11 ms·

I was in a small group of people having an intimate (private) conversation in a church. Out of nowhere we were interrupted by a Windows computer sitting in a c

by nfoz 9y ago

I was in a small group of people having an intimate (private) conversation in a church. Out of nowhere we were interrupted by a Windows computer sitting in a cabinet, connected to the booming AV system: "I'm sorry, I didn't get that. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that." I hate these things.

EADGBE 9y ago
Was this Cortana, or Alexa?
- nfoz 9y ago
  Cortana, didn't mean to conflate it with Alexa -- more the product category as a whole and its (presumably) unintended consequences.
JoshMnem 9y ago
I'm still baffled why anyone would put those voice-activated devices in their houses. Smartphones are bad enough, and I'm hoping to get rid of mine soon.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Same here. I told my roommate/landlord I'd be totally against a Alexa/Google/Siri mic/speaker in the house. I see so many people in tech who have them that it's scary. I've thought about making my own open source version using something like Jarvis.
  - scotu 9y ago
    have you heard of https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/ ? Opinion?
    - Vendan 9y ago
      It still (by default) uses cloud STT, and there's no good local STT that's anywhere near simple to set up. It's hardly any better.
      - kathy-mycroft 9y ago
        That's a good point Vendan, and that's a dependency that we're working pretty hard to remove. Here's our CTO, Steve Penrods, on our STT roadmap: https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-speech-to-text-and-balance/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-speech-to-text-and-balance/
  - themaninthedark 9y ago
    I have an interest in home automation and smart lighting but it looks like all the current systems need to be hooked up to wifi/cloud to do anything. Are there any systems out there that you can hook up via ethernet and hook up to your own server? Things like having bedroom lights change color temp on time of day. perhaps stepper motor control of blinds. I really don't know why my lights need to be hooked up to the cloud via wifi for things like that.
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      I don't know much about it, but Mozilla is working on this: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-initial-release-of-mozillas-open-source-speech-recognition-model-and-voice-dataset/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-init...
    - wiml 9y ago
      There are several smart bulbs that people have reverse-engineered enough to put open-source firmware on them. They'd still be using wifi, but you could use firmware that doesn't require any "cloud" or external connections.
    - free652 9y ago
      Homeseer, it can work with multiple protocols. I use Insteon, you can just buy a USB insteon modem and skip the cloud hub.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      Look at home assistant as a hub. It's a fully open source python-3 based system that runs happily on a raspberry pi. It has many ways of interfacing with just about every device including local-only things like zwave, ZigBee, or lutron. They also have support for some wifi based things that are still local-only, but I tend to treat them as hostile and firewall them off, and even then I don't really like having them as they tend to be made by unknown manufacturers and have pretty shitty first party apps.
- jklinger410 9y ago
  Convenience paired with having nothing to hide. Also understanding the technology that goes behind keeping your identity obfuscated from advertisers even with intense personalization. Bonus Round: A desire to quicken technological advancement by buying into emerging tech instead of resisting it or requiring economically restricting benchmarks.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I'll bet most people who have "noting to hide" could be motivated to reconsider if someone went through all their private correspondence and reported the results to them.
    - jklinger410 9y ago
      I would suggest that most people who think someone is going to spend their time doing this to get over themselves. If you are notable, intensely rich, or some other special person...
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        Maybe in the future you will be one of those things, and your data will still be waiting for you. Unless you’re special enough to see into the future I guess.
        emodendroket 9y ago
        Yeah, or you just piss off (or just attract the attention of) the wrong person or group. I can't imagine Ken Bone envisioned someone combing through his entire Reddit history or Justine Sacco imagined her joke would lead to people tracking down her employer and getting her essentially blackballed from her profession. And that's just nobodies working with only public information.
      - craftyguy 9y ago
        > I would suggest that most people who think someone is going to spend their time doing this to get over themselves. No person is going to personally do that. We have computers and increasingly more advanced 'learning' algorithms to do that for us, and to help us draw conclusions (correct or not) about the person of interest.
