311–320 of 734 posts
I have this idea of a system I would like to have in my house. It contains cameras in every room that are constantly watching where people are and relaying the coordinates to a central server. That server makes decisions on if lights should be on or if A/C should be running in that room. But I would never buy this system. I would have to make it myself. I am hopeful that open source software and hardware can produce…
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The chance that a random implementer has a security vulnerability is much higher than that Jeff Bezos is listening to me watch TV. A private system is more vulnerable to target attack and an Amazon system is more vulnerable to mass surveillance.
You are on the right track, but I don't think you are quite right. Amazon like systems are more vulnerable to mass surveillance. Your vulnerability isn't a targeted attack: you are not valuable enough to be worth the effort to figure out your system. As an attacker on your system I'd have to figure out how to break in, and then how to use the hardware you have. You are more valuable as part of a botnet - attacks that…
Think about this statement for a sec. Of course is listening to you. It has to listen to you because it needs to be able to respond to "Alexa". So yes, this is always listening.
Now, once you come to terms with that, do you feel comfortable having a technology with access to the internet, location, habits, account, contacts, email, phone, CC information etc etc, to be actively listening to your most intimate private conversations?
It does not take a 5 year old two seconds to figure this out.
What actually happened: Alexa misinterpreted some voice commands and activated a "call" skill. The people involved and local news got very excited and escalated this into a conspiracy story. Amazon takes customer privacy EXTREMELY seriously. There's no way a team would get the "ok" to build a skill that randomly records private conversations then sends them to a random contact. It also doesn't make any logical sense…
Heh, skill.
What actually happened: Alexa misinterpreted some voice commands and activated a "call" skill. The people involved and local news got very excited and escalated this into a conspiracy story. Amazon takes customer privacy EXTREMELY seriously. There's no way a team would get the "ok" to build a skill that randomly records private conversations then sends them to a random contact. It also doesn't make any logical sense…
Why? Because from a PR perspective, it doesn't matter what Amazon or the engineers intended, all that matters is what actually happened. You said:
> There's no way a team would get the "ok" to build a skill that randomly records private conversations then sends them to a random contact.
But that's exactly what happened. Whether it was a bug or a feature doesn't matter. Imagine if the wing fell off a plane and an airframe engineer came on here and said "hey, there's no way we would get the OK to design a wing that falls off in midair." Yeah, we know. The fact that it happened by accident doesn't make it better (maybe worse, actually).
Now you've got dozens of people responding to you, and BTW a lot of reporters read HN too. Do you really want to see stories like "Amazon Engineer Calls Customers Conspiracy Theorists"?
What actually happened: Alexa misinterpreted some voice commands and activated a "call" skill. The people involved and local news got very excited and escalated this into a conspiracy story. Amazon takes customer privacy EXTREMELY seriously. There's no way a team would get the "ok" to build a skill that randomly records private conversations then sends them to a random contact. It also doesn't make any logical sense…
Of course. But it is entirely plausible that somebody builds a skill that records certain conversations, and somebody builds a skill that sends recording somewhere, and then due to some bugs or coincidences or missing controls to prevent such occurrence, the first skill is activated when it should not be, and the second one is activated when it should not be and with wrong parameters.
So there should be more checks. Like - ask for explicit permission before sending any voice recording out, or ensure that the target where recording is set is validated against whitelist explicitly set by the user, etc.
I am oversimplifying here but: * install device that is designed to listen to speech in the house * the device is connected to internet * the device is capable of contacting other internet peers/services/hosts * the device knows a bit about its owner's internet presence such as contacts * the device is equipped with simple conversational user interface based on fuzzy human speech-command detection These basically bou…
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> The device did not audibly advise that it was preparing to send the recording, something it’s programmed to do. Apparently it's not programmed to do that. Unless this was a hardware glitch or cosmic-ray event.
As developers, we use 'programmed' in that manner all the time, to mean what we were trying to get it to do rather than what it actually does.
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Might be cool to add thermal sensors to that, so the lights don't shut off because you're not moving enough.
I wish more offices would install motion sensors facing keyboards from above, tune-focused for finger motion detection.
A new dystopian developer-productivity metric.
I am oversimplifying here but: * install device that is designed to listen to speech in the house * the device is connected to internet * the device is capable of contacting other internet peers/services/hosts * the device knows a bit about its owner's internet presence such as contacts * the device is equipped with simple conversational user interface based on fuzzy human speech-command detection These basically bou…