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A comment on Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees. Parent comment

Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by mr_gibbins on Monday November 14, 2022 @11:52AM (#33596973)
This is not strictly true. I examined a master's degree thesis last semester where the student proved conclusively that Alexa devices are periodically spamming bursts of data back to Amazon HQ even when not woken. Beyond a heartbeat, too - MBs of data, not KBs.

No clear idea what that data is, though. There's at least a small chance it isn't benign.

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Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by djbusby on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:01PM (#33597140)
So, mitmproxy that traffic and see what it is?
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Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by mr_gibbins on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:11PM (#33597294)
Scope of his work didn't go that far, he looked at several devices and Alexa was notably chatty. He was measuring for abnormal data bursts from IoT home devices - included things like smart bulbs etc.
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Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by ahepp on Monday November 14, 2022 @01:01PM (#33598132)
isn't the point of SSL that you can't do that (assuming the client is verifying certs, etc)?
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Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by jefftk on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:05PM (#33597181)
link?
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Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by mr_gibbins on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:10PM (#33597277)
Unpublished. It's still going through board approval.

As/when it's put on my institution's open repository I'll post a link. Might be a few weeks though.

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Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by registeredcorn on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:32PM (#33597666)
Interested to hear more, once it's through! :)
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Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by rightbyte on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:56PM (#33598055)
Be sure to put as a submit :)
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