Sonic Siri

A Chinese research firm has discovered that all our our various voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, OK Google and Cortana) listen to frequencies well beyond the range of human hearing.  Therefore, if a malicious command is pitch-shifted above that range, our devices will hear it and execute it without any of us knowing about it.

Here's the video of it in action:



On the surface, this looks a bit scary: the parts are cheap, there are apps that will shift the frequency of any input (though it may need to be washed through the app a few times, but that's not hard, just time consuming).  And maybe it is scary, but there are some things that you can do about it.  Read on.

Equi-Fu**ed

I've written about on-line privacy before and the utter helplessness surrounding it for the individual citizen.  The Equifax hack highlights this again and takes it to new and more horrifying heights.

Equifax, one of the three credit reporting agencies used by every US entity that needs to decide if any one person is trustworthy, had 143 million records stolen out of their supposedly secure database.  That is roughly two-thirds of the population with a credit report (approximately 246 million people aged fifteen and up).  Bottom line: your information has been exposed.

There have been many data hacks in the past, from Target to Sony to G-Mail and on.  This one is worse.  While those others have had some information, often including social security numbers and credit card information, Equifax makes its business collecting all of that information: credit card payment histories, utility payment histories, mortgages, employment, bank accounts and more.  On everyone who has ever opened any of those.  They collect all of this so that they can help banks and employers and others decide if you will pay your bills on time.  If you are someone who is responsible.

But how can any of that be trusted if the company collecting it proves not to be responsible?

Voice Cliques

The big news from this last week in the Internet of Things is that Amazon and Microsoft are talking to each other.  At least, they are through their digital assistants.  You can now 'summon' Cortana through Alexa and vice-versa.

The big idea that helped these two Seattle area volcanoes of tech to work together is that their two assistants are good at different things.  Cortana integrates well with Microsoft Office and the Bing search engine.  Alexa is good at almost everything else.  This means that you will soon be able to say natural sounding phrases like, "Alexa, open Cortana. [pause] Hey Cortana, what's on my Outlook calendar for today?"  All from the same speaker thingy sitting on some shelf in whatever room you are in.

Not clunky at all.

Weapons of Doubt

Last week, Elon Musk again warned against Killer Robots.  This time, instead of just him on stage, he got 115 of his closest friends (really, leading experts in the field of AI and autonomous weapons) to publish a letter to the UN.  In it, he (and all the rest) warn against the use of these kinds of weapons that are not only unmanned, but also not directly controlled by a human being.

Is he wrong?  No.  There are terrific potentials for misuse around these things.  Think of mean ol' Mrs. Jenkins who always yells at you to pick up after your pooch.  If she sets up a Kalinshni-Bot(tm)  on her front yard, the neighborhood population of pups is going to take a sharp down turn.

What I find a bit disingenuous is that Mr. Musk is the person voicing these concerns.  After all, he is one of the leaders in autonomous vehicles with Tesla.  And the area awareness software and sensor suite that he is plunking into his cars could be easily modified to drive something more sinister.

But let's put that aside and think a bit about what those rules might be.

Virgin Money

Over the past week or so, there has been an increase in interest in Universal Basic Income (UBI).  A couple more of the tech elite have added their voices to those of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in support of this Utopian economic concept: Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack, and Richard Branson, founder of all things Virgin.

The two of them are coming at the concept from slightly different bents.  Mr. Butterfield sees it as a way to help those hurt by localized market inflation, similar to the housing market in Silicon Valley where high tech salaries have driven home prices out of reach of all of the ancillary jobs that those technocrats take for granted.  It doesn't matter how well sourced your latte's beans are if you don't have a barista available to prepare it.

Mr. Branson is looking at it from a bit more humanitarian perspective, having met with groups working in Finland to understand how that countries limited UBI program is working.  In a blog post, he states:

"In the modern world, everybody should have the opportunity to work and to thrive. Most countries can afford to make sure that everybody has their basic needs covered. One idea that could help make this a reality is a universal basic income. This concept should be further explored to see how it can work practically."

This is slightly different than both Musk and Zuckerberg who are more concerned with the fallout from workplace automation and how we all can afford basic necessities if we don't have jobs.

Avast Your Content

This last week, a couple of news items knocked me out of the stratosphere of the post-work society and back to reality.  That is because both items hit me where it hurts: in the content I love.

First up, there is the news that HBO has been hacked and someone is trying to blackmail them by threatening to release Game of Thrones episodes ahead of official release.  Plus allegedly damning emails.  After the Sony "The Interview" hack of 2014 which is rumored to have cost Sony around $100 Million, companies have taken threats like this seriously.  Unless the hackers don't actually have what they say they have or think that what they have is more critical than it is (see "Burn After Reading"), as appears to be the case here.  HBO is not reported to be negotiating in any serious manner with the cyber thieves.

Secondly, Disney has announced that they are severing ties with Netflix and will be pulling their content from that service in 2019.  They intend to set up their own streaming service for their content which may include content from ABC and ESPN, both owned by Disney.  Netflix responded by buying a comic book publisher, Millarworld, which is most known for the "Kick-Ass" series.

What do these two news items have in common?  Well, they are both about money.  They are both about control.  And they are both about content piracy.  And content piracy is about breaking free of money and control.

Virtually Polite

I like my virtual assistants, be they "Hey, Google" or Alexa.  (I've not owned an Apple product since long before Siri.  As for Cortana, well she may be fine, but who knows?)  But they are not perfect.  Each has their own set of problems, be it interoperability with the apps I want to use or the trigger words that are used to 'wake' them up.  However, the thing that irks me the most about them is that they are only kind of polite.

By 'kind of', I mean that they follow the intent of polite conversation, but not the forms.  They respond quickly with relevant information (most of the time) if they are address correctly, but they do not handle words like 'please' and 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' with any grace.  Ffor instance, if you say, "Alexa, please tell me about the weather," then Alexa will tell you about the weather, ignoring the word 'please' as irrelevant to the request.  Then, after you have the information, if you say, "Thank you," you get nothing in return.  Instead, you have to say "Alexa, thank you".  Only then will you get a "You're welcome."  It does not fit into a natural conversation.  At least in the style of American English in the beginning of the 21st Century.