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Google Home

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Re: Google Home

#241

Post by dragonwriter »

walrus01 wrote: post #238

How many months from release until the FISA court issues a secret order to turn one of these on 24x7x365 in a suspect's home, and stream the audio to the FBI "counter terrorism" people investigating a subject?

> How many months from release until the FISA court issues a secret order to turn one of these on 24x7x365 in a suspect's home, and stream the audio to the FBI "counter terrorism" people investigating a subject?

Google Home isn't the first entry into this market (Amazon Echo is a thing), and neither of those is the first network-connected microphone-bearing device in people's homes that might be targeted, so its kind of weird to focus on this particular product for that question.

Re: Google Home

#244

Post by TeMPOraL »

unusximmortalis wrote: post #234
mbrock wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Free Software Foundation, in its texts, often uses the phrase "the free world" to mean the realm of computing without proprietary restrictions, surveillance, etc. Approximately since Snowden, I've become more and more convinced about both the fragility and the value of this free world. And today, I basically see the tech giants as colossal enemies. Career-wise, henceforth I will avoid proprietary systems and dedi…

That's why I think an open source distributed & end to end encrypted social platform to replace facebook and google plus is needed too.

I think we need to go even further - we need to reduce the cloud back to being dumb piece of infrastructure, compute for hire, paid by the hour. The only thing it should do is abstract away computation - not centralize data and processing under control of some companies (big or small, startups are actually the most annoying entities in the cloud ecosystem, IMO).

So for instance, I want my calendar or e-mail to be stored somewhere, I don't care where - hence in the cloud. But I want the data to be under my control. I can pay for a reasonable guarantee that the data will not suddenly disappear. I can pay for someone else's piece of code to be run against my data, but otherwise I want that someone else to stay away. Companies can earn money by providing useful pieces of code, and even managing stuff for people who absolutely don't care about how this stuff works - but we do need to reverse the idea. It should be arbitrary code run on demand against our data, not our data feeding someone's machine.

Re: Google Home

#245

Post by walrus01 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #241
walrus01 wrote: post #238

How many months from release until the FISA court issues a secret order to turn one of these on 24x7x365 in a suspect's home, and stream the audio to the FBI "counter terrorism" people investigating a subject?

> How many months from release until the FISA court issues a secret order to turn one of these on 24x7x365 in a suspect's home, and stream the audio to the FBI "counter terrorism" people investigating a subject? Google Home isn't the first entry into this market (Amazon Echo is a thing), and neither of those is the first network-connected microphone-bearing device in people's homes that might be targeted, so its kind…

It might be the first one to pass some sort of critical mass of consumer adoption, and within a few years have 10x the market share of Amazon Echo. Depends how much Google subsidizes the hardware and how much they advertise/push it in their other platforms.

Re: Google Home

#246

Post by dredmorbius »

corin_ wrote: post #223
__jal wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a mighty fine distinction, one that sometimes makes no difference. You are also assuming that "access to attention" is perfectly firewalled from data, which it isn't. I know one person who is playing with what correlations can be made by getting people to click on google ads. I can't imagine he's the first. You are also assuming that Google's policy will never change, Google's assets will never end up…

> The average corporate lifespan in the US is 27 years. I wonder what the average lifespan is for companies that are already more than X years old, where X could be 1, 2, 5... I'm thinking as a comparison to how the biggest increase in average lifespan for humans wasn't everyone dying a tiny bit later, it was infant mortality dropping massively.

Among the more fascinating results out of evolutionary biology and the Red Queen Hypothesis is that species survival probability is almost wholly independent of species age. That is: survival does not convey a survival benefit.

I don't know what the corresponding trend is for business ventures, but I suspect they may exhibit similar traits.

I am aware that various measures of corporate dominance are declining -- residency within the Dow Jones 30 Industrials, for example.

Re: Google Home

#247

Post by dredmorbius »

poozer305 wrote: post #116
nkg wrote: post #56

This morning a friend of mine got his gmail hacked, which means his Play, Maps, Music and everything got hacked also. With Google Home, add your "everyday tasks" and voice history to this! ^^

Sounds like your friend's fault for not using two factor auth.

Blame the victim? Really?

Re: Google Home

#248

Post by fizzbatter »

ewindisch wrote: post #144
fizzbatter wrote: post #20

I'm dying for an Echo / Home that is fully api friendly and allows custom keywords. I want to buy an interface to my own home assistant. I want a hackers friend. Sure, offline-capable would be great too, but for now just give me the damn api hooks. :s edit : Note that i believe Echo has a pretty good API. I just don't want to talk to echo haha. I want to talk to my system.

The Echo not only allows you to extend its vocabulary, Amazon offers the Echo functionality as as a service that any developer can use from their own hardware. If you wanted to use your own voice recognition and natural language processing, you could easily tie that into open source vocabulary that has been written for Echo.

Yea, i hear the API is quite good - i should have been more clear, it sounds like for me the main blocker is the trigger word.

But yea, what i would want is to literally take all input from the Echo, have amazon/echo transcribe it to text, and then send it to my code. Echo would then read the english response back.

Re: Google Home

#249

Post by TeMPOraL »

reitanqild wrote: post #222
amelius wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you think that free software can keep up against these giants? In the near future, it will all be about having large amounts of data, and processing power; it will be less and less about the actual algorithms. I'm afraid the only way out will be to rethink the economy.

> In the near future, it will all be about having large amounts of data, and processing power; I don't think we are even close to the limits if what we can reach with standard desktop and server software.

I agree. The current trend of outsourcing everything to "the cloud" is partially fashion, partially laziness, and mostly dictated by business models - why do something the right way (from engineering point of view), when you can lock your users up in your own garden and extract rent (either directly, or by spamming them with ads and selling their data)?

Our devices have incredible amount of computing power now - a great untapped potential that we could use for something else than for supporting unnecessary indirection layers.

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