- notyourwork 9y ago
  Why do you carry a GPS tracker around? Why do you put wireless in your home? Lots of things are easy to question until you step back from your single point of view and realize a large population out there doesn't live with a tinfoil hat on. It is not because they don't care about the same security problems you do, it is because they are naive and don't understand how stuff works or what the problematic implications of using them are.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    You're right, the Bill of Rights only protects criminals.
    - notyourwork 9y ago
      When did I say anything about the bill of rights?
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    It's also because this isn't a problem well-suited for addressing by individuals. I doubt even Richard Stallman audits every line of code he ever runs on his computer, and I doubt most of us would want the extreme level of inconvenience that comes with living his life.
    - notyourwork 9y ago
      Which is it - inconvenience or comfort? I don’t see how you get both here? If you don’t want something listening don’t buy it. If you don’t want tracking enabled on your phone that you feed to cloud services don’t use it. What am I missing ?
- phil248 9y ago
  Yeah, it sucks having a powerful computer in my pocket all the time that can handle nearly all of my regular tasks. Wait, what?
  - mulmen 9y ago
    My phone does a much better job of redefining "normal tasks" than it does solving problems I had before smartphones.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    The net effect is possibly negative. Here is some reading: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your-smartphone-reduces-brain-power https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your... https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-our-phones-tristan-harris-wants-to-rescue-them/ https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-...
- mikeash 9y ago
  Smartphones are vastly worse, since they’re always with me. Once I’ve accepted that, putting a smart speaker in my house doesn’t make things noticeably worse.
  - pdkl95 9y ago
    Normalizing the use of always-on microphones in previously "private" areas (such as the home) such that people expect that their voice might be recorded and transmitted to a 3rd party removes the warrant requirement for the police to also use that technology. (Kyllo v United States) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16061681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16061681
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    The more devices you add (giving a larger number of unknown entities access to information about you), the higher the risks. Also, the solution to the smartphone problem isn't just to passively accept defeat. That will allow the problem to become worse.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Passively accepting defeat may not be “the solution” but it’s what approximately everybody does, including approximately everybody complaining about smart speakers.
      - JoshMnem 9y ago
        Yes, that's the problem that needs solving.
        mikeash 9y ago
        Unfortunately, every story about smart speakers is flooded with comments like yours, saying that they're evil and they can't understand why anyone would ever buy one, while stories about smartphones never get any comments like that. If smartphones are the problem, why are you complaining about smart speakers instead?
madspindel 9y ago
"God, please end poverty in the world" "I'm sorry, I didn't get that. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that."
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Does taking potshots at the OP's religion add anything at all to the discussion?
  - mediaman 9y ago
    Huh? It's an amusing joke. How is it taking a "potshot" at his religion? Imagine being in church, praying to God for the betterment of humanity, and then you hear Him answer you back, filling the church with His voice, but...it's just Cortana with an inane canned response. It's funny, and not in an insulting way, except perhaps if you're on the team working on one of these products.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I guess I could see how you might be amused by that reading, but the way I imagined it was more like ridiculing someone who attends church with a joke about how prayer is futile.
- a_e_k 9y ago
  "For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good."
- nfoz 9y ago
  Heh. To be fair the conversation in question was a lot more personal than that -- matters of crime, addiction, forgiveness, and personal change. The "nothing to hide" arguments are irrelevant here -- people absolutely do have things to hide. This is where people seek advice about lawbreaking before they are ready or able to discuss with authorities. We can't have even the pretense that something could be listening in on these convos. It's appropriate to blame the church for having the listening device.... but as technologists we know that off-the-shelf products don't give them much choice without technical proficiency/awareness to reconfigure the defaults. Edit: and I think I interpreted your joke as you intended; no offense taken.

