If you can.
In the future we'll spend our time disabling stupid IoT devices to prevent our fridges gambling our savings in Vegas https://t.co/5Rc8Gr80NZ
— Hari Kunzru (@harikunzru) January 7, 2017
(H/T: @RobinDLaws)
The short version of this one is: some kid in Texas ordered an expensive dollhouse through Amazon’s Alexa voice-purchasing system. Some news station in San Diego reported on the story. Some news anchor said, on said program, “I love the little girl, saying ‘Alexa ordered me a dollhouse’.” …And then, all throughout San Diego, households with Alexa activated proceeded to try to buy their households dollhouses.
I’d like to say that I saw this coming, but in reality: I was too lazy to buy Amazon Echo.
Is this what’s known as a cascading failure?
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Seems like Alexa needs voice-recognition.
I’ll just note that the Amazon Fire TV gizmo requires pressing a button to activate voice recognition .. this seems like a reasonable safeguard.
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I mean, really, what’s the alternative?
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“Alexa, begin auto-order sequence, authorization Picard 4-7 Alpha Tango.”
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Mew
Am I the only one who read Acat’s scenario and thought: “That would actually be awesome!”
If I ever get one of these, acat’s is the authorization strategy I’m going to use.
Far as I know, it doesn’t actually *allow* that .. but it should.
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Mew
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p.s. did anyone catch the classical reference?
Yep, but I kinda like Garibaldi’s 🙂 https://youtu.be/jpFNS1RojAw
I would advise against shooting Alexa.
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Mew
I just laughed.
A lot.
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That’s a beautiful case of second order effects.
Y’know .. that really should be in a textbook ..
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Mew
you don’t need Echo…it also works on Amazon Fire devices