so what they’re really saying is they won’t give it away for free

hey man, i think you may have misinterpreted who i was replying to /what i was saying, or perhaps i didn’t communicate perfectly.

i am 10,000% on your side with this, and very much appreciate your post and appreciate your support in this thread/community on this topic. it’s actually giving me a tiny bit of hope that this community isn’t entirely lost.

i’ve really grown absolutely weary of the ridiculous denialism in society and especially in so-called tech communities on this topic.

the kindest thing i think you could say about the rampant denialism is they emotionally do not want to believe it could be happening, and therefore all rationality has gone out the window.

these threads are always a circle jerk of denialists repeating popular media headlines which say “its not happening”, and then if you read the article IT DOESN’T SAY THAT AT ALL. and these denialists WON’T EVEN FUCKING READ THE ARTICLES THEY POST.

apart from the emotional cope, perhaps also partial exposure to eg. basic consumer stuff like installing steam or downloading a movie, so they assume the bandwidth is too high to exfiltrate audio cos their music/game/movie audio files are big, completely ignoring the fact that the telecomms industry has put many decades and $ into producing efficient voice codecs for around 50 years now. they probably think nyquist is a brand of cough medicine

same goes for all the other erroneous ‘consumer tech’ false facts they parrot back and forth.

eg. the lunacy of saying the tired old statement “if they were listening ALL THE TIME, we’d know” completely ignoring threshold based noise gates have been a thing for well over half a century.

these self-proclaimed know-it-alls can’t even put in 10 minutes reading BASIC topics in an encylopedia to realise this shit was solved over half a century ago. (actually you don’t even need tech knowledge or an encylopedia to imagine such a fundamental thing as…i don’t know…not recording when nothings happening 🤯). they can’t put in even BASIC effort, yet are SOOO smug in not only telling us “its absolutely not happening”, but they actually can’t wait to be rude and ridicule randoms for even asking the question.

correct.

the level of unsubstantiated cope in this thread is mind boggling. from people many of whom should honestly know better.

cos the majority in this thread cannot even read the articles they cite mistakenly thinking it supports their unscientific claims that this topic is decided.

afaict no researcher has formally claimed a full coverage binary analysis.

if you know of such a study please link?

afaict the researchers are very upfront about the limits to the coverage of their studies and the importance of that uncovered ground being covered.

when the researchers themselves are saying the work isn’t over. why are all the super geniuses in this thread so smugly announcing this topic is wrapped up?

i guess they know better than the actual researchers do. amazing, someone should tell them not to worry cos the geniuses in the forums have it all worked out 🤣

[if you’re unable to reply with a direct excerpt from actual formally issued research (not some pop media headline) i will not bother responding]

yeah the level of technical competence on this site has plummeted since the influx of the reddit crowd.

just enough consumer tech enthusiast knowledge to delude themselves they can smugly and self righteously shit on the average non-tech person.

and now they’re the majority, drowning out legitimate curiosity by loudly parroting headlines from articles they didn’t even read. slowly turning lemmy into the regurgitated reddit pop media shithole they wanted to escape.

this topic is especially difficult because of the clear emotional desire for it not to be true. hence the degree of fragile cope in this thread.

thankfully not everyone here is a lost cause, and you’ve been given some good advice on delineating the other possible causes for what you’ve observed. when we do a careful analysis we must ofc consider all possibilities.

what i’ve not seen properly acknowledged in this thread, however, is that the possibility of alternative explanations doesn’t preclude the possibility of voice-based surveillance either.

always listening

i never claimed always, i specifically advised op to refrain from claiming always.

how can you pretend to represent a sound scientific approach when you misrepresent the scientific claims made in sources you cite

piss easy

many domain experts dedicating significant resources to it’s study

pick one.

when your sources repeatedly don’t say what you claim they say, maybe its time to revisit your claims ;)

Of course a researcher is never sure something is 100% ruled out. That’s part of how academic research works.

once again, that isn’t what they were reported to have said. [and researchers don’t need to repeat the basic precepts of the scientific method in every paper they write, so perhaps its worthwhile to note what they were reported to say about that, rather than write it off as a generic ‘noone can be 100% certain of anything’] it’s a bit rich to blame someone for lacking rigor while repeatedly misrepresenting what your own article even says.

what the article actually said is

because there are some scenarios not covered by their study

and even within the subset of scenarios they did study, the article notes various caveats of the study:

Their phones were being operated by an automated program, not by actual humans, so they might not have triggered apps the same way a flesh-and-blood user would. And the phones were in a controlled environment, not wandering the world in a way that might trigger them: For the first few months of the study the phones were near students in a lab at Northeastern University and thus surrounded by ambient conversation, but the phones made so much noise, as apps were constantly being played with on them, that they were eventually moved into a closet

there’s so much more research to be done on this topic, we’re FAR FAR from proving it conclusively (to the standards of modern science, not some mythical scientifically impossible certainty).

presenting to the public that is a proven science, when the state of research afaict has made no such claim is muddying the waters.

if you’re as absolutely correct as you claim, why misrepresent whats stated in the sources you cite?

no, they don’t

Please be careful with your claims.

