151–160 of 215 posts
Speaking of Ring knock-offs:
In these days of self-imposed isolation, this hands-free motion activated connected door knocker seems seems pretty useful for scaring away unwanted visitors without spreading germs:
https://blog.smartthings.com/how-to/smartthings-door-knocker...
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There were stories earlier about Alexa employees and contractors hearing all kinds of unintended conversations. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-amazon-alexa-echo-...
It should be noted that the device is not intended to record conversations absent the trigger word, however there can be false positives: > According to Amazon’s website, no audio is stored unless Echo detects the wake word or is activated by pressing a button. But sometimes Alexa appears to begin recording without any prompt at all, and the audio files start with a blaring television or unintelligible noise.
My girlfriend celebrates passover which involves discussing "Elijah". The way she pronounces that name (she's a New Yorker) triggers her Alexa device, to much hilarity. More soberly: I had no idea what Elija stands for so I asked the device, which recited part of the wikipedia. It then said, "while I have your attention here are some notifications you missed" and began to recite the first of her messages from her wor…
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False positives does hurt the perception, because the device will usually do something or utter a response unless it fails to detect something intelligible or writes the request off as not intended for it (having two devices at opposite ends of a large open space living area can sometimes get frustrating, but looking at the history, you see how often they correctly determine which device should respond) An occasional…
That's not true. Amazon can have a significantly more accurate classifier running on their backend that processes the transmitted audio. And this classifier can be more accurate due to both more computation and it would have access to the entire data stream, not just the initialization words. You would never know that your data was sent to Amazon and then ignored.
But unless you have multiple devices, those make up a relatively small proportion of requests, and hence most of the time false positives is something they have a strong incentive to stop because it causes negative user experiences.
[If you have multiple devices it will happen "all the time" when a request is genuinely meant for a Alexa device but more than one device hears the request, but then it has no UI effect - one device will usually answer, and the other(s) will stand down; this is by no means perfect, but it works reasonably well]
Alexa et al are also normalizing "always on microphone that sends audio to a remote business over the internet" technology . According to the bright-line rule from Kyllo v United States [1], when a technology is "in general public use"[2], police no longer need a warrant when they use their own devices based on that technology to see the "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without ph…
Supposedly they use on-device AI to recognize "OK, Google," "Hey, Alexa," etc., then send the following command over the internet. Supposedly.
Source: worked on project for ~3 years.
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You had better not trust the T2 chip, because it is vulnerable to the checkm8 exploit and the checkra1n folks have already demonstrated total compromise. The encryption functionality isn't affected if you have FileVault on, because your password is not stored anywhere on the device, but everything else, from basic SMC functions like mic/cam/fans/touchbar to secure boot to verifying the microcode and ME firmware befor…
Reference?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be noted that the device is not intended to record conversations absent the trigger word, however there can be false positives: > According to Amazon’s website, no audio is stored unless Echo detects the wake word or is activated by pressing a button. But sometimes Alexa appears to begin recording without any prompt at all, and the audio files start with a blaring television or unintelligible noise.
What's funny is nowadays Alexa or Google Assistant will fail to wake when called but tend to trigger randomly during conversations.
It's not like people are perfect at doing this task either.
My understanding is that the "microphone mute" button on Alexa devices is a hardware switch that cuts the wire to the microphone, at engineering's insistence. I'm rather short of praise for Amazon but if this is still the case, great.
Which is notably a feature of the Librem phones and laptops as well: https://puri.sm/posts/lockdown-mode-on-the-librem-5-beyond-h...
Alexa et al are also normalizing "always on microphone that sends audio to a remote business over the internet" technology . According to the bright-line rule from Kyllo v United States [1], when a technology is "in general public use"[2], police no longer need a warrant when they use their own devices based on that technology to see the "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without ph…
How so? The ruling is about agents using thermal imaging technology to bust a marijuana plantation, performed from a car on a public street. The court stated that this does not constitute a search, since any random citizen could've done the same thing using commodity equipment. Always on microphones that transmit via the internet (i.e. bugs) have been a commodity for... a few decades? But you still cannot legally bug…
My understanding is that the "microphone mute" button on Alexa devices is a hardware switch that cuts the wire to the microphone, at engineering's insistence. I'm rather short of praise for Amazon but if this is still the case, great.