Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager » CANDID ISIGHT 4 U

May 30, 2006 | Comments: (0)

CANDID ISIGHT 4 U

TAGS: Desktops and notebooks

I recently updated Comic Life, a very cool app I'll describe below. When I launched the new version of the app, the green tally light next to my MacBook Pro's built-in iSight camera lit up. I didn't expect that; the app's image capture pane is not active when Comic Life launches. No preview window was shown, so from where I sat, it looked like the camera had been activated for no good reason. In any case, the camera turned on, I had an active broadband connection to the Internet, and my imagination took it from there.

With the original, standalone iSight Webcam you can shutter the lens, point the camera away from you or unplug the FireWire cord, none of which the built-in iSight lets you do. If you're looking at the display, some part of you is in your Mac's viewfinder, just waiting for some app to turn the green light on, however briefly. There are times in your life when you don't want that.

I'm not alarmed by this. There are so many practical jokes and varieties of petty blackmail one could carry out with the aid of an ever-ready camera. Spy on your babysitter using your cell phone. Find out what your employees are actually doing while they're “working at home.”

As for its potential to be (ab)used by hackers, law enforcement or the NSA, I'll let your imagination spin on those possibilities. Someone would need access to your system to install an iSight-enabled application, and if you're sloppy enough to give someone that access, snapping piccies of you will be the least interesting thing they could do with planted code. If it worries you, put a little masking tape, or something else that doesn't leave gunk behind, over the camera.

Comic Life, published by Plasq and bundled with my Intel-based iMac and MacBook Pro, is a fanciful idea turned into an brilliant app. It takes images from your iPhoto library (or any other location) and arranges them in a comic book layout. You can place, scale and rotate multiple images, add graphics layers that contain text, frames and balloons and create comics spanning however many pages you like. Or you can paste up one graphic and save it out as a JPEG like the one I pasted into this entry. Think of Comic Life as the Garage Band of comic books, or just pop-art relief from iPhoto's canned themes.

Posted by Tom Yager on May 30, 2006 08:59 PM

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