By which I mean, if there's a vulnerability, exploiting it's as good as exploiting any other. Microsoft have spent a lot of time closing a lot of back doors in Vista, but this just opens up a great big new one.
Well, speaker verification is more than 99% reliable if you first get the user to say specific utterances a number of time so that you can build up a model of their voice patterns (such as ask them to count from one to ten three times or so). But most of this stuff's speaker-independent.
Anyway, the problem's not with the recogniser so much as how Microsoft's integrated it into the OS. You'd think they would have learned by now, but it seems they're still putting the user's convenience before sensible security precautions.
"Microsoft has said that even if the machine was primed to accept voice commands it would be unlikely the user would not be in the room to hear the file with malicious instructions being played."
Yeah, nobody ever leaves their computer unattended.
And of course, it would be completely impossible for a Trojan to pipe appropriate sounds directly to the input buffer of the sound hardware, thus negating the need for it to be played through your speakers at all. As we all know, Windows is completely watertight against that sort of thing.
This raises an interesting possibility, though - what if you could confuse the recogniser itself into making false positives? You could, for example, persuade it to recognise silence as a command of your choosing.
Best way round this is probably to prevent people doing potentially destructive operations via voice commands. But if this isn't suitable, you could employ clever confirmation strategies, like "If you're sure you want to delete c:\windows, please say the following words..." with the words in question being drawn from a dictionary. No malware could anticipate the sequence (although I suppose you could set the recogniser to work against itself, by playing the text-to-speech engine's own output back to it and triggering recognition).
Well, if they came out and said "I'm a PC running Windows", the ASA would be down on them like a ton of bricks because it would be an out-and-out slur on a competitor. "I'm a PC" is ambiguous enough for it not to be a direct jibe at Windows, so they can get away with it.
A big difference in ads between the UK and US is that unless you've got a hard factual basis for a claim that you're better than the competition, you can't say it. So Halifax bank can say "we pay 50 times more interest than Natwest" as long as it's true, but you can't say "we asked 100 people and they said Persil washes whiter than Ariel", because it's subjective. You can say something like "outperforms a leading competitor", and to me, that's kind of what Apple are doing here - they're positioning themselves as better than "the competition", without naming them.
My definition of a designer is that their role stops short of writing code, whether that's HTML, CSS, whatever. They don't concern themselves with how something's implemented, because then you find yourself thinking like an engineer, and working in terms of what's most expedient, rather than like an end user, and thinking in terms of what's best.
So if you're using this book, you're a developer, not a designer.
Yes, and the first item on the list would be "don't try to sterilise the world. You can't."
Sensible precautions are all well and good, but you're fighting a losing battle if you think you can keep germs permanently at bay. One of these days something's going to sneak up on you unawares, and your immune system won't know what's hit it. Meanwhile, I'll have a bit of a cold.
You're right, and yet nonetheless, what you can buy in supermarkets in the UK nowadays is utter, utter shit. Unless, of course, you're stupid enough to pay a significant premium for what your local butcher/greengrocer/fishmonger would have provided you with as a matter of course before the supermarkets ran them into the ground.
Well, y'see, pregnant women have a hyperactive senes of smell, and if you brought unpasteurised cheese into the house, she'd do nothing but complain about the pong, so it's more for your good than hers...
No, I mean trivial to implement, especially in relation to the benefit gained from having it work properly. A small thing that makes a big difference to the perceived niceness of the product. Personally, I would never have considered buying an iPod until they implemented this (and I'm still not, because I have the altogether superior Samsung YP-Z5, but anyway). To my mind, if your music doesn't have gaps in it, and the player puts gaps in, then that's a bug, and should be fixed like a bug.
...Here we are, with Microsoft having rejected other manufacturers' hardware as deficient, going it alone, and still coming out with a laughably bad product, even after having all that time to learn from both the successes and failures of others.
Admittedly, most of Apple's competition seem to have great difficulty getting their head round what seems to me a very simple proposition (make it nice to use and nice to hold, like an iPod, but make it do stuff an iPod can't), so it's not just Microsoft at fault here, but yet again I find myself wondering what the hell their problem is. Sometimes it seems like they just don't want to get it right.
