https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/t...aser-hack.html
If you can't access the article, try right-clicking on the link, saving, reading the copy

It was just a matter of time...

Sounds like those people long ago who could make phone calls by whistling into the receiver.

was it wardialing ?

i remember reading about that.

Wardialing was dialing jillions of phone numbers hoping to find a modem that would connect into a business. Businesses would have contiguous blocks of numbers. You could dial them all if you had the hardware. You'd do it after hours. A security tip back then was to disconnect your computer from the phone line after work.

We called it phone phreaking. People without perfect pitch would make 'blue boxes': little tone generators, to do it for them. Wozniak made one, Apple's first hardware.

You will never see one of those pieces of Big Data spywa--er, digital assistants--in my abode.

I am ambulatory. I can throw my own darn light switch.

These kind of articles and the other one (linked from said article) about the disguised voice commands, are just smoke and mirrors. Yes, someone with too much time on their hands could shine a laser at the device's microphone or someone could hide a command within some "white noise"... but the "elephant in the living room" here is the spy in your own home, listening, recording and transmitting data to google/amazon/apple, to be stored who knows where and used for who knows what purpose - and not some security or privacy defect in a device which is quite simply, by design, a glaring security/privacy problem in its own right.

That's why I would never have one. But any kind of computer is hackable at a pinch, so having your front door controlled by one is idiotic.

I like personal house assistants as a concept, but I'd rather roll my own.
Julius speech recognition is a clunky kludge, but it does the trick, and that really is the biggest appeal to alexa and co, talking to it.

And they do listen all the time, or they wouldn't be able to recognize the "wake up" word.