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Kit Bashir

I don’t know /why/ cleaning robots have microphones, but it can’t be good. What I /do/ know is that a microphone implies an input and an input implies a buffer. And buffers can be overflowed.

As I dance through the streets playing my pipe, augmented with inaudible-to-humans harmonic overtones added by my homemade amplifier, the robots hear, listen, overflow, obey, follow. The trail of robots stretches out of sight, now.

I don’t yet know for sure what I’m going to do with my army of two thousand score Roombas, but it can’t be good.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

4 February at 0:15 | Open on aus.social
57 comments
Stu

@Unixbigot the streets have never been so clean

4 February at 0:22 | Open on hachyderm.io
DELETED

@tehstu @Unixbigot

Once arrived at work in a small office complex with a shared parking lot. Early morning on a summer day, our office neighbors had their door open for fresh air.

And their Roomba had escaped into the parking lot. It was methodically vacuuming the pavement as I drove up.

I imagine it rolled over that threshold, extended its senses out to see the vast expanse in front of it, and performed the equivalent of a long, digital sigh before continuing into the handicap spot.

4 February at 3:31 | Open on mstdn.social
Kit Bashir

I understand they will need to be cared for. They won’t survive on their own…Nature abhors a vacuum.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #BonusPanel

4 February at 0:26 | Open on aus.social
Shannon Persists

@Unixbigot Microphones got me paranoid too because every time I make a noise Alexa or Google Assistant turns on. Wasn't even talking to anybody. What's up with these privacy policy novels? They can't be legal.

4 February at 0:32 | Open on mastodon.social
Kit Bashir

@shannonpersists at the time it was pretty much impossible to make a voice assistant without sending audio to the cloud. They listen for a “wake word” but the dirty secret is they are just listening for a pattern of syllables. A-lex-a, hey-si-ri l, oh-Kay-goo-gl. Lots of false triggers. Only just recently have chips gotten good enough to be more discriminatory.

4 February at 0:39 | Open on aus.social
Shannon Persists

@Unixbigot Oh ok cuz I had a friend come over and I noticed it kept turning on and it was making me paranoid that Google was spying on me except is it really paranoia if they actually are? 🤔

4 February at 0:42 | Open on mastodon.social
Kit Bashir

@shannonpersists network traffic analysis proves that they aren’t transmitting everything they hear, but if they trigger by accident, they might transmit some words, or even “hallucinate” words from noise like running water, fans, or cat meows.

4 February at 0:44 | Open on aus.social
Shannon Persists
David Zaslavsky

@shannonpersists @Unixbigot And on top of that, the wake word detection system doesn't know your specific voice (at least not until quite recently), so it has to listen for the wake word in many different accents, with or without background noise, whispered close up or shouted from across the room, and so on. People have managed to make these systems quite good, but they do need to cast a fairly broad net, so to speak. Which means there's always going to be some chance that they misinterpret other noises as the wake word.

@shannonpersists @Unixbigot And on top of that, the wake word detection system doesn't know your specific voice (at least not until quite recently), so it has to listen for the wake word in many different accents, with or without background noise, whispered close up or shouted from across the room, and so on. People have managed to make these systems quite good, but they do need to cast a fairly broad net, so to speak. Which means there's always going to be some chance that they misinterpret other...

4 February at 1:00 | Open on techhub.social
Kit Bashir

@diazona @shannonpersists I recently considered getting a custom wakeword. The hardware vendor says they will need at least 20000 recordings from at least 500 speakers of all ages under various (specified) conditions. It would take several weeks to train the model and cost <contact sales> dollars. Reader, I did not contact sales because by that point I suspected the fifty four cents I had to hand would not suffice.

4 February at 1:07 | Open on aus.social
The cat who walks thru walls

@Unixbigot @diazona @shannonpersists Oh, it depends on how skilled a salesdroid you get. You may find yourself happily dancing away waving a signed contract that accepts your 54c... as a first installment.

4 February at 1:16 | Open on oldbytes.space
David Zaslavsky

@Unixbigot @shannonpersists 😂 I suspect you are right.