Although it's probably a good thing that this partnership came about. Because if you think the iPod has a monopoly now, imagine what it would have been like with Microsoft shoving it down everybody's throats. And imagine how little the product wuold have improved over time - I mean, Apple spent the last couple of years sitting on their hands and not implementing relatively trivial features like gapless playback, because they could get away with not bothering. Recently the competition's started to get their act together and they're making noticeable improvements to the iPod line. But we all know what happens when MS is the only show in town, don't we? Not a whole lot, that's what.
Well, yes and no. Settlements have appeared and disappeared in the area we call London during that time, but it hasn't really been consistently "there" in the same way as somewhere like Rome, and it certainly wasn't anything like as big for most of that time.
Jeez, is that still going on? I remember when I was at school, in the early to mid Nineties, and they were always dropping absolute fortunes on RM desktops and servers. We were doing A-level computer science, so we were pretty pally with the head of the computing department, and asked him why the hell they did this, pointing to adverts in Computer Shopper where you'd find more or less equivalent machines for far less money, and the answer was "because we have to". Ten years on, during which computers have become practically commoditised, and they're still doing it? The bastards.
Just another example of idiotic spending of taxpayer's money in the UK.
I don't know about that. Nintendo seem to be doing their best. The thing's still selling out as fast as they can get them to the shops. Whereas you can see now that the scarcity of PS3s was artificial (even in spite of the reduced numbers shipped by Sony), because as soon as there's a reasonable supply, they're not selling.
I'm sitting here marvelling at you getting modded informative for that. Who are the poor innocents who read your comment and thought "well, you learn something new every day"?
If it's good enough for BBC News, it's probably good enough for most people. They're using it more and more. It's straightforward enough that reporters can shoot and edit their pieces all by themselves, without needing to drag a cameraman and sound man around with them. Quicker, more personal, and a whole lot cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I see. So I suppose this isn't any more dangerous than any other trouble that could be caused by a Trojan. Fair enough.
Any hole's a goal, right?
By which I mean, if there's a vulnerability, exploiting it's as good as exploiting any other. Microsoft have spent a lot of time closing a lot of back doors in Vista, but this just opens up a great big new one.
Well, speaker verification is more than 99% reliable if you first get the user to say specific utterances a number of time so that you can build up a model of their voice patterns (such as ask them to count from one to ten three times or so). But most of this stuff's speaker-independent.
Anyway, the problem's not with the recogniser so much as how Microsoft's integrated it into the OS. You'd think they would have learned by now, but it seems they're still putting the user's convenience before sensible security precautions.
I mean, look:
"Microsoft has said that even if the machine was primed to accept voice commands it would be unlikely the user would not be in the room to hear the file with malicious instructions being played."
Yeah, nobody ever leaves their computer unattended.
And of course, it would be completely impossible for a Trojan to pipe appropriate sounds directly to the input buffer of the sound hardware, thus negating the need for it to be played through your speakers at all. As we all know, Windows is completely watertight against that sort of thing.
This raises an interesting possibility, though - what if you could confuse the recogniser itself into making false positives? You could, for example, persuade it to recognise silence as a command of your choosing.
Best way round this is probably to prevent people doing potentially destructive operations via voice commands. But if this isn't suitable, you could employ clever confirmation strategies, like "If you're sure you want to delete c:\windows, please say the following words..." with the words in question being drawn from a dictionary. No malware could anticipate the sequence (although I suppose you could set the recogniser to work against itself, by playing the text-to-speech engine's own output back to it and triggering recognition).
Hmm. Promises to be quite fun, this.
Well, if they came out and said "I'm a PC running Windows", the ASA would be down on them like a ton of bricks because it would be an out-and-out slur on a competitor. "I'm a PC" is ambiguous enough for it not to be a direct jibe at Windows, so they can get away with it.
A big difference in ads between the UK and US is that unless you've got a hard factual basis for a claim that you're better than the competition, you can't say it. So Halifax bank can say "we pay 50 times more interest than Natwest" as long as it's true, but you can't say "we asked 100 people and they said Persil washes whiter than Ariel", because it's subjective. You can say something like "outperforms a leading competitor", and to me, that's kind of what Apple are doing here - they're positioning themselves as better than "the competition", without naming them.
My definition of a designer is that their role stops short of writing code, whether that's HTML, CSS, whatever. They don't concern themselves with how something's implemented, because then you find yourself thinking like an engineer, and working in terms of what's most expedient, rather than like an end user, and thinking in terms of what's best.
