6 ms·

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?

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?