News Microsoft says Vista speech recognition is safe

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/02/01/MS_says_Vista_speech_recognition_is_safe/

 

still funny that vista got owned so quickly

 

"SAY SOMETHING!!"
"WHAT?"

 

I hate that sooooooooooooo much. sites that have that advert should be banned

 

I think this isn't going to be a problem at all, at least not until people can hack Vista so that the entire basis of this exploit is the speakers conveniently pointing at the microphone.

Once someone makes Vista think that a sound file or something is actually coming in through the microphone, well THEN they have problems, because THEN they have Vista doing exactly what it is supposed to, responding to microphone input, and even then there are a great deal of things that the microphone control can't do, so my overall expectations for this exploit are that nothing will ever come of it.

 

I think too many people are too busy finding exploits on vista just to trash it around, I too find that the exploit they mentioned is not that much of a threat, for one thing as mentioned by Sterkenburq, who the heck has the speakers perfectly aligned with the microphone? ( if from my understanding the exploit works by playing a sound thru the website of a would be attacker through the speakers), and wouldnt the you hear those commands comming out from your computer?, though its just me btw..

 

Set the website to say "revoke all licenses". :-D


Honestly, I can't wait until someone develops a virus that involves fooling the operating system to think that the user is downloading a "protected" music file, replicating a sort of tag over every file on the system stating it is an invalid licensed file, then having the O/S'es built-in DRM deleting everything on their hard disk.

Now that would be funny.

 

who is going to have this enabled anyway? I will probably play around with it for like 10 minutes or so, but I imagine my typing and actually using keyboard shortcuts will be quicker than trying to instruct a computer to do it via voice.
I am not sure how many blind or poor sighted people will be upgrading to vista any time soon either, its not as if the new Visual Aero vista UI will be on top of their list of features.

 

What I do not quite understand is how someone would get the PC to play a malicious sound file in the first place while nobody's there.
Wouldn't that first step already be the security breach?

whatever.

 

This isn't a Vista security flaw - it's a generic flaw with any speech recognition software. Ever since speech recognition came out, we've had the joke:

Hey Dave, what do you think of my new voice recognition software?
Hmm... format see colon slash queue slash you enter...
--Splat--

Now, all that's happened is voice recognition has become more widespread, so suddenly people are scared - but it's not Vista specific. The idea of embedded sound files on websites doing it is actually a pretty clever idea, but it's not dangerous.

Best solution - very low quality speakers, or headphones!

Mind you, I wouldn't mind seeing voice print identification on system commands - that would be cool!

Speaking of voice prints - I guess the old system where you had to train each command was a lot more secure, as it had built in "Owner only" style security! Does that make it more or less advanced?