Disable voice recording storage Disable "Help Improve Alexa" Manage skill permissions Turn off Amazon Sidewalk
But in the end you have a 3rd party passive listening device. Depends if you trust that 3rd party I guess.
And after that post on x, I’m sure that person disconnected all the Alexa’s in their home right?
OK
Install
Accept
[X]
Upgrade
and they never want to clear their cookies and lose their logins.
If my desktop music player has an exploit, it should not be possible that it can read my SSH keys. Node supply chain hacks keep occurring where your development environment can leak your private data. Mobile OS have this isolation already, but desktop is sure to slowly follow. I think we might eventually get to a point where even code libraries get assigned capabilities (eg libxml does not have network access).
[0] https://www.marcroberts.info/2023/echo-show-uploading-data-c...
Device Download Upload
=========== ========== =========
Echo Show A 5.487 GiB 1.451 GiB
Echo Show B 4.343 GiB 1.293 GiB
Echo A 0.778 GiB 0.739 GiB
Echo Dot 0.626 GiB 0.580 GiB
Echo B 0.132 GiB 0.291 GiB
----------- ---------- ---------
Total 11.366 GiB 4.354 GiB
Ie. Non stop "Who has IP/MAC address XYZ? tell ABC" ARP requests, then a second device see's the request for XYZ (which may not even exist on the network anymore!) and realizes it too doesn't know who XYZ is, so it too sends it's own broadcast. And on the cycle goes as devices constantly see others requesting knowledge of XYZ and triggering the request in a cycle.
Embedded devices are especially susceptible to doing this. You might not even notice, apart from a mild "my network feels slow" unless you inspect at network traffic closely. The worst part is these ARP storms basically require you to power down everything and power back up again. In the most classic engineer move the most effective way is to reboot the house. Ie. flip the switch at the fuse breaker and turn the house back on again. That turns all devices off and on again and causes what ever IP/MAC address confusion that triggered the storm to resolve.
Worth investigating for OP. Especially for home networks with a lot of devices. Home routers won't stop a broadcast storm and once it's going they don't stop. Happens more often than is discussed in my experience (i think people just don't notice that poorly programmed devices can do these cyclic and endless ARP requests)
My gran's power company doesn't like this. When I flipped the main breaker, they saw the load drop and scheduled a crew to investigate and repair[1]. We found out when they called to tell us off after they saw the load restored in few minutes.
[1] It's an old house and hard to tell which outlets and lights are on which circuits, and which of the multiply-rewritten labels in the breaker panel are true, so the main breaker seemed the easiest way…
> Customers can turn Sidewalk on or off at any time from Control Center in the Ring app or Account Settings in the Alexa app
> The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.
Now that those tech companies are working closely with an American regime that seems increasingly willing to disregard the rule of law and public perception to round up people they deem undesirable in large numbers and put them in concentration camps, and we have natural language processing tech that can pretty effectively filter through large amounts of text for some semantic analysis, I hear some of the more attentive people coming to the barest hint of a realization that this situation is unacceptably dire
It really seems to me like we are cooked
Got a call soon after that it'd used her monthly home internet allowance.
I guess it didn't cache the wallpaper images.
I have been worried about it since I found my ISP router back in the day spent 10G/week by itself when nothing is connected. Wtf
This is easily fixed by disconnecting and shredding any such devices you own!
I hope this helps!
Now I think this stuff is the norm though; I guess bandwidth is so abundant and cheap for the average American that they don't realize how much is actually being used?
[1] I'm not conservative but there was a creator I liked that was banned from YouTube and was uploading to Rumble.
However, when it was working well, it was nice to be able to set a timer handsfree when my hands were busy. And when running a recipie where the measurements are inconvenient, I apprechiated being able to access unit conversions without context switching to a computing device (memorizing unit conversions could fill that gap).
I'm not in a rush to replace the device, but if I hear about a device that can do those things in an offline way, I might consider it. None of the online features were useful or reliable enough, and by their nature they would be changing all the time ... having them was a negative.
False positive wakeword triggering was annoying too. But maybe a talking timer would have a wakeword that was more specific.
I don't want an LLM either. I want a very constrained command list that is consistent and doesn't change. Yes, you need some voice to text magic, but 'set a timer for x minutes', 'cancel timer' maybe something to have multiple timers. And also 'convert X teaspoons to ounces' maybe with sometimes things like 'how many cups of flour in a pound' (which is a not quite right question to ask, but I still might ask it)
> If it is in very high demand, I might just make an application. :D
If I've learned anything from my years on the planet, if toast0 wants it, it's not in high demand. Sorry!
> If I've learned anything from my years on the planet, if toast0 wants it, it's not in high demand. Sorry!
Hey, I would not be so sure. :P
(I didn't count music as buying stuff since it's a flat rate streaming service.)
color me shocked.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 [1] https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/ne [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1593468/internetshield...
It'd be one thing if he owned up to it and admitted what he did was wrong but he's grown past it. His attempts to obscure it away just tell me he hasn't changed. Which is funny, because his videos gave me a grifter vibe I couldn't quite place until I learned about his history.
for me it was him boasting about his amazing game changing contributions to Windows
when he mostly did thing like lay out the widgets on the format dialog
he's no Dave Cutler
It's not like he needs to peddle merch or anything, I doubt he needs the income. His whole channel seems to just be a hobby and talking about old MS stories attracts Youtuber viewers en masse.
I think there are quite a few more interesting stories he could tell from his more recent time as a malware/scareware developer, but the internet probably won't be quite as appreciative of them as his Task Manager story.
At a minimum, disable the microphone via the switch... which makes them basically worthless and so they've outlived their usefulness.