannot make or receive voice-only FaceTime calls. Even if I am in the US, using a US SIM, this is the case. It's not related to the GPS or cell tower location, or to the time zone.

Um, no. I just found out about the issue as I bought a Japanese iPhone5S in January and promptly returned it the next day because I couldn't turn off the camera sound. I picked up a USA iPhone5S in Hawaii in February. Have been back in Japan for 2 months now. No sounds coming out of my camera on my USA iPhone5S.

The thing that makes this most ridiculous is (a) they don't have the same requirement of digital cameras in Japan and (b) 3rd party camera apps you download for phones are not required to make a sound. Pretty much every Japanese person downloads another camera app for exactly that reason.

Me personally, I just don't want the sound. Sitting in a quiet restaurant taking stupid pictures of my food with my phone is already embarrassing enough without calling myself out with my phone making noise. Hence getting the USA model. Sure I could have used separate camera software but I wanted to be able to use the camera app that doesn't require me to unlock the phone without sound.

Film cameras: SLRs are big and obvious, Leicas not so much but still fairly obvious. The Rolleiflex medium format dual lens reflex camera has a leaf shutter and is very quiet at the time of exposure and is held at waist height. Popular with portrait photographers. However a Rollei is not easily concealed. Taking any of these cameras out is a serious undertaking. Bag, film, camera, various extras. Not casual.

I suppose the advent of high quality cameras that are always carried as part of a phone coupled with the very small size of the phone has lead some countries to evolve these regulations.

Perhaps an actual digital camera is felt to fall in the 'not casual' category, so not covered by the regulation?

I'm not sure what casual has to do with it. People that want to take up skirt shots aren't casual and they can buy keychain video cameras for $4 a piece on eBay and stick them in their shoes

The laws in Japan that require sounds for the phone are as stupid as punishing legit software purchasers with anti-copying measures. They only hurt the legit people and don't at all hinder the undesirable behavior

Leica has digital cameras these days, you know :)

I know. But not as weighty as my old M4.

So now i want to take snaps of my meals with a medium format camera.

> The thing that makes this most ridiculous is (a) they don't have the same requirement of digital cameras in Japan and (b) 3rd party camera apps you download for phones are not required to make a sound. Pretty much every Japanese person downloads another camera app for exactly that reason.

iPhone's bought in a lot of countries in the Middle East are equally ridiculous as they disable FaceTime (i.e. there is no FaceTime app). Even if you leave the Middle East, e.g. go to the UK and put a UK SIM in, FaceTime is still disabled. Same if you reformat even after doing that, so it's locked at the hardware level. Taking another iPhone to the Middle East works fine (although in most places it still won't actually work as the countries have internet level filtering in place).

The funny thing is you can still download Skype from the App Store and use that without restrictions :)

First I'd heard of this, curious! What's the reasoning behind banning FaceTime?

I'd hazard a guess that it's because Islam technically prohibits images of people's faces?

Middle East countries treat phone and internet as a source of revenue rather than as fundamental business- entrepreneur-enabling infrastructure.

So they're concerned that Facetime, maybe particularly Facetime audio, cannibalizes their mobile network call revenue. Yes, Skype and other alternatives may still be available, but Facetime is integrated into the iOS address book and pressing the "call with facetime" button is just as convenient as dialing a contact's phone number.

I saw this crushingly-self-harmful behavior when I lived in the region and experienced expensive, slow Internet access. They also ban ISPs from buying bandwidth from anyone other than a massively-overpriced state monopoly pipe. If they treated mobile and internet as a key enabling infrastructure instead, the massive expansion in business would result in much higher tax revenue than the hit to the measly communications tolls. But they're either short-termist or have friends who personally profit from the telecom departments.

Plain and simple: State capitalism runs the risk of cronyism, corruption, regulatory capture, etc. Singapore is a good example of state capitalism with relatively low levels of all of these.

I thought was disabled as a compromise because they refused to give those governments the ability to decrypt it. BBM had similar issues.

http://appadvice.com/appnn/2010/09/unconfirmed-saudi-arabia-...

It's still kind of a joke, since you can mute an iPhone very effectively by covering up the speaker holes.

Like most things it is a good enough solution, not a perfect solution.

Isn't the shutter sound, even where required by law, kind of pointless because unsavory users could just take a video instead of taking a picture? That's probably what perverts prefer anyway.

A true pervert ostensibly might appreciate the additional megapixels offered by a still image over under-sampled auto-compressed video.

A quality-minded pervert would probably just buy a $150 digital point-n-shoot. Just as many megapixels, no shutter sound, and much better optical components.

A technical pervert would take a HD video with their phone and then use multiple frames to mathematically extract even higher-resolution stills from it:

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~kalyans/research/snapshots/supp...

Let's hope to God people on Hacker News don't start taking upskirt shots.

They would get in arguments about the latest up-sampling frameworks and never ship anything.

"I'm not a pervert! I'm testing my app which has a target market of perverts!"

and people in the train will see you with a digital camera instead of a multi-use device like a phone.

Shutter sound is required by law in many countries.

How do those laws address devices without the capability to produce sound?

By forbidding them, most likely.

So the law mandates a speaker, and logic to convert data to audio, be bundled with every optical CCD?

The shutter sound can just be a beep as far as I know. One digital camera I bought for dirt cheap did that, presumably to cut costs.

Many countries? South Korea is the only one I can find a source for online. In Japan it appears to only be a voluntary choice among device manufacturers.

https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/south-korea/ii-...

How about Ukraine?

"voluntary" choice in Japan is basically the regulators telling the carriers that if they don't do it they'll have to regulate. From the carrier's point of view, it's a matter of doing it now in friendly terms, or doing it tomorrow with the regulators on their back.

That was my thinking as well.

I wonder how many of the people cheering this are also the ones horrified by Google Glass because someone might disable the recording light.

I don't know about 'cheering' it, but as a hack, it did put a smile on my face.

Yes, I believe Apple requires the shutter sound. They actually rejected the first version of my video streaming App because the recording beep was missing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com