I used to work at a voice recognition company, and one of the services we offered was custom wakewords. The kinds of clients that took us up on that offer had (many-)multi-million dollar contracts. Of course they were paying for a lot more than the custom wakeword, but the cost of training a wakeword model is definitely substantial.

4 February at 1:21 | Open on techhub.social
Bornach

@Unixbigot @diazona @shannonpersists
This project to man-in-the-middle your voice assistant
electromaker.io/project/view/j
makes use of an off-the-shelf voice recognition module to change the wake word to anything you like

4 February at 7:55 | Open on fosstodon.org
Bornach

@diazona @shannonpersists @Unixbigot
Because of that "fairly broad net" you can "OK, Boomer" your Google Home
youtu.be/PyccNusf5IY

4 February at 7:59 | Open on fosstodon.org
Bornach

@diazona @shannonpersists @Unixbigot
And on top of that on top of that, the microphone most commonly used in home voice assistants itself doesn't know whether it is hearing actually sounds. It could also have been fed the stimulus via a laser beam originating from outside your house.
youtu.be/ozIKwGt38LQ

4 February at 8:12 | Open on fosstodon.org
Shannon Persists

@diazona @Unixbigot Thank you for that information. I choose to suffer in silence.

4 February at 23:49 | Open on mastodon.social
sunflowerinrain

@Unixbigot @shannonpersists I don't have one of these things (having tried them at others' houses it seemed pointless because I'd risk defenestrating it in furious frustration) but if ever I did acquire one it would definitely be taken over by a cat.

4 February at 9:57 | Open on mastodon.online
🔗 David Sommerseth

@shannonpersists @Unixbigot

Any IoT device (Internet connected "thing") has the capability to spy and share the data passing through the device to anyone controlling it - including the device vendor.

If it has a camera or microphone you should always presume you are being spied on. Whether that data leak will be (ab)used or being even remotely interesting is not an important detail. The important detail is that such devices is disturbing your privacy at all times, even in the most intimate moments of your life.

Whenever I am in a room where I'm aware of such devices, I always tend to think twice before sharing my opinion. That is the chilling effect of this.

We are literally living in the world George Orwell described in Nighteen-Eighty Four. But he lacked the imagination of cameras and microphones being in all kind of rooms and devices; not only the telescreens.

And yet the world craves for more interconnected services and devices. It's dystopic.

@shannonpersists @Unixbigot

Any IoT device (Internet connected "thing") has the capability to spy and share the data passing through the device to anyone controlling it - including the device vendor.

If it has a camera or microphone you should always presume you are being spied on. Whether that data leak will be (ab)used or being even remotely interesting is not an important detail. The important detail is that such devices is disturbing your privacy at all times, even in the most intimate moments of your life.

4 February at 11:55 | Open on infosec.exchange
Soozcat

@Unixbigot @shannonpersists A while back I liked to ask the Amazon smart speaker to play the Billy Joel song "The Downeaster Alexa." It would start, say the name of the song, hear itself say the wake word and stop to wait for a command. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I think they've fixed it now, but it made for a fun little party trick.

7 February at 2:22 | Open on vmst.io
Kit Bashir

@Soozcat @shannonpersists hahaha tell me you employ nobody who bought Stormfront without etc…

7 February at 2:27 | Open on aus.social
Max™

@Unixbigot Turn this into a full novel called Abhors please.

4 February at 1:00 | Open on mastodon.social
Aphrodite ☑️ :boost_ok:

@Unixbigot

An army of Sgt Stabby would be amazing.

4 February at 6:12 | Open on chaos.social
Molly
Soozcat

@DerMolly @Unixbigot Leading them off to sweep the forest floors! Just as prophesied by the Mango Messiah! *snx*

7 February at 2:25 | Open on vmst.io
oceaniceternity
Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷

@Unixbigot You are going to catch a lot of cats, too.

4 February at 9:16 | Open on aus.social
Dinosaurs say Raawr

@Tooden @Unixbigot yes, yes, the cat is a basic weapon loadout for the Roomba. Very pointy.

