[HN Gopher] Cox (was) bragging about listening to user mics
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Cox (was) bragging about listening to user mics
Author : lowestdecks
Score : 12 points
Date : 2024-08-30 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techdirt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techdirt.com)
| lowestdecks wrote:
| I share the author's skepticism that Cox would have ever been
| capable of this. Especially not at the scale that was claimed in
| the deleted B2B marketing materials.
|
| While there are reasonable concerns over access to microphones in
| various devices found in consumer's households, especially cheap
| IoT devices (although, I'm EXTREMELY about claims that any agent
| is listening to unfettered microphone access on smartphones,
| given the restrictions that have been put in place to get access
| to microphones), I don't believe that a limited scale (compared
| to any big tech) cable company could have the engineering chops
| to pull this off.
|
| Things that would be required: * getting this system to work with
| an exceptionally large variety of devices from nearly as many
| brands. * having nation-state quality malware to get access to
| the microphones on many of these devices (either from the
| manufacturer not wanting to work with them or not incentivized to
| work with them) * battery powered devices not facing user-
| noticeable power draw (think a Dualshock controller) * having
| advanced enough AI (bigger issue 2 years ago than it would be
| now) at a very large scale filtering out noise and categorizing
| conversations such that they are useful to advertising partners
| (probably possible now with the vectorization techniques in LLMs)
| * having the AI be cost effective at that scale without local
| processing (unlikely to locally process on the devices themselves
| due to processing power limits; unlikely to locally process on
| their modems because cables modems are made as cheap as possible
| to offer the services that they are selling, without a FLOP
| more); this is a much bigger roadblock than the advanced enough
| AI * actually hiring talented enough engineers to accomplish
| these things (especially the AI)
|
| And frankly, they are such a small player in the grand-scheme of
| things, they would be idiotic to not also be selling this tech to
| every cableco/telco in a developed nation, in order to get their
| money's worth. This would be 'discuss it at the shareholder
| meeting' important if that much money was spent and they wanted
| to get their value out of it, since they are otherwise limited to
| where they can physically roll out Cox cable.
|
| Frankly, a bunch of marketing hot air (that they've since
| removed).
| howard941 wrote:
| You're getting too far into the weeds with the IOT and
| smartphones. TFA talks about mics in the cable boxes and smart
| tvs. I wouldn't put it past them to monitor mics in cable
| boxes.
| TillE wrote:
| This really just reads like an idiot misunderstanding and/or
| bullshitting about what might be theoretically possible, but
| isn't actually happening.
| HocusLocus wrote:
| MICS without physical disable switches that actually short input
| to ground through a resistor (open circuits can leak) are always
| a problem. It's more of a "Darwin in action" issue because during
| a critical period that people could have demanded this real and
| effective solution (the 1990s and early 2000s) they didn't seem
| to care.
|
| Then laptops took off as primary computers and people were no
| longer installing their own peripherals any more, and demanded no
| external circuit-interrupting switches not even for cameras.
|
| Back in the 1990s I was telling people, your plain speakers are
| not safe either (from being used as listening devices) as long as
| they do not have their own amps and are driven directly by a chip
| in the computer. How much do you know about that chipset and who
| makes it? One of the major early chipset players was Realtek.
|
| Then some Ben Guriron researchers burst onto the scene in 2016 (
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot17/woot17... )
| with a real proof of concept where they used a jack assignment
| matrix in (you guessed it, a Realtek chip) to turn an idle pair
| of headphones into a listening device.
|
| I'd be interested to hear anyone who heard the other shoe drop. I
| don't doubt that an internal assignment matrix facility exists in
| many modern chipsets. It would take a concerted and deliberate
| effort to mitigate this kind of vulnerability. Has anything like
| this been done?
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