Hi, I bought a nitropad and bought the extra camera and microphone removal. I am using qubes and if i go to my usb hub, there is a microphone which is attached to domo. Now I am wondering if Nitrokey forgot to remove my microphone… or is it just a bug?
I can confirm what you say, also having a Nitropad which microphone was removed from factory and running Qubes OS. It is true that I see a microphone attached to dom0, as you reported.
But I think that the microphone is such a passive element, that the hardware is unable to detect if there really is one or not and the audio stack wouldn’t know either if a microphone is really physically there where it should be…
Doing some testing, I was absolutely unable to record anything (using Sound Recorder with Debian 12 based template) If the microphone is mute (PulseAudio volume control), no sound is being recorded. If the microphone is ON, it records only static - because there is actually no microphone picking up any sound - but the system doesn’t know about that and is unable to detect such situation (because all consumer laptops come with an internal microphone nowadays - except for us customers buying hardware having none)
When I read this report, I wonder if the microphone you see in the GUI is an actual device or an audio sink pre-configured by QubesOS. For example, if your Nitropad has a headphone jack, it should be usable once you plug-in a headphone-mic (e.g. from your phone). Plug one in and test for the static noise again, whether you can record then.
A regular microphone that may have been forgotten to be removed should show up in either lsusb or lspci output in dom0/usb-hub. If you see devices listed you can’t identify, you can look them up via Find parts. That said, Nitrokey should give official guidance how to ascertain the purchased product properties. The microphone they remove will have a fixed device id, so it could even be listed in documentation for the device.
In my case, I did receive the removed parts inside the parcel - so I can be sure these elements were removed. This also makes it practical if one ever wants to install them again.
@blobman1 did you also receive the removed parts?