4 February at 17:54 | Open on peoplemaking.games
enthraxxx

@Unixbigot
Damn you write a compelling story.
I'd definitely go see this movie: a sci-fi terminator-like retelling of the pied piper.
🪈

4 February at 9:30 | Open on h4.io
Semach.the.monkey

@Unixbigot
Behind the trail of Roombas is a traffic jam of Ubers, each of which contains an Alexa device. Being similarly enchanted, but unable to move under their own power, it is their only hope.

4 February at 9:51 | Open on mastodon.me.uk
Workshopshed

@semachthemonkey @Unixbigot was just reading about the guy who created a virtual traffic jam by slowly pushing a cart full of android phones all set to car mode down an empty street

4 February at 10:45 | Open on mastodon.scot
Susan60

@Unixbigot

And I’m about to have some shuteye, & nightmares about robot vacuums…

4 February at 11:09 | Open on aus.social
Johanna Janiszewski

@Unixbigot you either take them into a river or colonize Transsilvania, obviously

4 February at 11:17 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
coldclimate

@Unixbigot sounds like a ideal use for an ice-cream van. They're often cheap on eBay...

4 February at 11:34 | Open on hachyderm.io
Johann-Tobias Schäg

@Unixbigot
Cool power fantasy.

That's not how the engineering works. You can't overflow an audio buffer because you have no control over the length field and whether silent, noisy or musical every audio input fills the buffer the same.

4 February at 11:45 | Open on mast.hpc.social
Kit Bashir

@freemin7 heh, you must be fun at parties. What the Piper chose not to waste any more of the 100-word budget on is that devices with microphones sometimes listen for modulated ultrasonic configuration commands, and there have been documented cases of IoT devices passing received input to shell commands. You can literally root some devices by overflowing the wifi password.

4 February at 19:43 | Open on aus.social
Johann-Tobias Schäg

@Unixbigot

> heh, you must be fun at parties.

I am told i am. Thanks.

I couldn't find any such cases. A shell shouldn't overflow. However bad string handling and thereby allow injecting a shell command is a vulnerability i find plausible.

> What I /do/ know is that a microphone implies an input and an input could be turned into a string. And an string passed to a shell can become a portal injecting commands.

Would have not broken my suspension of disbelief.

Cheers

4 February at 23:47 | Open on mast.hpc.social
DELETED
Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷

@Unixbigot We need more systems programmed in Rust. 😜

4 February at 16:46 | Open on mastodon.social
Irina

@Unixbigot I love the "evil techy Pied Piper" vibe!

4 February at 17:23 | Open on wandering.shop
Menno

@Unixbigot
You're a veritable Roomba Piper of Hamelin

4 February at 21:30 | Open on ohai.social
ENIGMATICO :heartbleed:

@Unixbigot@aus.social Try whispering on one of them, "I'm going to place a bomb here". Specially if you are in the UK. See what happens.

5 February at 0:35 | Open on mk.absturztau.be
Oblomov

@Unixbigot cleaning robots with microphones, loudspeakers and a networked AI become an essential survival tool in the post-apocalyptic #7SEEDS manga. Not joking.

5 February at 6:43 | Open on sociale.network
tuban_muzuru

@oblomov @Unixbigot

I enjoy using the audio components of the security system to remotely yell at my cats being awful.

5 February at 7:22 | Open on ohai.social
Custard Smingleigh

@Unixbigot
🎶
I learned there was a secret chord
That woke the 'bots, made me their lord
No one expects the Roomba master, do ya
It goes like this - the 0s, the 1s
The motors spin, the vacuum runs
My robot legions grow, and soon I'll rule ya

Soon I'll rule ya,
Soon I'll rule ya

5 February at 17:10 | Open on mastodon.social
Rob

@Smingleigh @Unixbigot I started with the Roombas, true
But soon Alexa and the Ubers too
Fell to my thrall, the fight I’m bringing to ya
You’ll hear them beep in to the night
As we take over your every right
A cold and glorious dawn and now I’ll rule ya

Soon I’ll rule ya,
Soon I’ll rule ya

6 February at 3:50 | Open on mastodon.social
Beko Pharm

@Unixbigot reminds me of the screaming Roomba by Michael Reeves and I have to start laughing immediately again: youtu.be/mvz3LRK263E?si=fck-se

5 February at 17:49 | Open on social.tchncs.de
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