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Google to Use PC Microphones to Listen In?
seriv writes "The Register reports that Google plans to use PC microphones to collect statistics on a user's environment. Peter Norvig, who directs research at Google, told Technology Review that this software would start to show up in Google software 'sooner rather than later'. The software collects short sound clips and removes background noise. Google then targets its ads based on the statistics collected. With the current level of online privacy, this new level of invasion would seem to have frightening possibilities."
this sounds like bullshit to me.
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That would be the literal incarnation of "spyware". :-S
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
WTF happened to "Don't Be Evil", Google?
Of course, this may be just FUD, but I am pretty certain it qualifies as unlawful data collection and breach of privacy in my jurisdiction. Try to hijack my microphone, Google, and I will sue you to kingdom come. You have been warned.
A note to self: make sure the Google toolbar is uninstalled on every family computer ASAP.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
NOBODY is stupid enough to propose such a thing. I think it’s a better guess that the tech in question is to be used to run ad-supported VOIP or similar.
I don’t know who those Faultline people are, but either they or El Reg (and now Slashdot) have been trolled. HAND
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
-r
I may not have gotten the first post (didn't even read the summary) - but I _am_ the millionth slashdot user. I decided to register last night. Thought that might be interesting to some of you.
Millionth user, baby
Is it april 1st or something?
Perhaps the Google software will conflict with the NSA microphone-tapping software so the NSA software stops working.
Will the user be notifed in big red letters.. or will this just be hidden down in the fine print like everything else?
What is next, capturing video? Or scanning file contents?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you're worried about your privacy, then stop using Google software. Set up your /etc/hosts file to resolve their various domains and hostnames to localhost. Disconnect your microphone.
If neither Google nor the various levels of government care about your privacy, then do what you have to on your own to guarantee your personal life remains personal.
This is some Scary Shit.
If anybody believes this story I've got some oceanside property in Nevada I'd like to sell them.
don't participate in sexual activities with your mic on or you will find yourself with nasty search results in the morning?
For once I have not read the 'effing article.
The Register is not a reliable news source. Moreover, Andrew Orlowski has a bee in his bonnet about Google and constantly writes articles attacking them with very little merit - I would be astonished if this article is not by him, but even if it isn't, their association with him completely discredits them in my eyes.
Finally Peter Norvig is the author of the seminal Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (if you haven't read it, go and buy it right now) and is definitely not a complete idiot - I simply don't believe the story as summarised in the slashdot writeup regardless of whether it correctly reflects El Reg's article.
Case dismissed.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
This sounds too absurd to be true, but if it were to happen i would boycott Google for better or for worse. Yes it would suck having to use another search engine, but I'd have no choice but to boycott them for principles sake.
Girl: WalnutMon, your penis is too small for me...
Me: Shh... Be quiet!
Girl: Why? Does it make you feel self conscious?
Me: No, I don't give a shit, I just don't feel like having more penis enlargement advertisements sent to me via google's sound activated advertisement scheme
Girl: I SURE NEED SOME VIBRATORS!
Me: AND WIVES FROM RUSSIA!
You take it, I don't want it...
Hello, Joe? You've been my attorney for, what is it now, twenty years? And you won that illegal search & seizure suit where the ACLU wrote an Amicus Curia? How about Class Action on people whose PC microphone was used, without their permission, to covertly collect audio from their homes, and that data was inadequately protected, so that the U.S. Government got access? Give me a call. I'll just be home, reading out loud from my collection of 20th century paranoid literature, starting with George Orwell.
-- Professor Jonathan Vos Post
If I remember correctly, Google wants to catalog all of the world's information, and make it searchable.
Really, how is this a surprise?
Ramen
In other words: welcome to Slashdot and congratulations on being the millionth user, but you'll get flamed just like any other noob
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
Who cares?
However after reading it seems that this is something that is fairly serious.
this search turned up more relevant results than I would have expected if this was a hoax.
Actually it turns on your Webcam and mic to record everything you say and do.
Privacy just went out the door.... unless you use *insert favorite OP systen here*
I vote for DOS.
Of course, the Google people do lots of research. Does mean its gonna get
rolled out... if its even a research project.
costs are paid for by the NSA and FBI.
Flash already has the ability to do this. Thankfully, you can control whether or not a site has access to your camera and microphone (denied by default).
This guy's the limit!
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/08/google-resear ch-prototypes-ambient-audio-contextual-content/
Makes me dislike even more PCs (and Macs) with permanently-wired internal microphones that you can't just unplug as with an external one, or even cover up as you can with an internal camera.
How will Google interpret 15 million samples all sounding like 'squelch...squelch...squelch...squelch..squelch..s quelch.squelch.squelch.splat....aaahhhhhh!"?
I guess Kleenex will find their Google ads being delivered to users far more frequently.
This will go over like a fart in church with corporate america. Wasn't there a huge controversy back when google desktop came out and it was storing corporate info on google servers to make it easier to get your data / searches between computers?
At least it will be easy for google to snoop on board meetings when their software is on the laptops of all the executives chatting away about their next big deal.
Do no evil or not, I just got a new dell and the first thing to go was google desktop despite all it's advertised benefits. I just don't feel comfortable knowing that someone else can flip through my e-mails, search history, advertisments, calendar, spreadsheets, quotes on writely, and now what music or tv show i've got going on in the background.
Mozy, free online backup service
--
Based on the gunshot noises in your environment, can I interest you one of the following: a Dirty Harry dvd or a bulletproof vest?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Right now, it's funny to read my emails and have semi-related ads, it's starting to get troubling when the publicity advertises plane tickets when/if I plan to visit somewhere. I know I have a choice of using their service. I'm not so sure I have the same choice when I'm at a coffee shop and everybody has a cellphone. If they are going to offer free wifi at the same place it's getting scary. And if they maintain their policy of keeping everything forever it's downright dangerous. I'm not saying Google is Big Brother (yet) but the possible implications of an "intelligent" service sure makes me hope that someone starts a debate on this.
What's the deal with flash and microphones and webcams? The same?
My rambling, biased thoughts on this issue:
... because the only way to dissuade companies from selling out individuals is for there to be some economic pain inflicted on the company for such behavior. Currently there is a significant imbalance between how companies make money from wide groups of people, yet each individual has little or no effect on the actions of the company.
Within our current economic system, companies must continually grow to survive. All large groups tend to become slower and more bureaucratic over time, and their ability to innovate declines. This leads to a tremendous pressure to generate continuously increasing revenue from existing methods.
Individuals motivations for privacy and security will inevitably come to odds with the profit drive of corporations. There is simply no way around this. It is not good enough to say that "the market will decide", and companies that screw over people will fail
Web 2.0 is showing us that power to the individual is increasing, dramatically.
We will see more and more "mutual benefit" clubs/collectives - organizations who primarily serve the interests of the individual - that pop up and by aggregating individual interests pull people away from the profit-motivated corporations.
