Use a bandaid. Cotton pad in the middle, no adhesive to muck up the lens.
Overall, the Post it is probably the simplest and cheapest solution. Or for fun a bit of something almost but not quite transparent. Let someone watching go cross eyed from blur and trying to figure out what they are seeing. Petroleum jelly dabbed on the lens?
I’ve always favored sowing a bit if discord to mock anyone spying and to let them know you know.
These things are silly expensive for what they are.
The pricing does seem excessive for these things. I looked at getting some branded with the Company Logo for a give away for internal training and the like and … yeah … I’ll bring a roll of electrical tape instead.
Me too: put a little square of tape over the adhesive side where the lens would be so the tape doesn’t stick to the lens. Also fold one of the corners of the larger piece of tape for easy removal once a year when some manager wants to try this new video chat thing.
Meh, keep it open for as long as it takes to give you a “clean” footprint. If the NSA (or whoever) really want to listen to all of the mundane conversations you have about who is going to cook dinner tonight, let them.
The flip side of that is that you should make sure you have an escape plan for if/when shit hits the fan. Keep a burner and a thumb drive with a preloaded virtual PC that can only access TOR locked away in case you might need it.
As long as you aren’t doing anything sensitive, you’re just adding to the “noise” part of the signal to noise ratio.
A folded business card works just fine.
Custom company-logo stickers would be the best of both worlds!
I just keep neglecting to keep my TAILS USB up to date.
I fire up TOR enough on my laptop that I’m generally current, but I suppose I need to setup some sort of job to always keep the latest TAILS iso downloaded.
The loss in your laptop’s status and self-esteem if ever caught using quotidian tape when they can use this overpriced and over-designed tape-like substance ™ is staggering. Are you really willing to take that risk? Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have misplaced my graphics table stylus cozy. I swear it was around here somewhere…
Maybe I’m just cheap, but the dot from a hole punch on a square of scotch tape has been my preference for years. It lasts about a month or two, the tape comes off without damage, the paper obscures. When I’m going stealth, i can use a piece of black paper. When I want to be festive, I can use Astrobrites. But I am cheap.
John McClane: [covering the webcam] You think you can, uh, track where he is?
Thomas Gabriel: Detective, covering the camera with your hand does not turn off the microphone.
It’s not a risk management exercise, its a piece of tape and 2 seconds of your time.
With so few known cases of cam hijack espionage, I guess that proves the tape is effective! 
For me, it has less to do with worries about stranger surveillance and more to do with untrustworthy peers, unreliable colleagues, nutjob family members and (very former) stalkery romantic partners. I don’t always know their hacking skills, and in the last case, don’t know how they’re spending their time. I work in a place with shared machines, and while I trust our IT security services, that hasn’t always been true. While I do practice strong password and access hygiene, I have colleagues who do stupid things like pick up and use abandoned USB drives. I worry far more about key loggers than cam surveillance, but defending against a compromised cam takes 5 seconds out of 60 days.
I’ve finally bonded with my father after years of acrimony. We both have duct tape over our cameras. Sure, he’s protecting himself from “crazy socialist liberals” but little does he know: I stole his duct tape because I needed cover for how awful I look most mornings.
If that ain’t a country song (I stole your duct tape and God is watching), well, it should be.
also good for covering those blue leds that are so bright you can see them from space.
who decided those were a good idea for every hard disk and usb port?
I was going to say the same thing: somebody gave me a fancy-ass business card on really nice cardboard which is thick enough to block everything perfectly, but fancily plasticized in a way that half of it folded beautifully into just the right shape to fit on the top edge of the lid/screen section perfectly, so that it almost looks like a purpose-made cam cover. And if I want to use the cam, I just slide it to the side, and no worry about adhesives causing problems (some plastic thing along those lines would actually make more sense to me as a purpose-made store-bought cam cover than the things in the article, frankly).
(Luckily, I don’t need to worry about the mic, as my laptop doesn’t have a built-in one, just a jack, so all I have to do is not plug it in.)
Bullshit
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