31–40 of 249 posts
Red light used to indicate recording, traditionally. I'd expect the light to be green when I'm safe from spying.
The red light should flash or pulsate when recording, in fact. Otherwise, people without good color vision might miss the cue.
But there’s still a security flaw in this method. If somebody from Amazon will decide to record you, they just send a reboot command to Echo. After reboot mic’s state will be changed back to normal I.e. powered.
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Why not physical debounce switch? I get it is more expensive but no one would question it twice.
In order to use a physical debounce switch, there are several steep challenges. You can imagine OP presenting to an audience of 14 people at Amazon Devices group with a slide titled "New BOM proposal" entailing 6 million devices x [$0.0273 (switch price at 100k qty) + $0.05 assembly cost] + $50k engineering NRE (650 engineering hours) + $35k tooling NRE + $22k FCC re-cert + 7k ESD cert + another $100k in various cert…
But there’s still a security flaw in this method. If somebody from Amazon will decide to record you, they just send a reboot command to Echo. After reboot mic’s state will be changed back to normal I.e. powered.
But there’s still a security flaw in this method. If somebody from Amazon will decide to record you, they just send a reboot command to Echo. After reboot mic’s state will be changed back to normal I.e. powered.
The parallel flops are probably hardening against bit flips from ESD events. There aren't any other active protection devices and phantom flips probably showed up at some point during testing of earlier prototypes.
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Thanks. Annoying that clickbait titles are allowed here.
The writers don't write for our amusement here and according to our criteria on HN, they writes as it pleases them. They went to the length to do a useful breakdown of a circuit, and write about it. They don't owe us some nice title, or some convenient summary so we don't read their post...
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The title gives all the information you need : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... If it was not a real mute, it would not be a question in the title but a statement such as "Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Microphone Mute is Fake".
> Like similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's law), it is intended to be humorous rather than the literal truth.