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Amazon Echo

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Re: Amazon Echo

#361

Post by blumkvist »

leeber wrote: post #311
chatmasta wrote: post #87

This "internet-of-things" trend coincides unfortunately with the "dragnet surveillance" trend. With every new product launch from a "cloud company," I increasingly feel as if I'm reading the tombstone of modern society. The selling point behind these devices is convenience, but at the cost of security. I don't think I need to explain to HN why an always-on, internet connected voice recording device is something to ke…

I get your point, but on the topic of paranoia breeding paranoia, (1) I'm not sure if there is really a causal relationship there, and (2) the government's paranoia a fear of alleged domestic and foreign threats to our safety, well-being, way of life, etc. while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast. Despite whether either threat is real or not, I'm less concerned about my facebook priv…

I wrote a really long ass post about how naive your line of thinking is, but I decided against posting it.

Do yourself a huge favor and pick a god damn book. I suggest 1984 by George Orwell.

Re: Amazon Echo

#362

Post by gisely »

stronglikedan wrote: post #326
bryanlarsen wrote: post #302

Why I might buy an Echo: - it's a speaker with extra features. At about the same price as a bluetooth speaker, and I need a better one of those, the extra features are basically free as long as the audio quality is good. - it can answer questions at the dinner table. My wife and I both have the annoying habit of pulling out our phones to answer questions that come up during conversation. Asking "Alexa" instead would…

While we're being positive, I absolutely do not think Amazon would be stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot sending all recorded data up to the cloud. I'm certain that within a few hours of release, someone will have a network monitor hooked up. Their findings will be widely known almost immediately, and this thing would be dead in the water if they were sending everything up. They know this already.

Doesn't mean the NSA or Chinese equivalent won't figure out how to hack Echo to plant a little piece of stealthware on it that records all conversations of suspects in "terrorism related" investigations. Such stealthware might get detected once or twice (though not often-- it won't be ubiquitous), but such detections will easily covered up by forcing Amazon to announce a rare and obscure firmware bug backstory. Actually, come to think of it, with proper contextual targeting, such stealthware wouldn't even need to send full conversations. Just wait for detection of "the meeting" or "the rally" and boom spend off all the info you need to effectively disrupt pro-democracy rallies in Hong Kong.

Re: Amazon Echo

#363

Post by towelguy »

spacefight wrote: post #32
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

> With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. I read: "Our cloud servers can hear you, no matter what." It's a killer idea. It's too bad privacy concerns might lead it to an early grave.

Yes. Seeing how big Amazon has come with its web services, cloud storage etc and now with technology like this, I wonder why we haven't read about Amazon in any of the Snowden leaks. Or have I missed something?

You don't hear of Amazon but you hear of their customers. Dropbox is on AWS for example.

Re: Amazon Echo

#364

Post by elwell »

jwallaceparker wrote: post #343

Watch the promo video again and pretend it's the first few minutes of a horror movie. A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father. The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her? Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa an…

Ha, you should be a screenwriter.

Re: Amazon Echo

#365

Post by lurkingperson »

taternuts wrote: post #344
dave1619 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree. I'd use it mostly for a bluetooth music streaming speaker. And for $99 (since I'm a prime member) it's a good price. All the other features are extra and I don't know which ones I'd end up actually using on a regular basis. But it would be cool to try out.

This was my train of thought as well, but it ended in me researching mini bluetooth speakers and buying one of those instead. The features enabled by Echo are kind of cool and all, but I don't think I'd use them at all and the security stuff is obviously enough of a concern to make me think twice. It wonder why they didn't try to add a wifi kill-switch kind of thing for the paranoid who would just use it for a blue-t…

there's a button on top to turn the listening feature off

Re: Amazon Echo

#366

Post by grey-area »

leeber wrote: post #311
chatmasta wrote: post #87

This "internet-of-things" trend coincides unfortunately with the "dragnet surveillance" trend. With every new product launch from a "cloud company," I increasingly feel as if I'm reading the tombstone of modern society. The selling point behind these devices is convenience, but at the cost of security. I don't think I need to explain to HN why an always-on, internet connected voice recording device is something to ke…

I get your point, but on the topic of paranoia breeding paranoia, (1) I'm not sure if there is really a causal relationship there, and (2) the government's paranoia a fear of alleged domestic and foreign threats to our safety, well-being, way of life, etc. while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast. Despite whether either threat is real or not, I'm less concerned about my facebook priv…

the government's paranoia a fear of alleged domestic and foreign threats to our safety, well-being, way of life, etc.

