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Quoting Guilherme Rambo

Simon Willison Archived Mar 17, 2026 ✓ Full text saved

Tidbit: the software-based camera indicator light in the MacBook Neo runs in the secure exclave¹ part of the chip, so it is almost as secure as the hardware indicator light. What that means in practice is that even a kernel-level exploit would not be able to turn on the camera without the light appearing on screen. It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blits the light directly onto the screen hardware. — Guilherme Rambo , in a text message to John Gruber Tags: hardware

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Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: CodeRabbit — Planner helps 10x your coding agents while minimizing rework and AI slop. Try Now. Tidbit: the software-based camera indicator light in the MacBook Neo runs in the secure exclave¹ part of the chip, so it is almost as secure as the hardware indicator light. What that means in practice is that even a kernel-level exploit would not be able to turn on the camera without the light appearing on screen. It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blits the light directly onto the screen hardware. — Guilherme Rambo, in a text message to John Gruber Posted 16th March 2026 at 8:34 pm Recent articles My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026 Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026 Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026 This is a quotation collected by Simon Willison, posted on 16th March 2026. apple 129 hardware 12 john-gruber 38 privacy 65 Disclosures Colophon © 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026

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