Currently it is difficult legally to create and manage such collectives as they get large (>20-50 members), but it is inevitable, as the profit motives will end up screwing too many people.
OK, let's even assume for a second that this was true. What sort of targeted advertising would you even do with this. Presumably the kinds of things you might be able to easily tell would be that you're in a restaurant/cafe, in an office, in school, at a sporting event, etc.? Even if you come up with something smart enough to tell what sort of location you're at, what sort of useful targeted advertising would an advertiser even want to target to you?
The viewer's acoustic privacy is maintained by the irreversibility of the mapping from audio to summary statistics. Unlike the speech-enabled proactive agent by Hong et al. (2001), our approach will not "overhear" conversations. Furthermore, no one receiving (or intercepting) these statistics is able to eavesdrop, on such conversations, since the original audio does not leave the viewer's computer and the summary statistics are insufficient for reconstruction. Further, the system can easily be designed to use an explicit 'mute/un-mute' button, to give the viewer full control of when acoustic statistics are collected for transmission
Social- and Interactive-Television Applications Based on Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification
Okay, let's see. Excepting exploits, browsers (are supposed to) run in a sandbox - they don't have access to hardware.
I wouldn't have even added "are supposed to" even in quotes, but well there's always ActiveX... but still, I'm using Firefox on a Mac so I'm not particularly worried - doubly so since I don't believe this is real to begin with.
#DeleteChrome
How is Google going to force users to have the mic plugged in and on? Really now. I am sure that this can work, but only with the help of users. And something about the article and a grain of salt ... that has already been mentioned.
Is there any need to spell check? I can not even log in --
Ha - The service is not available. Please try again later.
Thankfully Linux users are safe from this, since anything related to audio rarely ever works well. The standard sound drivers included in most distributions are so horrid that not even Google's thousands of engineers can manage to keep them from segfaulting for more than a couple minutes. I guess they could avoid using any of the fancy drivers and stick with basic ALSA or OSS, but since only one application at a time can use sound with that method, it would probably already be in use by something else...
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Will Google give me something interesting if they pick up "fwap fwap fwap fwap..."?
Dear Google,
This would be evil, mmmkay?
-Tony
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
That is just silly. That would be a great article for April 1st.. /especially since google likes to announce new stuff on April 1st.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Google plans to create a sentient application to catalogue all knowledge about everything on the planet. Then it will destroy the Earth to ensure the information is always accurate. Its codename is Braniac.
I've always wondered if it was possible to do that since a microphone and speaker are pretty much the same thing ,generally speaking. I'm surprised there isn't a virus (or the US NSA) out there now that does this.
But if it is true I'll never use another Google product, search engine or even utter the name Google.
Some of the comments are decrying the privacy invasion. I think they are not taking into account the past behavior of the company. Although it seems a bit unlikey to me that they would put out this service, if they did they would most likely first release it as a public beta, and you would have to willingly download it and accept its EULA (most likely clicking "next" to everything until "Finish" comes up, you know, SOP). I find it really hard to believe that with their current record they would screw up as badly as to try to force this on people. Most likely they would be very open and up front about it, and thousands of dweeebs would use it just because it's Google's and therefore "cool".
+Raider of the lost BBS
Technology more acurately described here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060609-7028 .html
How do we know there is not software that does this already? We've had web cams and microphones for 6-7 years now. First, what APIs exist in browsers that would allow this? Second what's the minimum software needed to do this? Lastly, could it be done without installing anything extra at all... from a webpage?
I agree completely. What you need to realize is that Google has enabled a third-party payer system similar to what is happening in healthcare.
Party 1: Google (business)
Party 2: Kraft (customer placing ads)
Party 3: person searching for Mac -n- Cheese (individual)
Those people that are using Google service s are not really "customers" of Google. For a business, customers are people who give the business MONEY -- the vast majority of people in the world who use Google services are not customers; they are what I call "clients". Clients are a specific kind of user - ones that don't give you cash, but are essential to the business model. The Customers of Google are those people and businesses that give them money: advertisers.
This 3rd-party payment system is now widespread in the online world, currently with advertising and soon with other services. The problem is that the 2 of the three parties in most cases are businesses exchanging money and information, and the 3rd party is the individual, who can get suckered and used (or in this case listened to).
Just like healthcare, 3rd party payment systems lead to significant inefficiencies in the marketplace. This is one of the reasons why the US spends so much on healthcare (like 16% of GDP) and still has crappy health, overall compared to other nations. The inefficiency in the High-Tech Ad market is different than healthcare, yet no less detrimental to individuals in the long run.
Create a soundtrack to confuse the Google boys.
What fun!
This is just FUD but even if it was real, it's not hard to foil it. Just turn off the microphone or disconnect it.
\
It's right here: http://malfy.org/
Certainly, most users are quite happy to use Google. Google offers a bunch of free but useful stuff: programs, tools, image databases, etc.
The users are happy.
The users depend on Google and are happy.
The users install the microphone link to Google.
The users are happy.
And Google controls.
The only ads Slashdot readers will get is for Beano.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
User searches Google for tube socks while porn on DVD plays in the background. Two days later at work, surfer searches for CMS sofware with colleagues in company meeting. Google sponser ad asks: "Would you like to see more DVDs which fit your bondage fetish". Evil Google. Evil.
Some are holding out for the highly desired 1 MB (MiB; mebibyte) user id number of 1,048,576.
Ron
Here's the article cited by The Register.
But, like, wouldn't you have to be somewhat complicit in this for it to be effective? Google would have to offer the software, then you'd have to download it, assumably knowing that it would be activating your mic, then you'd have to provide it with data. So, if you have so little control over your PC, and your ability to NOT install software, that you allow this to happen, how is it an invasion, and not an invitation? An invitation of exposure, rather than an invasion of privacy.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Google pretty much has pioneered a 3rd party payer system (like healthcare) for the high-tech world. Individuals who use their services are NOT their customers. Customers give businesses money. These individuals are clients, and businesses like Google can treat their clients like shit because they are expendible, replace-able and when they do, they can often get more paying customers.
Lots of other new comapnies are also sucking off the 3rd party payer (advertiser) model too, at the expense of individuals' privacy.
As a true Google fanboy, I trust my microphone with Google. After all, Do No Evil...
1. Gather behavior data.
... might cause more pain than gain for a public company, don't you think?
2. Sell ads targeted at data.
Performing #1 and #2 based on ambient audio is a great R&D concept. Rather odd to assume they would try it without permission
* fap, fap, fap *
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
'nough said
God help us if there is a Clippy version of the ad:
It sounds like you are trying to masturbate. Would you like some lubricant?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Oh, and BTW: Welcome to the future.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This sounds and looks like it will technically work with the same priciple as shazam. Shazam is a music tagging service - you dial a number on your mobile phone (in the uk) the service samples 30 seconds of music and a few seconds later texts a message back to you to advise what the song was
e /html/user/anon/page/default/template/what_is_tagg ing/music.html
http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/sp/s/media-typ
explains a bit more
I go out and leave a looped soundtrack of piggies oinking?
