internet funeral

It was never supposed to be a “gotcha”, it’s just the obvious question that arises based on what you said.

And I gave the obvious answers to those obvious questions.

I didn’t think my ideas were clever. Your thesis when you started this thread was that there was an easy way to be sure that the mute is real, and you gave it.

Sorry, but that's a mis-representation. Somebody said "Also muting it probably doesn’t stop it listening, it just stops its response.", and I replied to that with a simple way to show it's not the case. I didn't bring in a thesis, I brought up a counter-argument.

You sound like a person who simply can’t stand to just say “oh right, I misspoke” or even just “ah yes, I oversimplified”, so you act like obviously everything I bring up was implied all along, with a touch of rudeness as punishment.

You're free to show me where I went wrong, but I don't see it. Somebody said "what if A?", and I responded "it can't be A due to X". Then you came in "what if B?", I said "it can't be B due to Y". Then you came in again and I responded again. Where did I supposedly oversimplify or mis-speak? People kept bringing up hypotheses, and I kept bringing up counter-arguments.

Even though, again, your point about there needing to be a zero-compression algorithm made it seem like there was nothing else left to account for, even though there was.

Yes, if someone makes a different argument, previous counter-arguments won't fit. Seems pretty obvious?

I would not be surprised at all if there is a way to detect with high confidence whether the mute does what it should, and for all I know that has been done. I was really just wanting to hear what I was missing by bringing up the obvious questions that a non-security expert like me would wonder.

And I gave you answers for your "obvious questions". It would help a lot if you formulate your questions as questions. You formulated them as arguments, to which I replied with counter-arguments.

It seemed like it couldn’t be as straightforward as you said, and through your responses in fact it isn’t. You really have to ask yourself what you were even trying to accomplish with posting on this topic at all based on your reaction to those very simple, non-threatening questions.

The answers to the questions you brought up are as straightforward as I said. The answer to other questions isn't as straightforward, because I didn't answer those questions.

That's actually a good point! Random data is unlikely since it would be noticable due to differences in size of the compressed traffic (random data doesn't compress), but fake data would not be distinguishable from just looking at traffic.

Luckily there are still things you can do, like analyzing the firmware itself (especially when you can inject your MitM proxy cert). It has been done before, and it's reasonable to assume such a technique would have been found by security researchers by now.