So if you're using this book, you're a developer, not a designer.
Yes, and the first item on the list would be "don't try to sterilise the world. You can't."
Sensible precautions are all well and good, but you're fighting a losing battle if you think you can keep germs permanently at bay. One of these days something's going to sneak up on you unawares, and your immune system won't know what's hit it. Meanwhile, I'll have a bit of a cold.
You're right, and yet nonetheless, what you can buy in supermarkets in the UK nowadays is utter, utter shit. Unless, of course, you're stupid enough to pay a significant premium for what your local butcher/greengrocer/fishmonger would have provided you with as a matter of course before the supermarkets ran them into the ground.
Well, y'see, pregnant women have a hyperactive senes of smell, and if you brought unpasteurised cheese into the house, she'd do nothing but complain about the pong, so it's more for your good than hers...
See those pointy teeth in your mouth? Do you think they're there for chewing vegetables?
No, I mean trivial to implement, especially in relation to the benefit gained from having it work properly. A small thing that makes a big difference to the perceived niceness of the product. Personally, I would never have considered buying an iPod until they implemented this (and I'm still not, because I have the altogether superior Samsung YP-Z5, but anyway). To my mind, if your music doesn't have gaps in it, and the player puts gaps in, then that's a bug, and should be fixed like a bug.
Er, I meant that it's a good thing that this partnership didn't come about.
I'm now going to write out "I must preview before posting" 100 times...
...Here we are, with Microsoft having rejected other manufacturers' hardware as deficient, going it alone, and still coming out with a laughably bad product, even after having all that time to learn from both the successes and failures of others.
Admittedly, most of Apple's competition seem to have great difficulty getting their head round what seems to me a very simple proposition (make it nice to use and nice to hold, like an iPod, but make it do stuff an iPod can't), so it's not just Microsoft at fault here, but yet again I find myself wondering what the hell their problem is. Sometimes it seems like they just don't want to get it right.
Although it's probably a good thing that this partnership came about. Because if you think the iPod has a monopoly now, imagine what it would have been like with Microsoft shoving it down everybody's throats. And imagine how little the product wuold have improved over time - I mean, Apple spent the last couple of years sitting on their hands and not implementing relatively trivial features like gapless playback, because they could get away with not bothering. Recently the competition's started to get their act together and they're making noticeable improvements to the iPod line. But we all know what happens when MS is the only show in town, don't we? Not a whole lot, that's what.
Microsoft promised something and didn't deliver, you say? How unlike them!
It's dead easy. Zero's cold, ten's cool, twenty's warm, thirty's hot.
(Cue some Canadian piping up with a Pythonesque "Zero? Cold? In my day it were minus thirty in the summer! And we were the lucky ones!" etc.)
I see retirement's mellowed you right out, Rummy...
Well, yes and no. Settlements have appeared and disappeared in the area we call London during that time, but it hasn't really been consistently "there" in the same way as somewhere like Rome, and it certainly wasn't anything like as big for most of that time.
Jeez, is that still going on? I remember when I was at school, in the early to mid Nineties, and they were always dropping absolute fortunes on RM desktops and servers. We were doing A-level computer science, so we were pretty pally with the head of the computing department, and asked him why the hell they did this, pointing to adverts in Computer Shopper where you'd find more or less equivalent machines for far less money, and the answer was "because we have to". Ten years on, during which computers have become practically commoditised, and they're still doing it? The bastards.
Just another example of idiotic spending of taxpayer's money in the UK.
Seven. Maybe eight.
I don't know about that. Nintendo seem to be doing their best. The thing's still selling out as fast as they can get them to the shops. Whereas you can see now that the scarcity of PS3s was artificial (even in spite of the reduced numbers shipped by Sony), because as soon as there's a reasonable supply, they're not selling.
I'm sitting here marvelling at you getting modded informative for that. Who are the poor innocents who read your comment and thought "well, you learn something new every day"?
That's because you Aussies can't handle yer beer! Schooners indeed!
I'm a Dremel man myself. Is there nothing they can't do?
If it's good enough for BBC News, it's probably good enough for most people. They're using it more and more. It's straightforward enough that reporters can shoot and edit their pieces all by themselves, without needing to drag a cameraman and sound man around with them. Quicker, more personal, and a whole lot cheaper.
Two things:
1 North Korea has no oil;
2 North Korea has an army that will fight back.