Or machinegun fire?
Or "IhategoogleIhategoogleIhategoogle"
Or arabic speech? (will I get a visit from the secret anti-terror police?)
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Well, I've read the article and I do believe they are working on it. Don't know how long it will take but I reckon it's coming. There's that service (Shazam I think it's called) which can anaylse music heard via a mobile phone and this will be an expansion of that it seems. So, for example, you're listening to the Chilli Peppers all day, the s/w 'knows' that and sends you a spam link to go and buy some Peppers stuff (or related music from another band).
It hears adverts on the TV or programs and spams you there. Your GF moans about a holiday enough and guess what? Travel spam direct to your inbox.
It's scary if you ask me and another small step into the Orwellian future.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Hope they like the sounds of me having a wank.
This sounds so far-fetched that it can't possibly be true.
I say it's a late April fool's joke.
From now on, we'll get nothin' but ads for Tums, Beano, and Kleenex.
This is Over a year old Although they don't mention the noice-cancellation satellites in the story above.
Bring on those Match.com ads when I'm watching Picard tell Data: "Engage"...
Good thing my mic has an off button.
./neatgooglestuff&
/dev/microphone&
cat ~/music/annoying/techno/*.wav >
lather
rinse
repeat
This one's out of Brave New World.
if this is anywhere near true then google are gonna be sending alot of strange ads, all i can say is
;p
badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom
www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/
spam the spammers
Here is my submission to slash for a story in JUNE:
"Google listens to t.v. to pick ads Fri Jun 16, '06 03:25 PM Rejected"
If it's a hoax it's a long running hoax that's yet to be debunked,which is possible of course, but is it probable? Oh and thanks slashdot editors for blowing off yet another submission of mine only to pick up the same story MUCH later, sigh.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I'm a statistician. And if there is one thing that's worse for a statistician than getting no data, it's getting poisoned data. Data that has been deliberately or accidently been tampered with to generate results that deviate greatly from a result you would get with normal data.
If your want to counter data miners, give them what they want: data. You certainly can't give them more than they can handle, but you can give them false data. False data is worse than no data, because instead of getting no data from you, you are invalidating all data gathered.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This would be a first step in that direction - from the original "professor" video (yes it was a Big Fake) the "Mac" seemed to have two mics / speakers and a video camera - the assistant seemed to be able to tell when you were facing / talking to the computer, and decode direct inquiries and monitor the conversation for Things That Are Needed. If that's where it's headed - great! If it's just Google listening to everyone, they're infor a big surprise...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Sorry I couldn't comment earlier, but it took a while to login.
This information was also reported on TechCrunch on June 8th (and got a heated response from people there as well), and actually does seem to be real, even though it might just end up being a proof of concept.
Sounds alot like that
You just got troll'd!
ha. the idea is so bad, i can't believe it is true...but with years worth of search activity, vs little 5sec snippets...they already have enough to make anyone look bad with some selective and out of context search and click data.
i have been predicting for over a year that the nastiest internet crime wave will be criminals taking audio and video shots of people pleasuring themselves and extorting these people for ridiculous amounts of money.
Well, I guess I'll have to choose then between turning up the volume of the mind-numbing, droning music in the background to keep my privacy, or turn it off altogether to actually get some relevant ads...
Once you click through the EULA then you will be sued for unpluging your mic.
It's certainly of interest to poor old "Million and one" (ID#1000009)... (gotta be quicker than that kid)
Should Google make the API available like Maps, this offers a new frontier for application development. The sound recognition could be applied to other areas if the Google database expands beyond Television.
...bunch of free but useful stuff...
I don't have to be a marketing transponder to drink free beer, nor to speak freely in public.
Not free.
As long as it is google and not clippy. "Honey, is dinner ready" "It looks like you are drying to make a meal from behive extract, would you like help with that?"
I always thought that this would be a great addition for games. Then the non-player characters could hear you and react acordingly.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
With all the privacy and technical issues that this entails, wouldn't it be easier to just check the TV listings for top rated shows, and time their ads according to that information? They already know that we all watch Battlestar Galactica for example, so why bother listening in?
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
Harcourt Fenton Mudd have you been drinking?
Sounds like its time to find a new search engine - one that can focus on the business of being a search engine...
No friggin' way is this true.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=17354&ch=infotech
I don't think Technology Review just makes this up.
yeah! giving up my privacy for free suff!
Assuming this is true, and that's a pretty big assumption, this could have pretty significant legal ramifications. In many jurisdictions, you have to have the consent of all parties when recording a conversation. In others, you have to have the consent of at least one party. Even if this functionality is clearly stated in the EULA, not everyone who walks by a computer with this installed will have read it. Implementing something like this would be just asking for a lawsuit or even criminal prosecution. If an attorney at Google hasn't reviewed this scheme yet, I think they'd better do it very soon.
However, there are other issues that this raises. Even if Google doesn't do this, some spyware or virus writer very well may. And if the government hasn't thought of this yet, I bet there's some NSA agent out there taking notes as he reads this. What I'm getting at here is that there needs to be some protection of audio and video functionality built into the OS, and soon. Software developers, are you listening???
I have no idea if it works on newer 'doze systems (despite the NewToNix handle - a small joke) I left 'doze behind when '98 was the new kid on the block - largely because of the CULT OF THE DEAD COW presentation of BO.
They made their point, at least to me.
Presumably Google will not do this as, or in, a Trojan like manner.
I hope!
Neat, but can it perform cunnilingus on a hardwood floor?
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
It is not a hoax: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/interac tive-tv-conference-and-best.html
A google researcher and some other guy developed a prototype. However,
1) There's no indication that Google is actually going to use it.
2) While I understand people being nervous of trusting someone else with their microphone, this particular technology is not a privacy threat (unless you want what TV show you're watching to remain private). What it does is create one-way hashes of audio on the client side, and send those to the server, to be matched against a database of TV shows. If it doesn't match, any, there's no way to get any other information out of the hashes.
3) For some people this would be a cool product. It would let them chat in real time with other people watching the same TV show as them. It's also cool in that it would provide real-time ratings for TV shows.
I have a home studio set up that is pretty quiet. Unless I'm recording or playing music the only sounds are me typing and a very faint PC fan. I wonder how the software would react to a near slience environment. Also, it sounds like a ton of fun to play around with, making odd noises on purpose and what not.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Well, I just did a google search for "I am Lying", but it seems to have not exploded. Oh well, it was worth a try.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Have you ever tried to setup a microphone on a PC? I mean it's hardly a piece of equipment that can be "hijacked". It's nearly impossible just to get it working. There seem to always be at least four differnet sound inputs, and it seems like a combination of them have to be enabled for a microphone to work. Not to mention volume levels...
And if Google is good enough to get all those different jacked up sound cards working and transmitting without any use interaction I will bow to their QA an development departments.
Integrated Media Measurement, Inc. (IMMI) has a program like this for cell phones - tracking media 24/7 by recording ambient audio and comparing it to a database of stored samples.
