An Eavesdropping Lamp That Livetweets Private Conversations | Hacker News Reader

An Eavesdropping Lamp That Livetweets Private Conversations

wired.com

38 pointstaylorbuley16 comments

Wired,

If you are here reading this, please don't require a certain orientation for my iPad. I will not be bullied by you full screen popup telling me to rotate when I was getting along just fine before your interruption. I don't want your watered down Internet on my mobile device.

Thanks.

I received that msg too. I don't know if you saw the tiny close box in the top right, but it dismissed the message and I was able to read the article.

I didn't. I have seen too many mobile "optimized" sites that make me more frustrated than it's worth it to view the content so I just went back a page. This is similar to the sites that paginate articles on mobile and make it so that each page "view" is in the browser history requiring a back press. It's hostile to the competent mobile web browsers.

Are there more technical details?

> It screws into and draws power from any standard bulb socket.

Interesting, is this a common Rasberry pi capability?

> Then it uploads captured audio via the nearest open Wi-Fi network

How does this part work? Are they preconfigured for nearby networks? Even most public wifi channels require basic user authentication, even it they aren't password protected.

Edit: found the github repo https://github.com/brianhouse/Conversnitch. I don't see anything regarding connecting to WIFI automatically, they must be preconfigured for each location. Also this project is 7-8 months old.

Normally I'm all for provocative art projects, but I can't help being entirely put off by this one.

Same here. To be perfectly honest I'd feel like sucker punching these artists if it were my convos.

There was a time when such products sent their messages to IRC.

Now everything sends Tweets, which ironically, can leave a bigger digital trail from whoever set up the account in the first place and then anyone who may view / follow it.

IRC leaves a smaller trail and is easier to set up a bouncer to read from.

I bet plenty of today's hackers have never been on IRC or read bash.

That's kind of the point of tweets, "leaving a bigger trail" in the minds of people who read them than IRC messages (that can be said and then vanish away in the sea of chatter or get swallowed by the low signal/noise ration never even getting to be read). By actually having to subscribe to someone be notified of the tweets you increase your signal to noise ratio and you tend to actually read most of the messages and most importantly to share them in a different way than just throwing them away to drown in the sea of noise of a chatroom.

Now, to have this bigger "social/communications/memes trail" you also have a bigger digital trail that can be used to find and target people, but you need to pay a price for anything.

To me IRC has always been an instant-messaging and conferencing tool and I never understood how people could have communities in that chaos or even use it for things like technical discussions and project management. That's what mail groups were for back in the day (and still are, thank god!).

I mean for spying tools. The C&C is much easier with IRC, just have keyword triggers. You don't have to have all the hassle of the Twitter API, IRC is just a byte stream.

As for the wider IRC. I've not found it a problem then again I've been in channel for nearly 20 years. My client is in channel 24/7 so you only miss as much as you want to.

OTOH in that time I've gone from icq -> MSN -> googletalk -> facebook chat. As IM support comes and goes from the big players as they get bored with it. The only thing that's changed in IRC in that time is SSL transport.

Bruce Schneier touched base on this, too. He noted how simple it would be for non-artists (i.e. spies, criminals, the IRS) to develop the exact same capabilities.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/conversnitch....

Those tweets feel completely made up to me.

At the very least they've definitely been run through a middle-man at some point. So what they've done is put a microphone in a library, grabbed whatever audio is on it, voice recognition'd it and then cleaned it up, and uploaded it to Twitter. And hidden it inside a lamp. shrug

Yeah. I love the idea/concept though.

They are not even using software for voice recognition. Instead, they are paying people pennies an hour to do it on Mturk.

They're using Mechanical Turk to transcribe the audio.

Isn't this the same as the rumor mill?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com