In my experience, whenever investigating these claims and refutations we usually find when digging past the pop media headlines into the actual academic claims, that noone has proven it’s not happening. If you know of a conclusive study, please link.

Regarding the article you have linked we don’t even need to dig past the article to the actual academic claims.

The very article you linked states quite clearly:

The researchers weren’t comfortable saying for sure that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you in part because there are some scenarios not covered by their study.

(Genuine question, not trying to be snarky) Will you take a moment to reflect on which factors may have contributed to your eagerness to misrepresent the conclusions of the studies cited in your article?

Anyone saying they know for 100% certain it’s not happening is probably speaking from their emotional desire for it not to be true - rather than actual fact.

Anyone who has looked into the actual technical aspects, rather than spouting the usual surface-level “tech facts” or parroting headlines (rather than the actual academic findings), cannot seriously claim to know for certain its 100% not happening.

@op i would advise caution on stating ‘24x7’ until there is evidence of that specific claim. (unless you’re referring to while voice assistants are enabled.)

accurate

How do you benefit from clinging to an untruth?

OP is objectively and demonstrably incorrect in a number of their claims. So your question is quite valid. Are they in sheer denial and this is a certain flavor of cope? Or are they actually intentionally spreading propaganda?

The difference between inflation and cost of living.

Glad to see they’ve adjusted for inflation, have they also adjusted for cost of living?

Edit: For anyone (such as OP) who is confused by these terms:

The difference between inflation and cost of living.

well yeah most of its operating software was derived from opensource projects, but capitalists exploited those opensource project without giving the tinest bit back, so…

no idea

but google cache is being shut down, then google announces they’ll be participating with IA.

now this.

really not a good time in history for our ability to easily document web history to be getting messed with.

jami has so much potential. just wish it ran a bit more reliable

why does it need to be device agnostic?

happy to get into into these subtopics, but it’s also possible i may not be understanding you properly because i agree with alot of what you just said.

what are you attributing the close to 0 probability to?

if you wanna say “whats the probability that CMG was at least partly talking out their arse about their capabilities (and especially any claim they were currently in possession of that capability)?”

i’d also give it like >90% probability they (CMG) are full of shit. in which case you could say i agree with you (to within say 10% error margin).

if you’re instead saying the probability is ~100% that audio surveillance capability cannot possibly currently exist outside TLAs because “someone would’ve published it already” then i really cannot agree. (and afaict that ars article does not support that stance either)

Not disputing the three letter agencies

The capability they were claiming to have would make a three letter agency very excited.

sorry i didn’t understand. didn’t you say you don’t doubt TLAs likely already have this capability?

oppressive regimes

most (all?) of whom are operating outside typical legal constraints and likely already have access to the million dollar exploit trade which already exists.

further, i’m not sure how this changes the landscape anyway? its not without precedent that variations on capabilities can be useful to more than one market segment concurrently?

trivial to discover and flag as malware

can you explain further what you mean by this? i’m not sure there’s anything trivial about conclusive analysis of the deep complexities and dependencies of modern smart devices

Apple and Google would also be very keen to find and squash whatever loophole let’s them record without showing the notification.

historically we’ve seen google can take over half a decade to address such things, afaict (welcome correction on this) apple’s generally been faster to respond, and i do agree apple’s current public image attire would be contrary to be seen to enable this. [not simping for apple btw, just stating that part of their brand currently seems to be invested in this]

in reality there are a confluence of many agendas and there’s likely ALOT of global users running non-bleeding edge or other variations on the myriad of sub-system components, regardless of what upstream entities like google implement. if you are aware of any conclusive downstream binary analyses please link

which if true would have been exposed/validated by security researchers long ago.

i agree the probability of discovery increases over time. and the landscape is growing more hostile to such activities. yet i’m not aware that a current lack of published discovery is actual proof it’s never happened.

tbh we have our doubts this leak is directly connected to solid proof “they are listening”.

but we’re not currently aware of any substantiated reasons to say with certainty “they’re absolutely not listening”