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mdaEyebot | 3 years ago

These are philosophically interesting demands.

Many schools of thought believe that it is impossible to prove the absence of something. Personally, I would like some firm proof that there are no pixies living in my garden, but all I can say is that I've never seen one.

discuss

nine_k|3 years ago

See, this bomb has no fuse. It's just an inert mass of TNT in a metal shell. You can bang on it with a hammer, nothing will happen! You can scoop some of the TNT and drop it into your fireplace, and it will burn peacefully. It's completely safe to keep it in your house.

Now prove it's never going to explode.

Do you notice how a perceived risk of something really bad happening skews people's perception?

There is an obvious risk of turning a smart speaker into a eavesdropping device, because

- It has to listen to your commands.

- It has to send the commands it hears to a computer outside your control for processing.

- It receives firmware updates which you also do not control, and cannot inspect.

A perfect moral hazard.

If I were to use a smart speaker, it must have open-source firmware which I can inspect and flash, and it, or its processing software on my home server / router / NAS, should be firewalled off the internet. That would be a proof.

GoOnThenDoTell|3 years ago

It’s simply too easy for the smart speaker to have its behaviors changed. It’ll become the new wiretap.

im-a-baby|3 years ago

It's pretty trivial to construct negatives that can be proven. E.g. take a solid colored object and prove it's not a specific color. You can prove the negative statement by proving a positive statement about the true color of the object, e.g. by direct observation, measuring the wavelength of emitted light, etc.

Similarly, you could prove a speaker doesn't eavesdrop by proving it performs a finite set of operations, none of which are eavesdropping.

mdaEyebot|3 years ago

Sure, but computer chips are probably the most complicated things that our civilization can currently make.

Asking somebody to prove that a computer won't do X is a fool's errand, outside of some shrinking safety-critical industries.

That said, you could always make your own smart speaker with a hardware button or shell script instead of a wakeword:

https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-smart-sc...