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Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

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Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#81

Post by creeble »

komali2 wrote: post #76
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but hopefully that's banal things like "play Despacito" or "What's 2 + 2", not "Please add 'rending me in the gobberwarts with a blurglecruncheon' to my depraved kinks list" or "Set my root password to 'secret123'" or "How do I build a nuke in my basement off of stuff I can order from Amazon".

Whenever I find a stray Alexa or Google home at a friend's place I ask it how to import cocaine or where I can buy uranium. So far nothing's happened...

Nice friend! Do you search porn on their 'stray' computer while you're at it?

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#82

Post by LawnboyMax »

This may be an interesting addition to some home assistant developed using https://www.home-assistant.io/

That is, use Google Home/Alexa/Apple Home for their speech recognition abilities while ensuring it doesn't eavesdrop and works with any other smart device that you have (e.g. there is no way to directly control Nest using Apple Home).

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#84

Post by [deleted] »

heinrichhartman wrote: post #65
wrs wrote: post #55

While I appreciate the sentiment...unless you actually think Google and Amazon devices are recording irrelevant ambient sound deliberately (they aren’t), this doesn’t help anything. Unless the software here is better than theirs at recognizing the trigger word (very unlikely), there will be even more false positive activations on this device than there are on the originals. Edit: It’s very unlikely because Amazon and…

> (they aren’t) How do you know? And, how do you know they will not do this silently in the future? Also worse detection does not mean more false positives. Usually, you can get the false positive rate very low by allowing more false negatives. In this way you have a choice, how you want to trade-off. Without this device, you are stuck with the choice that Amazon/Google make for you.

[deleted]

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#85

Post by thefreeman »

tylerhou wrote: post #49
ars wrote: post #31

This is going to mess up the voice detection. It's keyed off of the original trigger word and knows who is talking to it so you get reminders and other items specific to that person.

What’s to stop you from configuring it so it says “Hey Google” differently based on the person talking?

Well for one you would need to build user identification into the speech recognition on Alias which is likely a lot harder then just recognizing one trained trigger word. Could be a feature down the line though.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#86

Post by lftl »

tantalor wrote: post #14
lftl wrote: post #8

I love this idea. I've wanted to do something similar for a long time, but I was thinking about building a home assistant where the always-on mic was a complete separate board that only listened for wake words and had no internet access. The main mic would only be powered on when the smaller board woke it up. Alias achieves the same thing in a much simpler way to where I might actually consider buying a home assistan…

Explain how this is an improvement?

Mostly what supermatt said -- this is a lot simpler. Particularly, it's been a long time since I looked, but when I last looked neither Google nor Amazon were offering the voice assistants in nice package where you could bring your own hardware but use their APIs. So beyond the hardware, the project would've also involved building my own voice assistant software as well. Both of those ecosystems have evolved alot so that might not be a hurdle anymore.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#87

Post by lftl »

hnnh44 wrote: post #16
tantalor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain how this is an improvement?

I'm wondering this too. Like hey, let's install some under developed AI from some unknown company with unknown security policies on top of a device with access to hordes of personal data and the ability to make transactions online. No hacker will EVER think to use it as an attack vector /s

I didn't look into Alias deeply, but does it even have network access at all? I don't see a reason it would have to.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#88

Post by crankylinuxuser »

The project seems really cool, but...

This is like putting gold leaf on a turd. The companies in question treat users like datamines to be stripmined and left. These are listening posts that books like 1984 talked about. Yet unlike the stories of them being "placed", they're being sold to the gullible public who clamor to get the next version.

Echo&GHome < Project Alias < Not buying one at all

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#89

Post by jedberg »

ModernMech wrote: post #70
michaelmior wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to be able to play music, ask simple questions, etc. without pulling out my phone. I don't understand why those aren't "legitimate" use cases. Maybe you don't like the tradeoff you're making in using such a device, but if I'm fine with it, how are my uses cases not legitimate?

Apologies if this comes across as too "get off my lawn", but I come from a time when to look something up, you had to haul yourself to the library; open one of dozens of drawers filled with index cards; find the card your looking for, which directed you to a stack in the library; find the book on the stack; and finally find the page in the book by consulting an index. It's a lost art. Then, you would have to go to an…

I too grew up in the time of card catalogs. And I learned a lot from reading through the other encyclopedia entries as I flipped the pages looking for the page with the info.

Yes, you're right, the voice interface is not the astronomical leap that the cellphone was. But why is that your cutoff line?

My voice assistants offer a lot of benefit to me. Especially with kids, I don't always have a free hand to pull out the cell phone. When my daughter was an infant, it was super convenient to ask it to play soft music as she was falling asleep without having to put her down. Now it's super nice to be able to set multiple timers as I cook with just my voice, instead of trying to fumble with multiple timers on my phone or stove.

I'm not paranoid to think that they are recording everything, because I understand that there would be no ROI for the company to do so with the storage and bandwidth that would be required. And therefore there really isn't much tradeoff at all. Google is already recording every search I do -- does it matter if I use my phone or my Google Home?

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#90

Post by glitcher »

WAthrowaway wrote: post #20

You could also just not buy one of those awful things. I have never seen a legitimate use for it that wasn't misplaced adolescent tech fantasies (omg I can tell big brother to make coffee and my keurig starts up!). But maybe my line of business has made me excessively paranoid / niche I would like to make an edit: functionality for those with disabilities is a huge use-case I did not consider. Thank you for your insi…

Anyone who grew up watching Star Trek has probably dreamt at some point of being able to simply say "Computer" and then send a voice command. We just didn't expect the tech to become popularized by advertising/retail companies.
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