721–730 of 746 posts
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Enjoy: http://youtubedoubler.com/dOPY
Brilliant! Thank you. Off topic: And good to know about that site. I've always wanted to be able to match the space shuttle backflip with this music: http://youtubedoubler.com/dOSz
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Doing 2 on a smartphone feels like it would be something which would start draining battery really quick which would be a giveaway. With this it's running on mains, it could upload in the middle of the night when it would probably be undetected Plus, why do one or the other? Sure you want to get someone's phone but why not another device too?
Modern smartphones are always listening for "siri" or "ok google", and are regularly sending keep-alive packets, so I doubt that the battery drain for spying would be significantly noticeable, if done properly. > why do one or the other? Because resources are limited, even at government agencies. Effort spent hacking a device that will probably sell in the tens of thousands when they could be targeting devices that s…
Still, personally if I had concerns about privacy and secrecy I'd be looking to limit the number of devices in my own home which had an always active microphone.
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…
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This is what I started thinking about as I was reading the paranoid HN comments. I believe there's open source voice recognition but the challenging part is taking commands and making them actionable.
Defining commands and their corresponding actions is something I think an open source could actually do much more effectively than companies. When everyone in the world can contribute commands rather than a single team of software devs it is possible build up a much larger collection of them. I would really like the ability to add commands to a natural language command system when a command I use doesn't work. Also,…
Also, if there existed something like a phrase thesaurus that could be extremely useful for building out a list of commands. For instance, "What's the weather?" and "What's it like outside?" mean the same thing and if you searched for one in the phrase thesaurus a synonym for the other would pop up. Then all the computer would have to do is take the input phrase, search the thesaurus, and find a synonym that it recognizes.
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> Most people don't care because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid. It's going to take a high-profile case to show people how wrong this is. Wait for it. Here's some potential scenarios: * An author who is researching dangerous-sounding stuff and discussing it with his friends for a book is SWAT teamed and shot dead. Later investigation reveals overzealous "parallel construction." * Someone at one of these…
Why can't privacy be enough reason by itself? There are plenty of legal things I want to keep private. The government does not need to have record of every little thing about me. Some things are personal.
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…
I've requested an invite.
I see it as a replacement for the ditigal photoframe pc I built a few years back out of an old laptop and have in my kitchen. Its running XP with a heap of autoIT scripts I hacked together, controlled by an MCE remote. I use it every day to listen to news headlines and check the weather while making my morning coffee and for streaming jazz while cooking dinner.
I think I'd prefer asking Echo to play these things than going through the hassle of upgrading the photoframe pc from XP.
I'd gain some functions such as easier music streaming, shopping list stuff, etc. I'd lose a few functions; I occassionally use VNC on the photoframe pc to display a recipe or twitch stream. I can do the recipe on my phone and put the twitch stream on my TV and turn it so I can see it from the kitchen.
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 feel the general the fear about "dragnet surveillance" is misplaced and uncalled for. As long as you haven't done anything wrong, hearing your conversations should be a total waste of time for whoever made the effort to do so. There are 100 million+ people in America, don't think people from NSA will waste their time on going over family conversations of every family.
But I don't.
Neither do you.
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The idea of this sitting on my dining room table while eating with my family is horrifying.
I hope you don't put your phone on the table while eating with your family, or have it in your pocket at that time.
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The people who don't broadcast their lives on social media are also concerned about what happens to the people who do. Because they are not psycopaths. well, generally speaking.
Converting other people to your religion "because you care". How nice of you.
I don't let people eat poisoned food because they didn't know it was poisoned.
You'd resent me if I let you do that, wouldn't you?
Now if you turned to me and said "I don't believe you." Should I forcibly stop you?b If you turned to me and said "I know", what then?