> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Part of Google's success is realising that yes, your goal needs to be that the right answer comes out when asked the wrong question. If you type "Rebecca Editor of Star Newspaper" it doesn't matter that's not how she spells her name, or that she was never editor of the Daily Star, nor that she's not now editor of anything at all, having been effectively promoted, Google correctly determines that you probably want results about a famous British woman named Rebekah Brooks.
There's an SF story, I thought it was a Multivac story but a list of those doesn't find it for me, where the world computer has been making "mistakes" and the technicians trying to diagnose it eventually realise its "mistakes" are actually causing humans who've disobeyed its instructions to fail. The computer has been tasked with improving efficiency, and disobedience results in inefficiency, so it has arranged for those who are disobedient to be unsuccessful. It isn't murdering anybody, but maybe they'll go bankrupt or miss out on a promotion and so the overall inefficiency is reduced.
Disclaimer: work for AWS, not affiliated with Alexa or Echo.
Is it really? I don't think you'd be able to detect steganographic communication or targeted attacks like this.
The microphone's input would either need to be transmitted continuously (which is detectable with Wiresharp or other traffic monitoring tools), or stored which neither the Echo or Echo Dot have large enough capacity to do for any significant length of time.
I'll give you that it could be possible to slip in other "trigger words" that could be tallied, then statistics sent off, but really, is that a problem? So what if your Echo counts how many times you say a specific keyword? Would that affect your life in any way?
it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to get some datapoints about what google might be sending based upon when transmissions were sent and what was being sent to the microphone.
Or just find someone smart enough to reverse engineer the device.
Your “phones can already do this” argument still holds
The last one is probably closest but it doesn't matter because there are starving children to feed and you're here worrying about names of fallacies, you animal. /s
> microphones only send recordings to the servers when you use the wake word.
This is a fact we can verify with tools like Wireshark. Their other point about "open microphones" largely ignores smartphones which all have open microphones and a baseband operating system which can activate the microphone to spy (which the NSA did[0]).
Their point about existing hacks targeting the Echo is also largely unraveled by a quote further down:
> This particular exploit only worked on devices made before 2017 and required the hacker to have physical access to the Echo.
Essentially if you disassemble an Echo and reprogram it, it will do something else. Compelling stuff...
[0] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/nsa-bug-iphone/