On the ubiquity of web-enabled microphones | Hacker News Reader

On the ubiquity of web-enabled microphones

panaudicon.wordpress.com

35 pointsconductor14 comments

I think the proposals in the article are dead on arrival by reason of the very same ubiquity. Unless you happen to be in the sort of situation where you can ask everyone around you to put their phone in the freezer, you can bet there's someone near you who would never dream of physically turning off any part of their phone, and who has no idea what network security even is.

Beyond that we're moving towards a world where practically everything is connected to the network and takes voice control. Even if it isn't designed to relay voice over the internet it's going to be built with commodity multipurpose hardware that certainly has the capability, and you can bet that practically no one is going to bother making sure they're private.

I don't know what the answer is but I think we're reaching, if we're not there already, a threshold where ensuring the security of your own device is of moderate utility at best.

Not to mention, turning off your recording device(s) could be a serious liability. Whistleblowers can typically only be successful if they can bring overwhelming evidence of their claims. Audio and video recording can capture pretty much all physical phenomena that would be relevant to a legal case. I'm sure you can imagine instances where people were physically and psychologically harmed solely (or in large part) because the abuser knew no one else knew what was happening at that time and location and never would.

It's not just microphones, but video cameras as well. Soon, global broadcast networks will be built, essentially allowing any device connected to the Internet to send live audio/video streams to any (and eventually all) other devices.

The upside to this will be that we (human beings) will be in control of the devices and they will be spread throughout the population (at least 1 device per person).

The news gathering and educational implications of this will likely be staggering. Secrets will become known, rapidly.

The accelerometer is an issue. Could the switch cut the mic and the accelerometer out at the same time?

I'm told that cutting power to the radio chip will take all the antennae off-line. But the OS and/or apps may become confused by its absence, which has never been factored into any model of phone before, AFAIK.

The point is to mindfully create bubbles of privacy where the face-to-face domain cannot be remotely penetrated without physical access, and to do it anywhere, conveniently, without taking one's battery out of their phone, which is too much for some people. There is a class of persons who would make use of the switch but never bother or forget to take their battery out. Cameras are easy to cover up.

    A friend suggested that a 3-way off switch might possess enough novelty to warrant a patent.  I have no idea.  I hope that it’s not actually patentable, because I just want to see that a product like this is made, but I actually have some concerns because of my situation that the government would take my idea and give it to a contractor, or patent it themselves and sit on the patent.

Congratulations! By publishing this article, you have established that you thought of this idea in early 2015. While you may decide to patent it yourself, you no longer need to fear someone else patenting it, because one must have a good claim to inventing a thing in order to obtain a patent on it.

Is that true? I thought the rule was first to file, not first to invent. And I have never heard of a blog post counting as "prior art".

In the US, the rule used to be first to file, but is now first to invent (along with the rest of the world) since the enactment of the America Invents Act in 2013.

First to file/invent isn't actually relevant for prior art though. Any publicly available source that describes the invention can serve as prior art. However, patent lawyers are very good at "writing around" existing patents and other prior art.

Actually, you have it backwards. The US was previously a first-to-invent country but as of March 2013 is now first-to-file. This brings the US in line with the rest of the modern world, which is already mostly first-to-file.

Is it possible to patent something that is already in the public domain?

"First to file" just means that if two patent applications come in at around the same time, there won't be a court case with a bunch of discovery concerning who was working on the actual invention first. Its just the first patent request into the office now. This does not affect prior art. If anything it makes it stronger by preventing the claim that a so called inventor was working on an idea prior to the disclosure of the prior art.

The fact that a two sentence blog post about using a simple 3 way switch to control a microphone is in fact prior art strong enough to bust a potential patent is just a sad, sad commentary on the quality of patents being issued today.

A switch is irrelevant now that we have evidence that even accelerometers can be used to reconstitute speech.

I'd bet that CCD elements have some level of sensitivity to external voice.

Pulling the battery/putting it in a Faraday cage are the only real options left.

It will have to be a Faraday cage with an internal white noise generator.

This is hardly worth mentioning when talking about 0day markets, but what stops a state willing to pay $500K for an exploit from taking the hacker(s) back home? Is it ethics?

Or remove the physical microphone entirely and use a headset.

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