by nfoz 9y ago

EADGBE 9y ago

Was this Cortana, or Alexa?

nfoz 9y ago
Cortana, didn't mean to conflate it with Alexa -- more the product category as a whole and its (presumably) unintended consequences.

JoshMnem 9y ago

I'm still baffled why anyone would put those voice-activated devices in their houses. Smartphones are bad enough, and I'm hoping to get rid of mine soon.

djsumdog 9y ago
Same here. I told my roommate/landlord I'd be totally against a Alexa/Google/Siri mic/speaker in the house. I see so many people in tech who have them that it's scary. I've thought about making my own open source version using something like Jarvis.
- scotu 9y ago
  have you heard of https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/ ? Opinion?
  - Vendan 9y ago
    It still (by default) uses cloud STT, and there's no good local STT that's anywhere near simple to set up. It's hardly any better.
    - kathy-mycroft 9y ago
      That's a good point Vendan, and that's a dependency that we're working pretty hard to remove. Here's our CTO, Steve Penrods, on our STT roadmap: https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-speech-to-text-and-balance/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-speech-to-text-and-balance/
- themaninthedark 9y ago
  I have an interest in home automation and smart lighting but it looks like all the current systems need to be hooked up to wifi/cloud to do anything. Are there any systems out there that you can hook up via ethernet and hook up to your own server? Things like having bedroom lights change color temp on time of day. perhaps stepper motor control of blinds. I really don't know why my lights need to be hooked up to the cloud via wifi for things like that.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    I don't know much about it, but Mozilla is working on this: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-initial-release-of-mozillas-open-source-speech-recognition-model-and-voice-dataset/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-init...
  - wiml 9y ago
    There are several smart bulbs that people have reverse-engineered enough to put open-source firmware on them. They'd still be using wifi, but you could use firmware that doesn't require any "cloud" or external connections.
  - free652 9y ago
    Homeseer, it can work with multiple protocols. I use Insteon, you can just buy a USB insteon modem and skip the cloud hub.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    Look at home assistant as a hub. It's a fully open source python-3 based system that runs happily on a raspberry pi. It has many ways of interfacing with just about every device including local-only things like zwave, ZigBee, or lutron. They also have support for some wifi based things that are still local-only, but I tend to treat them as hostile and firewall them off, and even then I don't really like having them as they tend to be made by unknown manufacturers and have pretty shitty first party apps.
jklinger410 9y ago
Convenience paired with having nothing to hide. Also understanding the technology that goes behind keeping your identity obfuscated from advertisers even with intense personalization. Bonus Round: A desire to quicken technological advancement by buying into emerging tech instead of resisting it or requiring economically restricting benchmarks.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I'll bet most people who have "noting to hide" could be motivated to reconsider if someone went through all their private correspondence and reported the results to them.
  - jklinger410 9y ago
    I would suggest that most people who think someone is going to spend their time doing this to get over themselves. If you are notable, intensely rich, or some other special person...
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      Maybe in the future you will be one of those things, and your data will still be waiting for you. Unless you’re special enough to see into the future I guess.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Yeah, or you just piss off (or just attract the attention of) the wrong person or group. I can't imagine Ken Bone envisioned someone combing through his entire Reddit history or Justine Sacco imagined her joke would lead to people tracking down her employer and getting her essentially blackballed from her profession. And that's just nobodies working with only public information.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      > I would suggest that most people who think someone is going to spend their time doing this to get over themselves. No person is going to personally do that. We have computers and increasingly more advanced 'learning' algorithms to do that for us, and to help us draw conclusions (correct or not) about the person of interest.
notyourwork 9y ago
Why do you carry a GPS tracker around? Why do you put wireless in your home? Lots of things are easy to question until you step back from your single point of view and realize a large population out there doesn't live with a tinfoil hat on. It is not because they don't care about the same security problems you do, it is because they are naive and don't understand how stuff works or what the problematic implications of using them are.
- mulmen 9y ago
  You're right, the Bill of Rights only protects criminals.
  - notyourwork 9y ago
    When did I say anything about the bill of rights?
- emodendroket 9y ago
  It's also because this isn't a problem well-suited for addressing by individuals. I doubt even Richard Stallman audits every line of code he ever runs on his computer, and I doubt most of us would want the extreme level of inconvenience that comes with living his life.
  - notyourwork 9y ago
    Which is it - inconvenience or comfort? I don’t see how you get both here? If you don’t want something listening don’t buy it. If you don’t want tracking enabled on your phone that you feed to cloud services don’t use it. What am I missing ?
phil248 9y ago
Yeah, it sucks having a powerful computer in my pocket all the time that can handle nearly all of my regular tasks. Wait, what?
- mulmen 9y ago
  My phone does a much better job of redefining "normal tasks" than it does solving problems I had before smartphones.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  The net effect is possibly negative. Here is some reading: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your-smartphone-reduces-brain-power https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your... https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-our-phones-tristan-harris-wants-to-rescue-them/ https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-...
mikeash 9y ago
Smartphones are vastly worse, since they’re always with me. Once I’ve accepted that, putting a smart speaker in my house doesn’t make things noticeably worse.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  Normalizing the use of always-on microphones in previously "private" areas (such as the home) such that people expect that their voice might be recorded and transmitted to a 3rd party removes the warrant requirement for the police to also use that technology. (Kyllo v United States) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16061681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16061681
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  The more devices you add (giving a larger number of unknown entities access to information about you), the higher the risks. Also, the solution to the smartphone problem isn't just to passively accept defeat. That will allow the problem to become worse.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Passively accepting defeat may not be “the solution” but it’s what approximately everybody does, including approximately everybody complaining about smart speakers.
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      Yes, that's the problem that needs solving.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Unfortunately, every story about smart speakers is flooded with comments like yours, saying that they're evil and they can't understand why anyone would ever buy one, while stories about smartphones never get any comments like that. If smartphones are the problem, why are you complaining about smart speakers instead?

madspindel 9y ago

"God, please end poverty in the world" "I'm sorry, I didn't get that. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that."

emodendroket 9y ago
Does taking potshots at the OP's religion add anything at all to the discussion?
- mediaman 9y ago
  Huh? It's an amusing joke. How is it taking a "potshot" at his religion? Imagine being in church, praying to God for the betterment of humanity, and then you hear Him answer you back, filling the church with His voice, but...it's just Cortana with an inane canned response. It's funny, and not in an insulting way, except perhaps if you're on the team working on one of these products.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I guess I could see how you might be amused by that reading, but the way I imagined it was more like ridiculing someone who attends church with a joke about how prayer is futile.
a_e_k 9y ago
"For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good."
nfoz 9y ago
Heh. To be fair the conversation in question was a lot more personal than that -- matters of crime, addiction, forgiveness, and personal change. The "nothing to hide" arguments are irrelevant here -- people absolutely do have things to hide. This is where people seek advice about lawbreaking before they are ready or able to discuss with authorities. We can't have even the pretense that something could be listening in on these convos. It's appropriate to blame the church for having the listening device.... but as technologists we know that off-the-shelf products don't give them much choice without technical proficiency/awareness to reconfigure the defaults. Edit: and I think I interpreted your joke as you intended; no offense taken.