Today is a day about reporting how Silicon Valley continues its downhill slide.

This article deals with HP, that company that says in their marketing "built for a better tomorrow."

Well, I sure hope so, because what they built for today sure seems sus.

Since my neighbors are pretty non-tech and they know I'm fully tech, I tend to be the IT Gal for the street. Yesterday my neighbor brought over her HP laptop (see above) complaining that her camera didn't work during Zoom calls.

Okay, that seems like a simple problem (usually solved by just selecting the right thing in Zoom's settings). Nope, that didn't work. No visual. So I went into my best Sherlock Holmes impression and decided that having ruled out the likely, then it must be the unlikely thing that's the problem.

Drivers? Up to date.

Is the camera dead? Well, its tally light comes on, and it seems improbable that the little embedded unit at the top of the display would have a working light but an unworking camera (those darn ribbon cables sometimes jar loose).

I got out my flashlight and looked more closely. Why did I need a flashlight? Well, black on black on black doesn't reveal much to the naked eye, especially when cheap plastics are involved. But lo, that doesn't look like a lens! Well, it doesn't look like what I'd expect a lens to look like when looking back through it.

What was going on here? I poked and felt all around and then I discovered it: HP had put an unseen (and easily moved) slider into the very top edge of the case. More black on black. Really small and impossible to see. Barely any ridge on it. Easily moved as you open up the screen to use your laptop. Moving that unseen little switch turned on the camera. Turns out that the impossible-to-see slider moves a piece of plastic over the image sensor.

Curious, I went to the laptop's spec page. No mention of a Webcam security slider. And, of course, you'd have to download the PDF manual to see that there's a "camera privacy cover," not that the manual actually really shows you what it looks like, as I will here:

I know I'm getting old, but that's small enough that a child wouldn't find that part and try to eat it!

Score another one for terrible design. Even Jonny never quite got things that bad.