4 ms·

Ex Kinect engineer here. I wrote a bunch of firmware in the original Kinect and a bunch of support stuff on the 360 console. I also did a lot of design on the n

by kabdib 13y ago

Ex Kinect engineer here. I wrote a bunch of firmware in the original Kinect and a bunch of support stuff on the 360 console. I also did a lot of design on the new Kinect system before I left MS. I won't reveal any secrets, but: 1) It should be very easy to determine if the Kinect is listening when it should not be, at least when the unit is off. So whatever MS claims the unit does should be verifiable. 2) I trust the Kinect team to do this right. They're dead serious about privacy issues. You don't know me, so my trust in point #2 isn't necessarily transitive. But you should be able to look at signals and verify #1.

nknighthb 13y ago
If they're that serious, why not do the obvious thing and provide a physical switch? Why make it dependent on code we all know is fallible?
- kabdib 13y ago
  Well, what does a switch do? How does a physical switch work? Phones -- the old ones -- have big honking mechanical switches, but you can still listen through the things, with a little engineering. A switch that just twiddles a bit on an input line can be ignored by software. A switch that controls power might be interesting. But then there's a cable from the camera to the console itself, which could carry some power, and might be used to run a microphone, or maybe the camera electronics, a little bit. Really, your recourse is to unplug the camera. Or not have one. Others have pointed out that there are microphones on laptops and tablets (that appear to be off, but who knows?), and many celebrated cases in which reverse-spyware has been used to recover stolen hardware. This stuff is all around us now. There's no coordinated plan for NSA-like folks to glue it together, or light it up without us knowing, and I think this would be hard, at least for the time being, and doubly hard to do without someone noticing.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    The "switch" in a telephone was never designed as a privacy mechanism, and the device itself necessarily requires a live connection to the telephone network at all times. By contrast, there is no compelling reason the Kinect component(s) must be connected to the xbox when not in use. I obviously don't know what sort of bus is being used internally, but if it were, for example, USB, then the mechanical switch could easily behave as the equivalent of removing a USB connector from a socket. The laptop/microphone argument is a red herring. "Everybody else is doing it" is not a valid excuse for doing the wrong thing.
    - kabdib 13y ago
      My point is that putting trust in a switch is a surprisingly deep subject. For instance, it's hard (and expensive) to mechanically switch high speed USB while retaining the proper electrical characteristics needed by the transmission lines.
      - nknighthb 13y ago
        That seems an extremely odd statement to make, but let's assume it's true: Then just make it an easily-accessible cable. Or leave it as an optional accessory, which is what everyone would have preferred in the first place. Don't get stuck in the mode of thinking you must design the solution to fit arbitrary requirements already decided upon. Those requirements aren't merely the source of the problem, they are the problem, and they're causing Microsoft to deliberately put its customers at risk.

by kabdib 13y ago

nknighthb 13y ago

If they're that serious, why not do the obvious thing and provide a physical switch? Why make it dependent on code we all know is fallible?

kabdib 13y ago
Well, what does a switch do? How does a physical switch work? Phones -- the old ones -- have big honking mechanical switches, but you can still listen through the things, with a little engineering. A switch that just twiddles a bit on an input line can be ignored by software. A switch that controls power might be interesting. But then there's a cable from the camera to the console itself, which could carry some power, and might be used to run a microphone, or maybe the camera electronics, a little bit. Really, your recourse is to unplug the camera. Or not have one. Others have pointed out that there are microphones on laptops and tablets (that appear to be off, but who knows?), and many celebrated cases in which reverse-spyware has been used to recover stolen hardware. This stuff is all around us now. There's no coordinated plan for NSA-like folks to glue it together, or light it up without us knowing, and I think this would be hard, at least for the time being, and doubly hard to do without someone noticing.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  The "switch" in a telephone was never designed as a privacy mechanism, and the device itself necessarily requires a live connection to the telephone network at all times. By contrast, there is no compelling reason the Kinect component(s) must be connected to the xbox when not in use. I obviously don't know what sort of bus is being used internally, but if it were, for example, USB, then the mechanical switch could easily behave as the equivalent of removing a USB connector from a socket. The laptop/microphone argument is a red herring. "Everybody else is doing it" is not a valid excuse for doing the wrong thing.
  - kabdib 13y ago
    My point is that putting trust in a switch is a surprisingly deep subject. For instance, it's hard (and expensive) to mechanically switch high speed USB while retaining the proper electrical characteristics needed by the transmission lines.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      That seems an extremely odd statement to make, but let's assume it's true: Then just make it an easily-accessible cable. Or leave it as an optional accessory, which is what everyone would have preferred in the first place. Don't get stuck in the mode of thinking you must design the solution to fit arbitrary requirements already decided upon. Those requirements aren't merely the source of the problem, they are the problem, and they're causing Microsoft to deliberately put its customers at risk.