Aussie hacks Siri to automate home | Hacker News Reader

Aussie hacks Siri to automate home

theage.com.au

49 pointsnreece7 comments

This is exactly why Apple needs to release "Siri in a Box" --

"He plans to sell a "plug and play" box that will ship early next year and allow anyone to hack their iPhone 4S Siri app."

http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/siri-dramatized-in...

Apple needs to do it first.

Apple will probably take its time, like always, to do it just right.

But I agree, siri in a box would be a great next product for apple and a great tool/toy for developers. It brings the TWINE project to mind http://kck.st/ruJgAV If the experience is a simple as the one portrayed in the video you linked and is as versatile or beyond TWINE it's going to be amazing.

Siri can open my garage door. http://rumsey.org/blog/2011/11/voice-controlled-garage-door/

It's not quite as slick as his solution, but having to say "Text House" in front of commands is a small price, and there's no way Apple can "close the hole" in my case, short of not allowing Siri to send texts. I don't know why they would want to anyway.

Also, the $30 credit Twilio gives just for signing up may last over two years at the rate I actually use it (1 cent per text, $1/mo for the dedicated phone #. $24 for two years plus 300 actual uses at two texts per use since there's a reply sent to each command). So it's nearly free unless I think up some other stuff I want to do with it.

I'm working on building something similar, but don't want to have a computer on full time to run it.

I'm using an PCEngines Alix board as the main control, and a remote relay board to run the garage door. I suppose I should write that up...

I find it unlikely that Apple will intentionally close this hole, as it's just a hijacking of the TCP SSL connection, and requires that the mitm cert be manually installed on the handset beforehand for it to work. It's not really a "hack" in the security-related sense of the term, only in the "sweet hack" sense.

Yeah, I agree, I was just responding to the article, "But the hack may not last long, with Mr Schappi predicting Apple would want to close the hole he exploited."

On the other hand, Apple gets uppity in sometimes unpredictable ways.

This article doesn't give enough credit to: https://github.com/plamoni/SiriProxy (without which the Arduino + Siri build wouldn't be possible).

Cheers,

Marcus (the guy in the article).

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