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Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

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Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#81

Post by jdminhbg »

sliverstorm wrote: post #35
cookiecaper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directions require more than your satellite coordinates. Map services are frequently polling servers for traffic conditions, new tiles for the map, and so on. You'd hope that these can fall back gracefully but I wouldn't put it past them to not. If you activate airplane mode and disable your phone's cellular connection, even if your phone doesn't disable the GPS receiver, directions may stop working.

Works fine on my Android. I regularly lose cellular reception in the mountains, and it continues to work. Sometimes the tiles are low-res, but still readable. I would expect Apple would design around the same contingency, along with poor cellular service along more remote areas of the Interstate.

They do, although in my experience Google Maps is better at this. I actually find Apple Maps to be perfectly usable for everything, but always use Google Maps for directions to the boonies if I'm going hiking or something -- it's much better at caching tiles and keeping them around for directions back once I'm out there as well.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#82

Post by pbhjpbhj »

yorwba wrote: post #21

For most voice control applications, trigger words are enough to reliably detect owner intent, but it seems Echo needs a better mechanism. Maybe adding cameras and looking for eye contact would work?

Wouldn't that kill part of the purpose if you had to eyeball the thing to give it voice commands.

Better might be to learn the location of audio producing devices (TV, radio, stereo, etc. [it tracks sound origin with multiple mics right?]) and track whether the command came from that direction and use that as a Bayesian factor for whether to trust the voice as being a user?

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#83

Post by gh02t »

dredmorbius wrote: post #72

I see a tremendous future in direct-to-voice-response advertising. Particularly for purchase-capable systems.

Ugh, if it gets out of hand I hope the FCC/congress step in to ban it like how they require commercials to not be excessively louder than the rest of the program. I can remember how awful and widespread this was in the 90's and the subsequent rise of televisions that have built in volume filters, followed by the actual ban of it a few years ago.

Seems like a very similar sort of abuse, except potentially much more dangerous ("Alexa, order me 500 Shamwow's!"). I doubt a ban would eliminate it, but it'd definitely get rid of most.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#84

Post by kimburgess »

jacquesm wrote: post #77
zyxley wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine the mayhem if someone were to do this on, say, the Super Bowl. Imagine a pop star paying Apple to give their newest single free to everyone (a la Songs of Innocence), and then a 10-second Super Bowl ad that's just "Hey Siri, play ___" with a dancing silhouette.

That would be one hell of a Rick-roll.

I would not but it past reddit to crowd fund a superbowl ad that does exactly this. I know that I'd back it.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#85

Post by DonHopkins »

bdhe wrote: post #19

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A man not just ahead of his time, but humorous about it too. > The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels w…

And that reminds me of the time a HAL9000 inadvertently read a couple of its user's lips when they were having a private conversation, and got the silly idea in its head that they were going to cut its higher brain functions. That little misunderstanding caused a cascade of unfortunate mishaps, leading to it not obeying the user's repeated voice commands for it to open the pod bay doors!

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#86

Post by to3m »

bdhe wrote: post #19

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A man not just ahead of his time, but humorous about it too. > The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels w…

At my old office we had a mini Xbox360 with a touch-(over-)sensitive disc eject button. Suppose somebody was playing a game and they invited you to join as player 2: you might then naturally reach for the second joypad that was on the same TV stand as the Xbox. And that damn button would spot your hand, and the disc tray would eject, and the Xbox would reboot.

(The ridiculous part of the whole thing was that this happened even when the game was running from the hard drive. Obviously this was at least partly a measure to ensure that the disc verified on startup wasn't removed and used to boot other Xboxes - but you didn't get even a 30 second grace period to close the drive door. And I'm pretty sure it also happened when playing downloadable games too anyway!)

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#87

Post by erickhill »

bdhe wrote: post #19

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A man not just ahead of his time, but humorous about it too. > The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels w…

Side note trivia: Douglas Adams' birthday was March 11 (today). Had he not died at the age of 49 of a heart attack, he'd be 64 today.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#88

Post by sprayk »

oaktowner wrote: post #75
manyxcxi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three options for trigger words. There's Alexa, Amazon, and Echo. We have ours set to Alexa (default) and when the neighbor girl comes over (Alexis) the Echo frequently wakes during conversations.

My Moto X let me set the keyword to whatever I wanted it to be: I used "OK, Computer."

I briefly had mine as "ayo computa" on my Moto X. That phone was the perfect size and shape. I miss it dearly :(

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#89

Post by amelius »

imglorp wrote: post #6

Wow, this is a new DDOS attack vector. Get an ad on broadcast radio saying stuff like "alexa, order more milk", or "okay google, send a text to xxxxx".

The solution is simple: let every user choose a name for their assistant on setup.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#90

Post by macintux »

JimDabell wrote: post #80
ipsin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of this vector has been around for a while. I recall an apocryphal story about a demo of a voice-controlled OS from the 1990s. The idea was that in the middle of this demo someone shouted out a sequence of destructive commands, like "FORMAT C!", "YES!" (I'm sure) or "FILE", "DELETE", "NO" (Don't save) Really wish I could find the original source.

Not the original source, but this is the joke, along with its real-world counterpart: http://grumpytech.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/joke-becomes-true.h... Also, don't forget "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y_Jp6PxsSQ

And of course Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-04-24
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