South Park Season Premier Sets Off Everyone's Amazon Echo | Hacker News Reader

South Park Season Premier Sets Off Everyone's Amazon Echo

maxim.com

141 pointsgridscomputing46 comments

These creators are just great guys. Not only is this again a sign of them being on the edge of healthy creativity, but they're also the only show that just has all episodes for free to watch.

There's a documentary on how they make each show "a la carte" each week, and never missed its deadline except once, but it's often been a close call of just a few minutes.

Edit: "6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ-Un8JjUwo

I thought the only reasons they offered their content for free (ad supported) was that they were competing with a major piracy site dedicated exlusively to streaming their episodes.

I read years ago that they explained that they placed the episodes free online because they were tired of going to pirate sites to get convenient access to their own stuff.

Every good show is competing with this

> but they're also the only show that just has all episodes for free to watch.

They haven't been free for years.

I can just watch them all for free.

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s13e04-eat-pray-queef#...

Perhaps they're blocked in the US?

No you can't just watch them all. A lot of them are unavailable.

In the US, the episodes are now at Hulu which cost money.

Not free anymore. Hulu has the rights now and almost all of the episodes are locked behind their paywall.

Audio is a terribly insecure channel to accept commands through. You presume no one else has access to the device because it is physically locked in your house, but sound travels through walls and through speakers. Heck, you can even make a window pane into a speaker with some simple gear.

It's no big deal when the worst case scenario is being served up a search result you don't need or listening to a song you didn't request, but you definitely wouldn't want to link voice recognition tech up to anything non-reversible like a stock trade or the lock on your front door.

In case anyone missed it, the commands don't have to be audible:

From https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf

> DolphinAttack ... modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers ... to achieve inaudibility. By leveraging the nonlinearity of the microphone circuits the modulated ... commands can be successfully demodulated

Yes, scary indeed, deactivated Hey Siri.

Hey Siri is keyed to your specific voice. A random person can't activate it.

Why, what is your threat model? Who is your adversary, and what is the worst case scenario?

Yeah, but it's the way it was done in Star Trek, and many of the engineers creating the technological future want that future to behave like Star Trek. Voice command isn't a technically superior user interface, it's just more "futuristic."

And <tangential rant> it shouldn't be mandatory. If I want Cortana or Siri or Alexa, let me download and install it. Don't FTLOG integrate it so deeply into an operating system that it's all but impossible to avoid </tangential rant>

You can already order products on Alexa/Home. Home knows voices of specific users so it can accept or deny commands based on who is saying the words.

They should add a character named alexa, and have everyone address her by name and order her around.

Don't forget Siri.

I still don't understand why these companies cannot let us choose a name for our listening devices. Computers can be named, phones too.

The models listening for the initial hook of "okay google" or "hey cortana" etc are stored and executed locally on the device-- usually in a low power manner.

This comes with a set of constraints:

Certain activation phrases are more catchy than others, with hard consonant sounds and enough length for the alg to grab on to. Allowing users to pick any name opens this up to a high false positive rate, where the device would 'respond' to arbitrary inputs rather than specifically its name when called.

Training models on new trigger words and then deploying them back down to the device is in its infancy, and voice detection has a long way to go (another example of this is the difficulty around responding to a specific person's voice, with its signature sounds etc). I could see this happening in the future as the tech improves.

My understanding is that these devices have ASICs which listen for their names, the actual pattern for the name coded into hardware, meaning that you can't easily select a new name.

Voice recognition takes more CPU power than the devices have, especially if you are trying to prolong battery life, and I think the more complex commands are relayed to a server instead of parsed locally.

Low-power DSP chip, I believe. For more complex tasks like voice recognition it generally makes sense to use something that at least resembles a general-purpose CPU.

The Echo lets you choose from a few wake words, but it takes a restart to change so I’m guessing there’s a firmware update implied with doing it.

Siri isn't triggered by TV in the same way. Take a look at last week's keynote where Phil Schiller says "Hey Siri" on stage and takes a pause to note nobody's phone was activated by his voice.

Yep, my wife's iPhone won't respond to me, and vice versa. We can use our Siris at the same time in the same room with no interference

My wife's iPhone has responded to me occasionally, but she doesn't at all.

Echo lets you choose from a small list of names. I've got one that responds to "computer" for instance.

They do. Echo, Amazon & Computer :p

This would be genius and brutal all at once. I love it.

The fact that these voice response devices don't lock into a particular set of users' voices is a major problem. In fact, multiple times I've had a Google ad cause the phone it was playing on go do a web search triggered by that ad. Totally insane.

My wife and I read my four year old son story books at night before he goes to sleep. And multiple times while I am reading the story, Siri on my wife's iPhone has interpreted my voice as a command to do a web search for something–something totally unrelated to the story I am reading. Strangely, only my voice has ever triggered Siri in this way, when she reads the story Siri ignores her. (Not on my iPhone, first thing I did when I got it was turn Siri off.)

For Google Now that demand is reasonable but Amazon Echo is designed to be triggered by anyone in the room, not just a specific owner.

The demand can still be reasonable for the Echo, if you believe that it is terrible design to be triggered by anyone.

Tim Cook's voice (or someone else from the presentation) enabled Siri on my phone during the iPhone X event (watching over YouTube). I thought it was supposed to be locked to my own voice though?

Apparently you have the same voice as tim cook to a robot?

I wonder if there is a low-pass filter on Alexa's microphone? Triggering your Alexa with ultrasonic commands outside of normal human hearing would be even more entertaining. Ads already embed ultrasonic chirps to some extent for tracking purposes.

Check out DolphinAttack

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21HjF4A3WE4

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf

People are doing exactly this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15199233

Maybe that's what They tried in Cuba? ;)

I sure wish I was one of the lucky bastards who was selling Gomphocarpus Physocarpus on Amazon. They really hit the jackpot!

https://www.amazon.com/GOMPHOCARPUS-PHYSPCARPUS-PLANT-HAIRY-...

I feel like I should get a writer credit for this episode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724174

I don't have a link, but an implementation of your project did make the rounds on YouTube and/or Twitch a while back.

Didn't Google have this issue with a Burger King commercial? Shouldn't Amazon have learned from that, and tried to cut this kind of thing off?

The underlying problem is not being able to rename assistants.

Indeed - but it's a much more difficult problem than it seems at first glance (unless you're okay with an always on, always streaming to the cloud microphone).

Should be done locally anyway, assistant should have some functionality (alarm, timer, calendar, etc.) when you're completely offline.

Other comments indicate the assistant names are hard coded in ASICs but they certainly don't have to be.

Countdown to Stone and Park enduring a lawsuit under the CFAA.

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