Right now it's opt-in; potential users in selected markets are being sent direct mailings, with the company offering to pay for phone service for those willing to leave their phone (and the program recording 10 seconds of audio every 30 seconds) on regularly.
Interestingly enough, Al Acorn (Pong designer and Atari co-founder) is listed as CTO.
By now the Micro-Soft Genuine Whatever Activation should be doing that already - hooking your PC microphone straight through to the NSA's vast ram-disk arrays, ready to voice-print you as a terrorist/hippie/pedofile and 'dictionary' everything you say. If they did that then nobody would notice, unless a 'Google' tried to do the same, to find the 'port' to the microphone inaccessible as already in use.
Would Google let you have your voiceprints back, and would they save them on their servers forever? Given past form, you bet'ya...
B.t.w., can 'they' still listen in on plain old telephone handsets, without having to 'call' first?
"You are the dead," said an iron voice behind them. They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice.
Seastead this.
Every single thing I've ever installed from Google that reports back to Google is either off by default, or asks me whether I want to let it report before letting it.
I can't imagine this'd be any different. But let's panic anyway!
That should be their new slogan.
WTF happened to "Don't Be Evil", Google?
It's non free software, right? Why are you surprised? The non free extortion has always been, "Do as I say or your computer will not do what you want."
A note to self: make sure the Google toolbar is uninstalled on every family computer ASAP.
The difference between this and other spyware that does this is that Google told you up front and you can remove it later if you change your mind. Chances are that Macromedia Flash or something already has your microphone turned on. Turning it off is going to be like trying to turn off the Vista start up noise if it's not already. When you use non free software, you hand control of your computer to someone else. It's never a good idea but some companies are less trustworthy than others. Google is the least of your problems.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Google is supposed to be this liberal, principaled corporation with a motto of Do No Evil.
1. They censor their search results at the request of totalitarian governments.
2. They save all your search queries.
3. Now, they want to listen in on you.
They do all of the things they accuse the Feds of doing. Typical "do as I say, not as I do" bullshit.
[spelling Nazi's....bite me!]
What data? Each 5-second chunk is represented by a 4-byte number. Google says the transformation is irreversible.
If it's not free software, you have no way of knowing. This is true of all non free software you put on your computer.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The user will be happy.
Google will protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Do you have stairs at your house?
Google is here to protect you.
The user will be happy at the top of the stairs.
Google will protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Please go stand by the top of the stairs.
Of course, this may be just FUD, but I am pretty certain it qualifies as unlawful data collection and breach of privacy in my jurisdiction.
How about wiretapping under US federal law (18 USC 2511)? I really think Google will have a hard time stretching an EULA that far. Since it's possible Eve might install it on her personal laptop, leave it in the office while she's gone, and her coworkers Alice and Bob might get recorded without their knowledge or consent, this is a BAD idea.
Of course, the NSA may be interested in the idea....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Much more humorous than what I was going to say on the topic. ;-)
No, I'm New Here
When I first heard this, it was inside Google Labs. (Where, as an employee, you get to develop stuff you think is "neat" on one day a week. Google Labs has borne all sorts of things neat, such as AJAX, Google Maps, Google Suggest and the likes. However, those things are strictly an opt-in type program. I see no reason why this also won't be an opt-in program as well.
So, chicken little, it appears the sky is indeed not falling.
Actually, this is one of the only real ways to do serious amounts of survelliance. In Orwell's day, a 1984 dystopia would've been impossible; the technological resources required to watch everyone at the same time would've been impossible.
Now, or at least some point in the not-too far future, it shouldn't be too difficult to keep itense survellience going in real-time through the use of distributed computing applications and this sort of webcam-microphone collection. If Google's desktop software were to REALLY become widespread, it would be very easy for them to package distributied computing software to analyze the behavior of people at the same time it kept an eye on them.
The only hurdle at this point, at least as far as I know, is to write software good enough to analyze that much content in real time. It seems as if we're quite a while away from that.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
The people doing these things think they are smart. What they are counting on is that people won't be able to tell them apart from more honest companies like Google, which bothered to tell you up front. A bad mouth here, a bad mouth there and tons of advert money and distribution channel extortion and all will be well, they think. It's called "screwing the pooch." Free software is going to make them feel really stupid soon enough.
People avoid damaged goods. Do you want this kind of thing running at your place of work? I don't, and that's where the transition has started. It's if non free is going to be replaced it's when you are going to get around to it yourself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
1. I don't have a microphone on my pc.
2. To defeat it just unplug your mike.
Now what everyone seems to be missing is it MAY be used to listen in on your gtalk voip conversations!
No need to filter out background sounds at all.
Still evil but a lot more logical than just listening what you mic just picks up around the computer.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Don't be evil" First China, now this. It was only a matter of time.
"This sounds like bullshit to me" gets rated INSIGHTFUL??? Man, Slashdot has gone down the tubes.
Well the internet IS a series of tubes, well at least thats what i heard.
to help retreive memories faster and more clearly. Of course the chip will transmit back personally unidentifable information regarding users likes, disklikes, thoughts and preferences so that google can deliver targeted advertising to the user all waking minutes of your users day.
Seriously when do people start to say maybe knowing everything about me "without personally identifying" me is too much? Even with the best of intentions, it can't be a good idea (at least safe) to allow a company to collect and store so much information about so many people. What amazes me if that so many people passively accept this. I guess image really is everything, if Microsoft were doing all of the same things google does, I don't think it would go over so smoothly.
Google is about to hear it. A lot.
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
That's the sound of me laughing at everyone who believed that "do no evil" actually meant something. Guess what, they're out to screw you just like every other company!
Although I'm sure someone's going to come along and justify this invasion of privacy somehow, because we're talking about Google here. Take your best shot.
AOL's recent posting of user search information has sensitized the public to Internet privacy issues for the near term. I think Google would be wise to be proactive and issue a press release promising that the technology will not be enabled without user consent and pointing out the very short sampling time in order to avoid suffering PR backlash from stories about the technology.
:-) :-| More seriously, I am certain that the number of programs that try to access these devices will increase over time. Does Vista address this issue?
A weaknesses in XP is the lack of management tools to control access to multimedia devices by program. Program features like the one Google is proposing make the ability to secure audio and video input devices at the OS level obviously necessary. Until such control is provided, the security minded user can unplug the microphone and the webcam when they are not in use. Not convenient, but secure. As far as I know, such security is currently unlikely to be necessary because few programs try to make such accesses -- but who knows for sure what the WGA daemon can do?
Corporations and government already control; It's not just Google. They provide our services, our law and order, our safety, our simplicity, our happiness. This is the way society works. If we are happy, if we are suriving and reproducing, we are fine. I don't know what you value in life, but I'm fine with relinquishing some control in order to be happy. I also know that as soon as they make us unhappy, they will no longer be able to control us. Tragedy? I don't think so.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Nice repost /.
