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The irony runs deeper than the free analysis offer. The whole Mercor contractor relationship was this exact pattern: hand over studio-quality voice recordings a
by saadn92 5mo ago
The irony runs deeper than the free analysis offer. The whole Mercor contractor relationship was this exact pattern: hand over studio-quality voice recordings and ID scans to get paid for data labeling work that didn't require either. "Explicit consent" was buried in the terms, and people clicked through because they needed the paycheck.
Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.
- inetknght 5mo ago> biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice. "My voice is my passport. Verify me." I have to renew my passport every 10 years or so. How do I do that with my voice? I guess it's time to take some vocal lessons.
- Romario77 5mo agojust take up smoking heavily
- throwaway67743 5mo agoDespite popular belief, even heavy smoking does not alter your voice in a significant way.
- reaperducer 5mo agoDespite popular belief, even heavy smoking does not alter your voice in a significant way. I guess you don't listen to Sinatra.
- ssl-3 5mo agoOr John Mellencamp, who repeatedly states in interviews that he likes what smoking does to his singing voice.
- terbo 5mo agoDepends on what you're smoking
- DANmode 5mo agoand mostly how.
- HansHamster 5mo agobacon!
- 9991 5mo agoSource: it came to me in a dream.
- coldtea 5mo agoThere's this myth (that came to you in pop culture) that you end up sounding like Tom Waits. In reality, some phlegm aside, their voice is still the same in any way that matters. If you knew people who didn't smoke and started (not uncommon in the 80s and 90s, quite a few people I know started smoking in university, or after the stress of a first job, some even later), and also the inverse, you can trivially hear it for yourself.
- throwaway67743 5mo agoMy voice is exactly the same as before I started smoking heavily, and I have never had any of the associated problems that most people seem to have (lung capacity, stamina, infections, phlegm etc) - pot luck I guess, like most things
- idiomaddict 5mo agoDo you have a source for that? I can tell with pretty good accuracy whether my students smoke from their voices (adult language learners, we take smoke breaks together and they have no reason to conceal it), and would be very surprised if I’m just that lucky and there’s nothing a person can pick up on acoustically.
- throwaway67743 5mo ago20 years of heavy smoking :) Although it does seem to affect some people more than others for sure, I guess it depends how and what you're smoking.
- argee 5mo agoEasier to inhale an undisclosed amount of helium before recording your password voice
- toss1 5mo agoExcellent idea! Do you need to calibrate it to be able to repeat it, and does that calibration change if you are at a different altitude and in different conditions, such as humidity? Does merely changing altitude (or ambient pressure) change voice enough to be considered different by a recognition or synthesizing system?
- malfist 5mo agoI recommend sulfur hexafluoride for something harder to replicate. Nothing like making hackers risk their life to impersonate you
- alasdair_ 5mo agoOr skip the half measures and go straight for the dioxygen diflouride. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
- eqvinox 5mo agoReminds me of the Interrail data breach [https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/eurail-data-breach-308000-travelers-passport-numbers-discovereu-2026/ https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/eurail-data-breach-3080...] The fediverse take on that was "customers are advised to rotate their faces and birthdays."
- nikkaelle 5mo agoVocal lessons are both a lot of fun and a lot of work. I haven't been using any voiceprint systems but I know most humans are unable to tell that my trained voice is the same physical person as my old voice. Would be curious to find out if an AI voiceprint system can discern whether it's the same or not.
- wholinator2 5mo agoAre you talking about singing lessons, or actual talking training? Singing lessons helped me sing but didn't change the way i talked at all, but i was only able to afford them for a summer so maybe it takes more time than that
- nikkaelle 5mo agoI'm referring to speaking, not singing. After a _lot_ of work, I can speak passably as a woman or man and switch freely between the two. Depending on context I generally choose just one for the entire conversation, as switching tends to cause whiplash in the listener (^_^).
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo agoI'm curious as to what prompted you to pursue this ability.
- wahnfrieden 5mo agoThere is a common enough need for this for some
- nikkaelle 5mo agoI'm trans. The ability to switch mid-sentence is mostly just something I discovered I can do and is fun. But the ability to pass as my real gender is something that helps me feel safe. And when needed, being able to occasionally pass as my prior gender (e.g., when calling my bank until I can change my name/gender legally), it also quite useful.
