News

Tamper With The Recording LED & Meta’s Glasses Kill Camera

Modders have turned removing the recording light into a paid service. Meta is now banning them and threatening lawsuits — even off its own platforms.

Published

2 months ago

July 9, 2026

Nour Nasir

tamper with the recording led and meta's glasses kill camera

Every pair of Meta’s smart glasses carries a white light called the capture LED. It blinks briefly when the wearer takes a photo and keeps blinking for as long as they record, and it has no off switch — the point is that everyone nearby knows a camera is running. The trouble is that modders worked out how to defeat it, and some turned removing the LED into a paid service.

Meta is now pushing back on both fronts. In a recently published FAQ addressing the backlash against its devices, the company said its glasses automatically disable the camera when they detect the capture LED has been covered — a safeguard in place since the second generation of the hardware. The camera stays locked until the system detects the LED is unobstructed again.

Taping over the LED, though, was only the beginning. Meta admitted it has seen people “go beyond using tape to sophisticated efforts to modify or destroy the capture LED”. Its answer is a software update that disables the camera entirely if the system detects the LED has been physically tampered with or destroyed. Meta confirmed to Engadget that the update is mandatory and is currently rolling out.

Also Read: OpenAI Cleared To Launch GPT-5.6 Publicly After Government Review

The company is also going after the businesses. Meta said it has been removing ads, posts, and Marketplace listings promoting LED-tampering services, and vowed to ban the accounts behind them — and to take legal action against those advertising such services, even when the ads appear off Meta’s own platforms.

The moves follow a rough stretch for the product line. The launch of Meta’s latest AI glasses intensified public anger over the devices, with critics raising concerns about privacy in general and about the glasses being used for all manner of unsavory purposes. The worries have been sharpened by the knowledge that the recording indicator could be switched off.

News

Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 weeks ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.