What value to the Oscars have or the Emmy? Peer-awards mean that your competitors think you've done a good job and recognize that.
But even if you toss out peer-awards, Buzzfeed News has also won the Sydney award, which is awarded by the The Sidney Hillman Foundation, and was founded by the founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, hardly a "journalistic" venture.
I don't consider any of their posts "award winning". They have had award winning reporting, including the National Press, the Sydney, and the Online Journalism Awards. They have also had reporting that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prizes in International Reporting. [1]
If the T2 chip is compromised, then separate SoC protection is moot. The only true protection is a physical covering (like in the Lenovo) or physical kill switch (like the Purism laptops).
At that stage though all bets are off - the hackers have access to everything you have typed, all your files, all the audio from your microphones, your credit card details, those photos of you and your partner on the hard drive...
Yet the camera on a laptop is the thing that we need to cover? It’s a weird security model, that’s all.
Besides, on a MacBook it sounds like the webcam light is almost impossible to circumvent because of the implementation.
For those photos of you and your partner you made the conscious decision to take them, perhaps even weighing the risks of them being compromised at some point. This is very different from a video feed being captured of you unknowingly. That goes for both the impact of such a compromise, and the feeling of the risk of being watched.
Almost impossible just means it requires lots of money/dedication, but still a T2 chip compromise is scalable and can be done remotely, which is fundamentally different from physically compromising hardware.
Well Purism laptops have hardware switches for the microphones too.
But it's not even just for hackers. Zoom had the SUPER annoying habit of turning your cam on when the meeting organiser selected that everyone should cam.
This led to several colleagues being unaware they were being shown at that time. One was even lying in bed and called in from her phone. That's her business, it was 8pm at her location. But now everyone knows.
A hardware slider would have prevented all of these real-world problems.