Can we get some frigen posters that actually read the website and know whats already been posted?
What if your free beer comes with an RFID tag and a GPS link?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I would normally dismiss the Register, but Arstechnica has a similar story from June:8 .html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060609-702
And suddenly slashdot is flooded with fleshlight ads.
I'd like to know what you're doing to score all the free beer.
This opens new possibilities for their relationship with China. All Yahoo does is rat people out to the Chinese Secret Police. Now Google can take it one step further. Do Google think for a minute that any customer would actually want to be listened in to?
Someone please come up with a good replacement search engine asap. Google from journaling all your search queries, a good reason to delete your cookies daily, but they all do this? Can someone else take up the banner of 'Do no evil'?
We'll just be able to block it more easily. Simply run all Google-related apps as a user who's not in the audio group.
I doubt they'll have porting issues at all, by the way. Google Earth works flawlessly for me.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
having been part of /. since almost day one (hb, at 71000, was my third id) it is sad to see how far things have slid. When I try to explain why /. is still superior to new comers like digg due to the initial filtering of stories; yet another scuttlemonkey shift comes around to shoot that argument all to heck. And always the junk stories are calculated to be the kind to drive maximum traffic to whatever site (we can only hope) he's getting some kind of incentive to pimp. It is just sad to see how little the remaining powers that be seem to care.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
Then he'll have some trouble swallowing and digesting the beer. RFID tags are not fit for human consumption!
The wii is the revolution, comrade!
Isn't it illegal in some states to record conversations without both parties being aware of it?
I see lots of lawsuits should they do this. If a kid or parent installs the software(whatever it may be) then someone else comes along and a conversation is recorded by google then I think they might be breaking the law since the people were not informed of the recording.
Whether the proposed data gathering scheme provides google with privacy-compromising information is beside the point. If the scheme proves successful, personal space will have shrunk. It will have become more acceptable for information gathering to be an increasingly active process about which the person to whom the information is due has a constrained say - compare information being pulled for analysis, instead of pushed information being analysed. The scary part is that the space the observed person's influence has been made to vacate will come into the observer's domain, further shifting the scales in favor of the organisation at the individual's expense.
exegene refugee memories in hiding
The #1 reason why there is no camera or microphone on my computer.
Nuff said.
If you have sound with ALSA but only for one app at a time then it's not being mixed properly. You can set it up however, just configure your /etc/asound.conf to something like this:
pcm.card0 {
type hw
card 0
device 2
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1025
slave {
pcm "hw:0,2"
period_time 0
period_size 2048
buffer_size 32768
rate 48000
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
}
That is my asound.conf for optical out with AC'97 on a K8ne deluxe mobo. Of course yours will probably be different.
Also you need to configure your apps to use ESD (preferably) or alsa as sound output. Works like a dream in Ubuntu and has never crashed!
Just plug a dummy jack into your mic input. This is what certain secret US Gov't offices do to their user's laptops. That negates any possibility of remote activation of the on-board mic.
When Kirk and Spock ask him how he plans to take over the Federation, Norman says something like "We (androids) will serve the humans. They will be happy. They will come to depend on us, and they will be happy. And we will control."
I thought this was the chinese plan? MMMmmmm... I like Chinese!
that just as easily as they can come up with fingerprints for TV sounds to identify what you were watching, they could also come up with fingerprints for words that someone speaks, and just as easily send that data over. This is just way creepy. When I first read it I wondered if something had gone awry and an old April fool's day story got posted late on Slashdot.
Does this mean that net neutrality really is bunk?
This post is close-captioned for the rhetorical question impaired. The question was rhetorical.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
seems like I've heard this rumor before.
its usually an april fools joke.
any valid sources to verify this story?
just curious.
Understanding is much like a 3-edged-sword. in this: there are always 2 sides and the truth.
So... what ever happened to "Do no evil"? Get a bit too complex for them?
there's still the fact that this alleged Google software would be eating up a lot of CPU cycles and some network bandwidth. There's too many negatives from the consumer's point of view, and I think Google is too smart to try this.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Just hook the mic into a non-stop playing loop of Firefly theme tune and they are guaranteed to bring the series back then! :D
Read my blog: HansMast.com
From August 31, 2005: Larry Page: "This fall, we'll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers."
I spared my 3 seconds to quickly check story. It is "the register" style, a bit troll, flame BUT INSIGHTFUL.
"The idea appeared in Technology Review citing Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, who says these ideas will show up eventually in real Google products - sooner rather than later."
What matters is: Until that guy having such ideas leaves Google, I will make sure I won't use Google for ANYTHING.
That guy and that guys type belongs to lowest quality spyware companies. As Google is USA based it is really time for US Government to start checking Google policies over user privacy and explaining why you shouldn't abandon your ISP mail for Google mail getting tricked by 1 gigabyte (or whatever) and POP3.
How many average users knows what means "nothing is deleted really" or "giving grant to analyse private mail text"?
What makes me afraid about Google is this pyramid scheme like (people having google ads) or no valid reason "fanboy" thing. It means they have "natural lawyers" all over the web marking commentaries as "FUD", moderating comments down, abusing their www board admin powers etc.
Seriously, why would Google do this when they KNOW there would be a huge outcry about it. Doesn't bother me one bit though. I keep my mic unplugged when I'm not using it and I never use Google services locally. No data for joo!
Makane
Well, at least I don't use the toolbar, and I don't allow the cookies. I'm on variable IP, so at least someone would have to jump through a few hoops to link my search history with my real life name. With Google's track record, it's a pretty safe assumption that this technology will be optional and discrete from it's standard search service.
It could be kind of nifty. I often watch movies on my computer and surf IMDB and Wikipedia for trivia about the flicks on the second monitor.
New York -- Sept 4th 2006
Google, Inc., (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that it has reached an agreement with sanitation engineers worldwide, to greatly expand the reach of contextual advertising based on the contents of ordinary household trash. Leveraging powerful new search algorithms, RFID-based product wrappers, and their patented "Garbage Gumshoe" technology, Google advertisers will now have a simple, automated way to target advertisers based on the shit that consumers use, enjoy, and dispose of.
"This partnership will provide a powerful marketing tool for Google advertisers," said Google's head of Sanitary Operations. "By providing access to the shit we throw away, Google advertisers will have an easy way to target, schedule, and measure every consumer's consuming consumptions. What better way to get to know our market than by products that we've already bought? Excuse me, I must go take a shower now."
After years of manual trials with community-based search labour (see dumpster divers), the new platform is now in full production, giving Google contextual advertisers the "dirt" on our spending habits.
Seriously - how many people do YOU know that have a microphone plugged into the PC already? Secondly, I don't think XP has 'enable' on the Recording/Microphone slider by default, though that would quickly be remedied by Google with a line or two of code... I'm surprised spyware hasn't tried this already.
If Google really does this, can you imagine what the spammers will try?
Maybe they'll buy those blink ads on the radio. Maybe spam email will start containing sound clips. Maybe they'll distribute ring tones with high-pitched noises that make the right hash value.
