Turning off camera LEDs and recording video is an old hack and old news. This is for a specific firmware and computer model and attack surface via USB to update the webcam's firmware, so I am assuming that makes it news?
EDIT: I keep a piece of black electric tape over any of my notebook's webcams.
> Turning off camera LEDs and recording video is an old hack and old news.
This.
Some of the linux webcam drivers drivers have had the option to specify the behavior of the LED via a parameter since way back, including turning it completely off.
I remember this was the case ~20 years ago.
One example (look for the led-option) https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.1/media/v4l-drivers/phili...
This is straight from the documentation:
"But with: `leds=0,0`the LED never goes on, making it suitable for silent surveillance"
On the contrary, being open source adds the opportunity to understand what the software does on a deeper level, and you can always fork (Librewolf is one of many examples that comes to mind).
Do you have any examples where large entities taking over open source project having lead to the project's total demise? This sort of thing happens all the time the in the commercial space.
It of course also happens to some extent to open source projects, but usually that results in forks if the demand is high enough. For commercial software, you don't have many options - especially for subscription based licensing, which is pretty much the norm nowadays.