171–180 of 291 posts
Infosec dramas are getting more and more tiresome. Between this and the Singapore Airlines story, it just seems like people need to ratchet everything up to 11. You have two options, choose one: - 1. Google wants to spy on you with a hidden mic - 2. They had future plans for the mic, but it was disabled, so it wasn't mentioned by the marketing department For the Singapore Airlines story, you have two options, choose…
And most of the rich people in my neighborhood have complete voice devices in their homes, Amazon’s device and Google’s I refuse to have these devices in my home regardless of how cool they seem.
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You don't need "advanced audio processing" to detect a glass window breaking because it is loud, and has a distinctive spectrogram. It's a lot easier to detect glass breaking than a wake word, and you can buy standalone acoustic glass break sensors for under $30. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Intellisense-FG-1625-Acoust...
Ok, so it could at least plausibly have been local processing. I haven't been able to find out what kind of CPU/etc is in the device, and most of the features would have been easy to implement on the almost any hardware. It would have been even stranger to also include a powerful (expensive) CPU to do a bunch of audio processing, but if there are techniques that work on $30 devices, that opens up a much broader range…
Having worked on hardware products, the features planned sometimes (even often!) change after the hardware has been prototyped and an initial production order has been placed. It is cheaper to simply not ship the feature than it is to change the board.
Many in this comment section do not really seem to have much experience with hardware. It is fairly common for products to ship with unused hardware and it much more believable than malicious intent, especially given how disorganized Google is internally.
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I remember someone in a recent HN comment thread mentioning that, as an ex-Googler, Google today feels like Microsoft under Ballmer. So while I agree with you, it _also_ wouldn't surprise me if someone raised the concern, but that person was on a different / more silo'ed team and therefore the concern never reached the execution stage. Herego too many management layers and/or nodes of entropy for communication. But t…
Or was "yes, yes, we'll add a story to the backlog to add it to the specs" and it just flat out got forgotten. I've seen this happen so many times where I've been the one to raise the issue and because I've passed it off, I've forgotten about it only to circle back around 2 months later when someone says "Oh, we need to do this" and I say "I raised this 2 months ago, I thought X had put it in the backlog." And when y…
Having worked at large companies before, I'm almost certain that more than one person working on the product raised the point "this has a microphone, why isn't it documented?" or "this has privacy implications", but was silenced. (Or it could be that everyone working at Google has been carefully chosen to not have such concerns; I do get that feeling sometimes too.)
Reminds me of the time that school issued laptops where the camera could be remotely turned on when the student was using it at home (including in their bedroom), and somehow no one realized the pervy implications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
"The school district intentionally did not publicize the existence of the surveillance technology. It also actively sought to conceal it.[23][41]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
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:D in my country, i never saw anyone with an alarm on their house :D maybe the issue is not to remotely silent the alarm, but that it's needed in the first place :D
Legal obligation on landlords in any developed country
Add to that the economic incentives involved when you wish to insure you property against fire and liability, or mortgage it (which almost always imposes a requirement to insure the property).
Oh wow, this is amazing. There's been a lawsuit in court about someone in Germany who sued their landlord because the landlord has put a Google Nest fire alarm into their flat against their will, ignoring offers by the renter to put in a non-google-non-iot fire alarm at the renter's expense. The landlord won because apparently the court was not convinced that the fire alarm could spy on conversations [1]... What woul…
The microphone / motion sensor issues aside I would never sleep in an apartment where someone could remotely silent an alarm.
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Stick, written weirdly.
No, it's Yiddish parlance for an act, gimmick or commonly employed routine.
(Admittedly, I have no idea if the Nest version has a similar test)
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If there's one thing we've learned from post-Snowden world, it's that most people don't care enough to dodge the surveillance because most people didn't respond by voluntarily throwing out all their computing devices, smartphones, ISP service plans, etc.
Another thing we've learned from the post-Snowden world is that people invoke the post-Snowden world as an excuse to abandon critical thinking and skepticism and assume all conspiracies are valid, and often don't actually understand what, specifically, Snowden did and didn't demonstrate. People still believe the PRISM program was about companies giving the NSA direct and unlimited backdoor access to their databases,…
Would you consider that as misguided? It certainly encourages a general distrust of all those company logos in the slides.