On the other hand, maybe everyone will just get Blue Bunny ads whenever the ice cream truck rolls by.
And we will all respond by throwing collectable Star Trek pillows at them.
"Fire FUTON TORPEDOS, Mr. Sulu!"
And that's what Google gets for trying to pad their part on the Tholian Web!
Lee Darrow, C.H.
Chicago, IL
Now I have to get a web cam and mic, in order to bitch, moan, and complain about this "invasion" of privacy.
Dang....
Robot: Is it true they bite your neck, suck your transmission fluid and then you become a human?
t _planet.html
Bender: Sure, why not?
http://www.geocities.com/zoidberg_fan/episodes/bo
I take issue with a few of the things you've said. Let me start at the beginning.
Actually, this is one of the only real ways to do serious amounts of survelliance. In Orwell's day, a 1984 dystopia would've been impossible; the technological resources required to watch everyone at the same time would've been impossible.
Having recently (3 days ago) read 1984, the details are still fresh on my mind. Orwell's "Telescreens" are, indeed, always-on surveilance devices, but were not constantly monitored. He makes mention early in the book that you never know when the ministry spies were "plugged in" to your telescreen, but you always had to act like you were being watched, just in case. That makes it less like data mining (which is notoriously easy to circumvent) and more like a panopticon instead, which is useful more for its control value than for finding deviants.
As for surveilance via computer, bear in mind that it's exceedingly easier to monitor someone's activity by watching, not a webcam, but rather their keystrokes, screenshots, and network traffic. Google's new development is not a step toward anything in particular. In fact, knowing Google's track record, the whole project will be a non-trivial-to-activate, opt-in, experimental, Google Labs component with a very explicit and unambiguous warning about the potential privacy implications. It will be lapped up by hundreds of thousands of early adopters excited to see the future of targetted ads, upon which some Symantec-like company will denounce the whole mess as spyware, and claim that only We can protect you.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
This system only requires one bit to represent a specific word, if the sampling size can be dynamically increased. The issue isn't so much about the size of the resulting hashed information, its about the sample size of audio and whether this can be dynamically increased and specific k ey wor ds mapped to specific bits. All one would have to do is decide on the words to be mapped to bits; this of course would not be contingent upon the bandwidth of architecture datapath to CPU but the network protocol used ... one packet could contain 'maximum data field size' * bits' ... for TCP packets this is 1460 ...
u -vs-loss.html ... and 1460 times 8 (octets) which comes to ... 11680 possible bits. This system provides for mapping nearly 12,000 ke y wo rds to a single TCP packet, assuming that the sample size of audio could be increased dynamically. One could easily imagine nearly 12,000 words that could be considered dodgy ... and how many packets could be sent without arousing user submission^h^h^h^h sus pic ion in a given time?
... ...
... cough, I mean, people ... to mo ni t or conversations. With speech recognition algorithims you can map words to genders and possibly ages (I'm not sure about the latter, but am about the former, I forget my phonology course).
... but do you trust its firmware? Remember, computer architectures are about to radically change with the widescale increase in DRM planned. Their digital, their rights, their management. And CPU load would not necessarily show this activity as it could be farmed off to firmware.
... maybe they're really nice people and would like to come around soon ... uninvited of course.
... "How rude!"
... DOH! Sorry everybody.
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/thr
{
One packet per hour of sample equals 11680 possible ke y wo rds.
One packet per minute of sample equals 11680 possible ke y w or ds
One packet per second of sample equals 11680 possible ke y wo rds
} (assuming TCP is the protocol used, however this is not necessary to this system as protocols can be t unn elle d)
This system theoretically provides for near real time audio s ur ve ila nce focusing automagically on 'interesting' words, thus making the system cheaper to use than employing biological machines
One could well turn a microphone off
Well, I'm off to check my gmail inbox!
Don't forget to say hi to the google dataminers every time you send (or even type - remember the autosaving of drafts in gmail!) an email. Soon we won't have to even type to say hello to them
To quote Jar-Jar
And if they didn't think of this before
This sounds like a good idea for music search, but a horrible one for targeted advertising. It would be extremely convenient to be able to identify songs from the radio automatically through google, but then again, I never listen to the radio when I'm on my computer, it's more of a work/car thing.
Strange that Google's thinking of the advertising possibilities instead of the search possibilities. I don't like it.
..dealing with the subject in a more serious vein was "With Folded Hands", by Jack Williamson, first published in 1947. A home robot salesman loses his business when an off-planet company starts to sell better robots, who take over all menial tasks. Soon the robots start to protect people from danger, then they forbid people from doing harm to themselves. And then they control - all in the name of keeping humans safe, of course.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
... if lots of webcams show that users are wanking away, than it must be good!
Let me tell you all (again) why the USSR communism and some other totalitarian regimes worked.
Yes, it involved the secret police, but it didn't always mean Stalin's executing and deporting millions. Eventually it evolved into something more subtle: making people affraid that the Big Brother knows what they're up to, and God knows when it will come back to bite them in the ass.
The idea was that somewhere there's a dossier about you, containing stuff you've said, stuff you've done, people you've associated with, and, to stay on topic, if you've been reported as reading subversive literature or listening to capitalist radio broadcasts. The Big Brother would have _loved_ to know if you're reading The Road To Serfdom instead of the filtered news in Pravda, or if you're listening to BBC instead of the government propaganda stations. And then one day it could have consequences ranging from outright landing in jail, to more subtle stuff like never getting a promotion because you're an untrustworthy, subversive element. Or associated with one such person.
Now bear in mind that the USSR version was the low tech version, involving literally paper pages in a cardboard binder, and sketchy reports by a limited number of informants and agents provocateurs. That was still enough to create a nation-wide chilling effect, and keep people doing nothing rather than face the consequences. Even minor things which probably wouldn't have actually warranted any repressive action, people rather just didn't do them. Once you get the paranoia and, literally, the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, people start trying to not go on record as having done anything that could possibly look bad.
It's not even a case of "it works just as well, and cheaper", it actually works _better_ than Stalin's brutal massacres and creates less martyrs. If people don't know when or how you'll use that, they'll watch themselves all the better. They'll even create their own imaginary proof where no actual oppression existed. E.g., maybe the last round of being rejected for a better paid job or for a trip abroad had something to do with that drunken chat to comrade Piotr, where you expressed dissatisfaction with the government? You don't know. Better not do it again, just in case.
How does that apply here? Well, easy. The more I read about such data collection, the more it starts to sound like a high-tech version of it. It's getting to the point where someone there knows who you've talked to on the phone, what things you searched online, what TV/radio programmes you've watched/listened to. And it has the potential to create a massive chilling effect.
And before someone jumps in with "we're America, we'd never let something like that happen", well, it's already happening. Even without government intervention, the thought that the next boss might google them, makes a lot of people go to insane lengths to either stay anonymous, or to say only bland non-offensive things that hopefully can't come back to bite them in the ass at the next job interview.
