[Virtual1]

Thank you for the helpful information. I was adding support for sending pictures from my laptop to my server and was getting this error, only when the script ran by cron of course, which was really annoying. I had to implement the applescript solution, and unfortunately this requires a user to be logged into the computer for the script to work but I don't think there's a better solution. This was probably done very much on purpose by Apple and they may not even approve of this workaround. (so lets hope they don't find this thread or this work-around may get worked-around...)

It's been my experience that the "open" command runs under the context of whatever user is using Finder, (specifically whichever user is "frontmost" when fast user switching is in use) and that dictates what rights will be available to isightcapture, so be sure that wherever isightcapture is placing files is writable by all Finder users on your machine, even if your cron job is running as root.

I could've swore I had this working earlier under 10.5. I wonder if they neglected to get this security fix right in 10.5.0 or 10.5.1? But it certainly is affecting 10.5.2 here.

The plist hack to keep it out of the dock is another handy trick I'll have to remember. I suppose I can use that the other way too (remove it) to get things into the dock that like to run invisibly.

Background: in case anyone's wondering what it's used for here, my laptop is set to detect its IP address (WAN as well as LAN) once an hour and ssh it to my server if available. If a script is waiting on the server for it, it downloads and runs it.

I recently found isightcapture, and so added another cron job (that runs once a minute) to take a picture once a minute and scp it back to the server if a file exists, and so I can leave it a one liner command to touch that file to turn on the minutely picture capture. Or the script can do anything else necessary if my laptop is stolen.

How much you want to bet there's an undocumented way to turn on the isight without turning on the green light?