Ostensibly. In real life these powers have been used for all sorts of activities outside this sort of apparently existential threat - for example spying on lawyers in civil rights cases. It's not clear they are useful against well-organised terror, that terror is actually the existential threat you seem to think it is, or that any usefulness outweighs their dramatic effect on our civil society.

Your fear of the extremely unlikely event of you being killed in a terror attack is being used to blind you to the other consequences of surveillance.

while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast.

False. The people's paranoia is that these powers will be used to spy on innocents who are rightly or wrongly suspected of any sort of wrongdoing, collect their communications with their politicians, lawyers, and accountants, and undermine the very democracy and open society spy agencies claim to be defending.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/intelligence-ag...

You don't have a choice about this, it's already happening, with or without your consent, because our spy agencies are determined to dominate every aspect of your digital life.

Re: Amazon Echo

#367

Post by meepmorp »

stronglikedan wrote: post #326
bryanlarsen wrote: post #302

Why I might buy an Echo: - it's a speaker with extra features. At about the same price as a bluetooth speaker, and I need a better one of those, the extra features are basically free as long as the audio quality is good. - it can answer questions at the dinner table. My wife and I both have the annoying habit of pulling out our phones to answer questions that come up during conversation. Asking "Alexa" instead would…

While we're being positive, I absolutely do not think Amazon would be stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot sending all recorded data up to the cloud. I'm certain that within a few hours of release, someone will have a network monitor hooked up. Their findings will be widely known almost immediately, and this thing would be dead in the water if they were sending everything up. They know this already.

There's no way this thing has the power to do adequate voice recognition on device for arbitray speakers and queries, even given a limited domain. It's sending everything to Amazon for processing. The only thing it probably recognizes by itself is "Alexa."

Re: Amazon Echo

#368

Post by anigbrowl »

hackuser wrote: post #275
anigbrowl wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid. Some percentage of people will be unjustly exploited, but probably not enough to offset the economic benefits that technology like this brings to its users. I think your focus on 'the people vs the government' is misplaced, because government is just a sort of social technology which can be used and abused like any other technology depending…

> Most people don't care because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid. Maybe you didn't mean it literally but it's a popular expression in this context. I don't think a desire for privacy is paranoid; it is normal, healthy behavior. But to address the gist of what you say, I think you assume an understanding of data security that is far beyond most end users. How many even know what "metadata" means, or how '…

I'm not saying a desire for privacy is paranoid, but the assumption that the government will engage in passive monitoring and archival of everything that can be captured through the microphone and use it as leverage later, even if it doesn't involve criminal liability, eg 'assist us without nefarious purpose or we will use something we recorded to cause you acute embarrassment with devastating social consequences.' I'm not saying this won't happen, but that it won't happen enough for most people to care.

But to address the gist of what you say, I think you assume an understanding of data security that is far beyond most end users.

I don't think I do. I've met plenty of non-technical people who worry about the possibility that their phone could record them when its swtiched off or suchlike - you don't need to understand how something functions in order to understand its potential as an instrumentality. But unless you have a fundamentally antagonist view of government (which most people in the US don't) then there's little overlap between the set of 'stuff the government could do me' and that of 'stuff that would advance the government's purpose' for the average person. This is what I mean when I say most people don't feel culpable enough; there isn't anything sufficiently illegal going on in their lives that they perceive a significant government interest in intruding upon them in the first place.

When I talk about paranoia I mean the idea that government is going to fuck with you no matter how blameless of a life you lead, and that the more blameless you are the less leverage you will have to push back against the inevitable intrusion. In other words, they overestimate the probability of oppression just as optimistic or authoritarian people may underestimate it, depending on context. While that possibility certainly exists, I think something like this Amazon product only marginally increases it because anyone who buys this probably already has a smartphone and keeps it close by at all times already.

Re: Amazon Echo

#369

Post by jarrettch »

jwallaceparker wrote: post #343

Watch the promo video again and pretend it's the first few minutes of a horror movie. A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father. The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her? Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa an…

Someone needs to film this.

Re: Amazon Echo

#370

Post by [deleted] »

jwallaceparker wrote: post #343

Watch the promo video again and pretend it's the first few minutes of a horror movie. A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father. The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her? Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa an…

[deleted]
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