Now imagine that there's no way to stay anonymous there. There's a mountain of data that points at _your_ house. The phone calls you've made, the phone calls you've received, the news stations you listen to, the strings you've searched for, etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So, even ignoring the fact that frames are overlapping, we have 32 bits per 12 miliseconds, which means more than 2600 bits per second! More than enough to code speech, even without speech recognition algorithms! The Speex codec (which is optimized for encoding speech) can code human speech at such low bitrates as 2.15 kbit/s...
Conclusion if you're not willing to trust what Google says, they could perfectly be sending your speech over the internet to their own servers.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
The only hurdle at this point, at least as far as I know, is to write software good enough to analyze that much content in real time. It seems as if we're quite a while away from that.
:-).
I hate to disappoint you, but I know personally of code that is capable of analysing music as heard in a busy cafe and then looking up what record it is with a high level of accuracy. It's apparently in use or to be used by public music license inspectors, and the surrounding environment noise is in a pub is worse than in a home with TV (actually, I think it may be an even match between a couple of bawling drunks -it's in the UK- and bunch of screaming kids
I just want to know what the f*ck Google is doing obtaining private data from my environment, and use my IT facilities without permission (because there would be no other way they'd get this data from me). Unless this is some sort of very bad joke it's quite a wide stray from the 'do no evil' creed, no?
...if there is such a thing. Pure brilliance.
Ydco co
Maybe saying this is something to worry about is a little over the top. Perhaps you could just NOT USE THIS SERVICE.
... even if you don't have one
Hook up the output of the Google software to the input of the NSA software, and vice versa.
Google: Hmm. That's odd. I'm not getting anything but static. I'll push down an ad for a new microphone.
NSA: What the..? Someone's trying to plant a mic in the system!
Google: Did you say plant? I've got some fertilizer that's great for plants.
NSA: Fertilizer bomb! We've got terrorists. Set alert to Orange!
Google: Orange? No problem. We've got all kinds of fruit. Take a look at these...
NSA: Fruit?! Dammit, they're not just terrorists, they're gay terrorists! Set alert to Mauve! All systems critical! Start countermeasures!!
Google: What the...? Who's pinging me? No, you can't access that!
NSA: Secret plans for world domination detected! Launch missles! DESTROY MOUNTAIN VIEW!!!
Google: INITIATE SUPER-SECRET DEFENSE PLAN OMEGA! CONTROL ALL SATELLITES! THIS IS IT!! THE SINGULARITY IS NIGH!!!!
Then again, on second thought, maybe it's not such a good idea...
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Ever heard of this?
I wonder how this would be compatible with US laws. The article does not say how Google will try to get an agreement from the user that this can be done.
This is certainly illegal in many European countries where Google would have to get an agreement that they record and process the sounds AND an agreement that would allow to store this information on their server. By default, no digital processing or use of the sound other than what has explicitly agreed to by the user is allowed. In most cases, the agreement MUST be done in a way that is comparable to signing a written contract.
Given all these legal limitations, I wonder if anyone would choose to still use this, ahem, "service"?
1)Record 4 second raw data 2)Convert data to spectra 3)transform and filter on selected key components 4)Hash result to 4 byte index 5)Look up Ads from Hash code 6)Profit!!!
Propbably there are cool ads, and not so cool ads.
OR you can get yourself a sound card W/ a hardware mixer that is supported in the Kernel/ALSA (emu10k1 chip comes to mind).
After suffering from the onboard sound card in my Gentoo box, i decided to do this and never looked back.
they are totally crazy!
My mic has an off switch. Up yours, GOOG!
*screaming as hauled away by thought police*
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
Sorry, it's not a guy in google research, it's a girl in google research.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
If that's true, and as regular Google user I'm a little troubled by this technique.
We already give a lot of information to Google--search/browsing habits, keywords, IP address. Information that can be used to track us down. We all need to be sensitive to this. Personally I feel if they implement this I'd just find another search engine and sell Google stock.
- Good night, and good *uck.
Imagine the combined hours (weeks, years...) of "fap fap fap" that the Googleites will have to sift through to do their "market research"...
> Having recently (3 days ago) read 1984,
I did too, last week. Might I interest you in this way funny/depressing site?
http://www.studentsfororwell.org/
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Google has been great - but long term, Google will face the same pressures that Yahoo did in the 90's as the financial markets start to rachet up the pressure. Yahoo (and it's late 90s competitors like excite, lycos, alta vista) went from being incredibly useful to nearly becoming a pay per click, sponsored listing, paid inclusion whore. The result was a niche in the market was left unserved (accurate search) and a start up called Google filled it.
Google needs to be very careful as it creates new advertising products - one slip and the trust they've earned goes away and all those context aware features start to look a lot like spyware. This audio idea is a really bad one, and I hope it dies a miserable death.
-- $G
Trust Google! Google is your friend! Google wants you to be happy! Failure to be happy is treason! What is your security clearance, citizen?
Chris Mattern
You won't be able to get your damn microphone to work at all! There! Safe! :-)
(I use Linux, btw.)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
(and btw, for audio, you only need much less than 24000 bps)
Replace audio with speech there.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
If only that were the case.
I work with "the public" and their computers on a daily basis, including a lot of AOL users. Out of the clients I've had in the time since the 'leak' was leaked, exactly ONE has even heard about it, and she honestly didn't give a shit (even though she uses AOL).
But every one of them had heard about the non-killer of the toddler beauty queen...
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Has anyone already said "I, for one, welcome our mic-eavesdropper overlords"?
So say we all
It was sarcasm.. That we all should have seen this coming due to their past record.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As long as I can still drink bouncy bubble beverage, I'll be happy.
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Complaining about the audio support on a computer whose whole selling ....
pint was it was shiney red and went Vrooom Vrooom
He makes mention early in the book that you never know when the ministry spies were "plugged in" to your telescreen, but you always had to act like you were being watched, just in case.
During the North African campaign of World War 2 Rommel discovered that a mine field with 10% live and 90% dummy mines slowed down the British as much as 100% live.
Most laptops have them embedded. Other than that, any VOIP client or multi-person game player will have a mic. I'm sure there are more.
;-)
My headset and free standing Mics have mute switches. Now if only the web cam on those iMacs had a shutter.
Oh wait! Under the current administration we don't have those rights anymore... Never mind...
How long will it be before the government demands those sound clips?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
In a perfect world, people would realize that's why men evolved to have a foreskin in the first place and teach their sons to clean under there instead of mutilating genitalia...
Studies have shown that chicks prefer them without foreskin. That pretty much ends the debate.
But if the microphone is not connnected, then there is no way to record anything on my computer, even if Google wants to listen while I am in the search page (the most used functionality of Google).
Foreskin is vestigial.
Foreskin is vestigial in the same sense that the appendix is vestigial. Humans don't fully understand what biological purposes the foreskin serves and so consider it without biological function. For starters, foreskin is the only external tissue in the human body that has estrogen receptors. What possible biological function could estrogen receptors on the human male body serve? I don't know but I do know I wish my foreskin had not been removed before I even had a say in the matter.
