Skip to main content

Shooby Shooby Do Yah ... now Google ... Turn Bill's Lights Off

Introduction

I drove from Edinburgh to Glasgow last and had a merry chat with my car companion.

As I was driving I asked them to "Play Banana Republic by the Boomtown Rats on Spotify", and then asked, "Tell me the latest tech news". But I was alone in the car, and every command began with "Okay Google".

I must admit when a great piece of useful technology comes along, I love it. There is no button to press, and there is no looking at the screen, and it works beautifully. All I have to do is match my sentences to the ones that my Google Assistant understands. For just now we are in a learning phase, and she is learning from me, and I'm learning from her. The world, as far as I can see it, is moving towards one which has Alexa, Siri and Now Google embedded into it. I believe this will become one of the greatest steps forward in the true integration of technology and humans.

 But, on the other side, we now have a little spy in our pocket, and she's listening to every single thing that you say. While her trigger is "Alexa ...", "Siri ..." or "Okay Google...", the agent is listening to every single thing you that say. If you have seen some of our reason IoT demos, we have a difficult conversation with Alexa, and we demonstrate how by working Porridge, she will trigger her listening process.

 Now researchers in the US and China have shown that it is possible to run commands on Siri, Google Now and Alexa with commands hidden in songs:


This has been dubbed the "Dolphin Attack". Along with hidden commands in music, they found that the assistants will listen to high-frequency signals which cannot be heard by the human ear. Their proof of concept song is here.

Come and see it in action ...

If you have seen some of our IoT presentations recently, we have been demo'ing Alexa and Siri having serious discussions with us - they basically refuse to let us do the things we want to do, and tell us to go away. We are now working on new demos which focus fully on the risks of using Alexa, Google Now and Siri. Why not come along and see the future?

 Here's a bit of fun with AI ...



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Domain Reminder "Scam"

Introduction You may know that I often follow-up on scamming emails, in order to investigate the true motive for their attempt. So here I would like to outline a scam which looks fairly passive but tricks the user in its usage of wording. The Scam First the scamming company search DNS records and locate a domain which is near to timing-out and gain the email address of the registered person. Next they draft an official looking email which looks like it knows lots of details about the domain and account holder, and which warns them about a domain which is expiring: But the wording is strange here, and there's nothing illegal in what they are offering. In quickly reading the email, it seems that they are warning you that your domain is expiring on 28 June 2017, and that it will be cancelled . But read more closely ... it is their offer of the SEO registration that will be cancelled on 28 June 2017! This is the same date as the domain is actually going to time-out, so they...
Post a Comment
Read more

Face Recognition at Public Events: Big Brother or Catching Criminals?

Introduction So did George Orwell actually predict the future of the Cyber Age with his 1984 book? In his book, George projected a state which observed its citizens, and where there was no hiding place. He could see a time of TVs on the wall which could talk to you, and for the citizens to be watched for everything that they did. Perhaps he could see a world where our Cloud Service providers ... Google .. Facebook ... and so on ... continually monitoring our activities? Obviously, in 1948, when he published it, the use of technology was not quite developed as it is now, but  perhaps we need to examine our current move towards the observation of crime through technologies such as face recognition. On the back of Internet records in the UK being monitored without a warrant, we now see that citizens may not be free from observation when they attend even something like a football match. Monitoring faces A number of police forces in the UK have been trying face recognitio...
Post a Comment
Read more