- thedrexster 5mo ago>> "My voice is my passport. Verify me." Well met, fellow Uplinker!!
- alasdair_ 5mo ago>Well met, fellow Uplinker!! I'm pretty sure this person worked at Playtronics.
- hkt 5mo agoSmoke 40 cigarettes a day, your voice will be unrecognisable in no time
- bonesss 5mo agoAlso: it’s not just the first order smoking, respiratory issues, increased chance of illness, and chronic coughing can damage your voices presentation.
- anilakar 5mo agoBiometrics are "what you are", not "what you know" or "what you have". Voice fingeprinting is essentially useless because it is easily recorded and reproduced.
- Sander_Marechal 5mo agoI have been telling people for years that biometrics (face, fingerprint, voice) is your username, not your password. But people are easily swayed by convenience.
- noosphr 5mo agoIf your user name is tattooed on your forehead, yes.
- Sander_Marechal 5mo agoFor all intents an purposes it is, especially face ID. Also, courts in most countries can compel you to provide biometrics. But many cannot compel you to reveal passwords.
- echelon 5mo ago> Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice. Voices aren't strong. There just aren't that many unique characteristic parameters behind a voice - it's largely dictated by an evolutionary shared shared larynx and vocal tract. They aren't fingerprints. The fact that human voice impersonation is not only widely possible but popular should give you an indication of this. Prosody, intonation, range, etc. - it's all flexible and can be learned and duplicated. The signals are simple too, because we have to encode and decode them quickly. You may or may not be able to picture and rotate an apple tree in your head, but you can easily read this sentence in the voice of David Attenborough. Moreover, you can easily fine tune a voice model to fit any other speaker. You can store the unique speaker embeddings in a very thin layer. Zero and few shot unseen sampling can even come close to full reproduction. You can measure this all quantitatively. Voices are not, and never have been, fingerprints. They're just not that unique.
- Oravys 5mo ago[dead]
- Marsymars 5mo ago> Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice. The problem is that even if you know that, you still get bombarded by banking apps promising "biometrics are more secure than passwords, switch now!"
- senectus1 5mo agoI doubt 1% of the 40k will learn anything. also this took me way too long to realize it had nothing to do with warhammer.
- post_below 5mo agoThis comment is pure LLM. I feel like we're right on the threshold where we give up and start interacting with slop like it's human written.
- AlexeyBelov 5mo agoAn LLM comment from an AI booster. How poetic.
- smcin 5mo agoWhat makes you think that comment is LLM?
- tlb 5mo agoYou can rotate your voice with substantial effort. Just speak differently: higher or lower pitch, a different accent. Your friends may look at you funny for the first few years.
- freedomben 5mo agoThis is an important point with biometrics that most people don't realize. When I say that biometrics aren't good security, most people are perplexed because they have seen movies and such that are high-tech where iris scans or fingerprints are the pinnacle of security. I like to tell them this story that I read somewhere a decade or so ago. It might not be a true story (I never checked) but it's a helpful way of thinking about it. Bob landed a great job and decided to celebrate by buying a new luxury car (a BMW in my recollection, but could be wrong) that had a thumbprint authentication for unlocking and for starting it, so you never have to carry external keys. One day a thief decided to steal Bob's car. They broke in to his house and tied him up. When they demanded the keys and he said there weren't any, they decided to cut off his thumb and use it as the key. Now Bob has no thumb and his car still got stolen.
- salad-tycoon 5mo agoThe story I remember is French police units specifically launching focused investigation on the sudden explosion of crypto people / family members getting kidnapped and having a finger or more chopped off. I did find your story from 2005 about a man having his finger chopped off once the thieves realized they would need his appendage every time in order to start the car2. https://news.sky.com/story/french-police-investigating-series-of-crypto-kidnappings-with-executives-tied-up-and-their-fingers-cut-off-13367737 https://news.sky.com/story/french-police-investigating-serie... [2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18624943-600-finger-chopped-off-to-beat-car-security https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18624943-600-finger-c...