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Should Burger King Be Prosecuted For Their Google Home-Triggering Ads? (washingtonpost.com)
Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein thinks Burger King should be prosecuted for
successfully running an alternate version of its advertisement to trigger Google Home devices again Wednesday:
Someone -- or more likely a bunch of someones -- at Burger King and their advertising agency need to be arrested, tried, and spend some time in shackles and prison cells. They've likely been violating state and federal cybercrime laws with their obnoxious ad campaign... For example, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act broadly prohibits anyone from accessing a computer without authorization... Burger King has instantly become the 'poster child' for mass, criminal abuse of these devices... It was a direct and voluntary violation of law.
I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!
Give it to me straight... who does this affect - 4 or 5 people tops?
#DeleteChrome
You're looking at this the wrong way - you should see this as an opportunity. When you see an obvious dupe on Slashdot, your first response should be to submit a new, slightly tweaked version of the item.
If we all work together, we can make it so Slashdot's front page is full of eight or nine copies of the same story!
#DeleteChrome
I mean, as long as we are all being dicks, why not have the bigger dick?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Lauren seriously needs to get a grip on reality if he thinks that jail time and shackles are appropriate punishments for a burger ad that triggers Google's spy equipment. There are real injustices in the world that are worthy of indignation, but Lauren's hyperbolic outrage over trivial first-world-problems (for those dumb enough to buy a Google Big Brother microphone to put in their homes and listen to their every conversation) is just plain silly.
Let's face it. From a marketing perspective, this is a huge success for BK. A relatively small number people were *actually* negatively affected, and I'd bet very few regular BK customers will actually STOP going there as a result. But for a single commercial, a huge number of people are now talking about BK and Whoppers. Even better, some people shift blame to Google for the insecurity of those voice interfaces. It's highly unlikely and negative legal consequences will come from this either.
Whichever sociopathic marketing asshole came up with this ploy is probably getting a big raise this year.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Or why not remove Burger King from their search engine? A milder version would be pushing up a warning page when searching for Burger King or any of their trademarks...
Apparently Burger King made a slight change to the article and resubmitted it.
I don't really care as long as I keep getting those sheets of coupons.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Dara Schopp, BK regards the ad as a success, as it has increased the brand's 'social conversation' on Twitter by some 300%," though he's not a fan of "reaching through your TV speakers and directly messing with your digital devices. You may wish to consider alternate vendors for your burger needs."
All publicity is good publicity. Thus the thugs at United Airlines have just completed the most sucessful and money making PR campaign ever.
Next on Burger Kings agenda - Murdering a reandom customer. Strangle that fucker in th efront of the store. That oughta get their Twitter feed, the undeniable measure of success, to go up by a million percent or so.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Kevin Mitnick spent 5 years in jail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and Aaron Swartz was prosecuted/persecuted to the point that he committed suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Meanwhile, Sony pulls off their rootkit exploit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and now Burger King with "OK, Google", and nobody goes to prison. The takeaway lesson for cybercriminals... don't do anything as an individual; instead, incorporate as a multinational, and have the corporation do the dirty work, without risk of anyone going to jail.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
No, this is a good thing. The security hole is, and has always been, that the devices only recognize selected trigger words. This hole is due to poor design choices of the manufacturers, and they must step up to the plate to fix it or become liable for any and all consequences.
My GPS in my car has a 100% programmable verbal trigger (I have used "yo, bitch" in the past... so as you can see, quite programmable) and it is almost a decade old. So there's zero question it can be done.
The message is flat on the table now: Amazon, Google, Mycroft... everyone has to set up user-programmable trigger words as part of the install of the device / app. Otherwise this kind of thing, including truly hostile events, will be a regular consumer experience, and the manufacturers will be complicit.
No manufacturer can argue they were ignorant of the risk now. Entirely a good thing. I look forward to them repairing this obvious malfeature.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Google will demostrate it is serious about security
Snerk. Sorry, but voice interfaces are a MASSIVE security hole (think tape recorder). There's really no way to completely secure the damn things. You could prevent this attack, but there's lots more where that came from.
As long as Google thinks people want them (and, from the fact that people buy the things, I have to say it looks that way), Google will keep making them. The only way to clean up the mess is to point out the flaws to the point that people don't WANT an always-on voice command system. And the only way that happens is if people find it more annoying than helpful.
So kudos to Burger King for forcibly pointing out that there's a big problem in a way that DOESN'T drain customer's bank accounts.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
It would be funny, but then you're just playing BK's marketing game. There would be headlines AGAIN about Google doing that, which is just giving them more publicity. How many marketing campaigns end up with several Slashdot headlines (along with plenty of other big-name media outlets)?
The worst thing that could have happened to BK is that this story was ignored. They way they figure it, the longer they can keep this in the news, the more successful their marketing campaign is. The faux anger will dissipate in fairly short order, but we're still all thinking about BK's Whoppers in the meantime.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Or why not remove Burger King from their search engine?
Because it's legally an incredibly stupid thing to do for a company that states over and over again they are not abusing a monopoly position.
I wonder if anyone has figured just how malicious this actually is, it is insidiously so when we consider this deliberate repeat activations of what is a google search recorded against a users google account and feeds into the advertising interest algorithms for the advertising google's network serves. It is directly going to skew adverts to win win the advert buy auction on an interest score rather than a price per an advert.
Nope. United's Contact of Carriage explicitly lists the conditions where they can remove a seated customer without consent, and none of those apply. They contacted away their right to declare the passenger as a trespasser.
Moreover, the airport police were not acting within the scope of their police duties at the time. They were instead acting as agents of United, and as such, the principal (United) shares responsibilities for their actions.
Shocked, ok. but how did they "abuse the trust"? What trust du you have (or do you need) to buy a plain sweater withthe only difference from other china produced mass market ware is a certain word?
And for the return to obscurity.. That's what's happening to all mass market fashon brands. They start with an exclusive price tag and everyone wants a genuine "Foobar" shirt. Then profits are increased by becomming more and more "available" (both in number of stores and price) until everyone will buy them. And when the early adopters give the first pieces to welfare, the brand folds.
bickerdyke
But it would be really simple here: That activation phrase is already annoying enough. ("Hey Siry" rolls like something you'd normaly say to someone, but chanting some company name to get results back sounds more like arcane magic summoning a demon from mammon's hell..)
Why not use individualized activation phrases?
Give your "personal assistant" some personality! A name of it's own, randomly modulate the speech synthesis parameters a bit for each device, and BK would need to go "OK John, OK Helen, OK Majel, OK Eliza, OK HAL..." and the spot would be over without triggering any device
bickerdyke