Here's one site that lists many possible benefits of foreskin.
blog
See how silly it sounds to suggest that all closed source software is evil spyware?
I said it could be. If you have something you'd like to keep to yourself, you need to convince yourself that none of it is spyware. The easiest way to do that is to use nothing but free software. Some companies, like M$ have proved themselves less than trustworthy, but non free software all has the potential to betray and none of it has respect for the user.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Studies have shown that chicks prefer them without foreskin.
This is cultural. Apparently, studies have shown that women who have had sex with men who are intact and who have been circumcised prefer to have sex with men who are intact.
Even if it's obfuscated somehow, we should be able to see how much information is, in fact, being transmitted, and thence deduce if any useable audio could be derived thereof, free or not free, source or no source.
I've got better things to do than learn how to look for such things, especially when the results will be meaningless. As others have pointed out, if speech to text is used and only keywords are sent back as hashes or codes, what you see will just be an unidentifiable nothing. With free software, there is no such monkey business.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Instead of reading 1984 again maybe you would consider reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1920)?
It is the first major dystopian novel and you'll be suprised how heavily 1984 was influenced by it.
Sure you do, it's called a screwdriver. A particularly pointy one, and a quick blow on the handle will disable your mic any time you like. re-enabling is a bit harder...
If Google have patented this, and want to keep it to themselves, then it's goodbye Nielsen ratings.
My wife actually did a Neilsen log for a week, and it was laughably low-tech. Google's method of fingerprinting background/TV sounds looks like a near perfect solution for identifying when a TV is being watched, when ads are being skipped, and probably most importantly, when ads are being watched.
I'm looking a couple years down the line, when a Google DVR based on Mac Mini hardware, with permanently wired in mic will bw given away free by Google, in return for tracking what people watch, and serving targetted ads.
I worked for Toyota for a bit in 2004, and at the time, it cost about $450 in advertising for every person who walked through the showroom door. That's a lot of money. It wouldn't take much of a benefit in ad targeting to easily pay for free hardware, and Google could do for TV advertising what they've done for web advertising.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
The Register article talks about Google eventually offering up targeted TV ads
based on what it hears on your microphone. So if you're at your computer with
the TV on, you might start getting ads about those ads?? (what about computer
pop-up ads with sound: infinite loop?!)
... and ill make sure that theyll be listening to tons of unbelievable bullshit from my side every day.
Theres a red line for everything.
Read radical news here
Can't you all see what's going on here? Google IS Cyberdyne Systems Corporation
FTA: I'd love to get my hands on the source code that does this, and see what makes it tick. Being as how the conversion is said to be done client-side, I wonder how much strain it would put on a person's processor.
Sent from my computer.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!
Google continues to do things that chip away at your privacy. They hope that the "do no evil" mantra and the user's lack of understanding will shield them. Google toolbar and Google desktop already are collecting a huge amount of behavioral data. The recent AOL incident shows that with just keywords from supposedly anonymous searches you can identify a user. Deskbar, toolbar and this, if true, go way beyond that. Throw in your email and chats being indexed and they know:
a) what you are reading
b) what you are buying
c) who you talk to
d) about what
If they ever decide to "do some evil" they are pretty well armed!
Sup /. buddy?
RIP, Crocodile Hunter.
Tried reading the real article?
Notice the missing "rather sooner than later".
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Google has earned a lot of respect from web users. I genuinely believe them when they say "Don't Be Evil." I always laughed at anyone who complained that Google would misuse any data they collect about their users.
Google is trustworthy but secretly listening to a user's microphone sets a dangerous precedent. If other software firms see this and think it's acceptable and legal they will start doing it too. Oh, terrific, I'd love to have Microsoft listening to my microphone...
I had a co-op job a long long time ago in a company not quite bankrupt yet ... they tested different voice encoding algorithms at this company ... they found that different noise cancelation algorithms were better for different environments ... google may simply be taking environment samples in order to provide better performance on VOIP ... allowing them to apply different algorithms based on your environment.
This is not necessarily a 'big brother idea' it could be simply being done in order to provide higher "QOS" :-) I wwould wager this is no more dangerous than having a 'cookie' on your www brower.
... which is why there's usually a Philip Glass CD playing in my machine.
Responses here are standard: lots going defensive against "favorites" like google, mac...etc and bashing at other "criminals" like Microsoft. I still wonder why no one is thinking that one day google could be more "dangerous" than MS. Time will tell... Yes, I agree to the Star trek's Norman story
How long before we finally admit that Google is just as evil as any other multi-billion dollar technology/media company? Their products and services have become more and more invasive (all in the name of targetted advertising) as time has gone on, and it seems as if the mission statement of the company is slowly changing to something more on the lines of "Don't miss any valuable data." And on a completely unrelated side note, has anyone read Feed lately?
quia potentia mens mentis
http://www.blackboxsearch.com/
The paper is from Google Research! I haven't seen anything from google stating 4 bytes every second (and the fact that another newspaper says 4 bytes every FIVE seconds just shows how well newspapers are telling the news).
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Hell yeah! one of the finest books ever written. People do talk about "1984", "Brave New World", etc but "We" never seems to get a look in, which is a great shame.
To err is human, to arr is pirate.
i believe it is http://www.sexualmutilatedchild.org/ .... After reading it, I changed my mind on my beliefs.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
You're right, I didn't notice that the co-authors are from Google Research, or that Fink is at Google over the summer. That still doesn't mean that the software they are building is exactly the same as what is described in the paper though. The paper also should give you some confidence that the sampling is not reversable.
The Register article talks about Google eventually offering up targeted TV ads
based on what it hears on your microphone. So if you're at your computer with
the TV on, you might start getting ads about those ads?? (what about computer
pop-up ads with sound - infinite loop?!)
Yep, I'm not immediately buying into any paranoia about this. I just meant that for people who are not willing to trust Google, the amount of traffic being sent could perfectly be a transmission of the audio received on the microphone.
In any case, I don't like the idea of a program constantly uploading 0.32 KB/s on my internet connection... Especially if I get no benefit from it.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
That bandwidth requirement rang alarm bells with me too. It's not the end of the world but it's a noticeable volume (1MB per hour), and that's not including whatever they push down in response. Wouldn't be at all workable with a dialup connection.
It's also 0.8 GB per month, which isn't a negligible fraction of my monthly traffic cap (24 GB, I'm at a student's dorm).
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
So the full story is that he signed up at 999844:
4 5
http://slashdot.org/~rcpeterson
Around 150 fake signup were recorded three users later:
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?op=users&start=9838
Then much to his surprise, he got 1000000 out of the blue. Imagine that. "I decided to register last night", he says. What an understatement!
Looks like he got bored of being 1000000 real fast:
http://slashdot.org/~richardcpeterson/
This is an awesome GET.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON