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 who 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

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.

agreed the existing system is deeply flawed and currently on a trajectory to critical failure.

regarding peer review itself, this is another point. people regard peer review as this binary thing which takes place prior to publication and is like a box which is ticked after publication.

which is ofc ridiculous, peer review is an ongoing process, meaning many of the important parts take place after publication. fortunately this does happen in a variety of fields and situations, however not being the norm leads to a number of the issues in discussion. further it creates an erroneous mindset that simply because something has been published that its now fully vetted, which is ofc absurd.

also agreed, the process should be blind. i believe it often already means the reviewer’s identities are hidden, but i also agree the authours should be hidden during the process too.

don’t see the role as unpaid being a problem though, introducing money would complicate things alot and create even more conflicts of interest and undermine what little integrity the process still has.

i really love your idea of standardising the process in a network-like protocol. this would actually make an excellent RFC and i’d totally support that.

on a similar vein, this is why i’ve been advocating for a complete restructuring of support given to reproduction. as you mentioned, the current process is vulnerable to a variety of human network effects. and among other issues with that problem, i also see the broken reproduction system playing a role here.

as it currently stands, reviewers can request more explanation or data, introduction of changes/additional caveats etc or reject the paper entirely. what this means is a reviewer can only really gauge whether something sounds right, or plausible. and as you correctly identify, certain personalities or flavours of prevailing culture will play a role in the reviewer’s assessment of what merely seems like it’s plausible or correct etc. this has shown to make major breakthroughs more difficult to communicate and face unfair resistance, which has frankly held back society at large.

whereas if there was an organised system of reproduction it’s no longer left to just a matter of opinion in how something sounds. this is ofc how its supposed to work already, and sometimes does, but all too often does not. imo it would be a great detail to include in your idea for a protocol-based review process.

i don’t envision this as always being something which must take place prior to publication, it can and should be an ongoing process. where papers could have their classification formerly upgraded over time. currently the only ‘upgrade’ a paper really receives is publicity or number of citations. the flaws of which are yet another discussion again.

unrelated: @OP looks like you accidentally posted this many times. Imo would be good to delete the others to keep the conversation in 1 place.

I generally agree. The system is utterly rotten.

Only thing I’d mention slightly counter to that is peer review - as a process - is still something I believe is useful.

That is, the process of people with relevant domain expertise critiquing methodology, findings etc. When its done right, it absolutely produces better results which everyone benefits from.

Where it fails is when cliques and ingroups are resistant to change on principle, which is ofc actually an anti-scientific stance. To put it another way, the best scientist wants to be proven wrong (or less correct) if that is indeed the truth.

It also fails, as you identify, when the corrupt rot of powerful publishers (who are merely leeches) gate-keep the potential for communicating alternate models.

It also fails where laypeople parrot popsci talking points without understanding that peer review is far from infallible. Even the best of the best journals still contain errors - any genuine scientist is the first to admit this. Meanwhile popsci enthusiast laypeople think that just because something was printed in any journal, that it must be unequivocally 100.000% truth, and are salivating at the opportunity to label any healthy dose of skepticism as “antiscience” or “conspiracy theorist” etc.

It also seems to fail when popsci headlines invariably don’t include the caveats all good scientists include with their findings etc.

Final point which I think would help enormously is its very very difficult to get funding or high worth publications in reproduction. The obsession with novelty is not only unhealthy, it’s unproductive.

Reproduction is vastly undervalued. Sadly its not easy to get funding or support for ‘merely’ reproducing recent results. There’s two reasons why this should change, firstly it will ofc help with the reproducibility crisis, and it will also afford upcomers excellent opportunities to sharpen their skills, and properly prepare for future ground-breaking work. To put another way, when reading a novel paper you think you understand it. Only when you take it to the lab do you truly understand.

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

the PR and lawsuit risk

what risk? facebook & others conducted illegal human experiments. this is an enormous crime and was widely reported yet all fb had to do from a pr perspective was apologise.

as we all know, fb even interfered with with the electoral process of arguably the world’s most powerful nation, and all they had to do was some rebranding to meta and it’s business as usual. this is exactly how powerful these organisations are. go up against a global superpower & all you need to do is change your business name??? they don’t face justice the same way anyone else would, therefore we cannot assess the risk for them as we would another entity - and they know it.

So, while i personally disagree for above reasons, I can accept in your opinion they wouldn’t take the legal risk.

simpler metrics are enough

when has ‘enough’ ever satisfied these entities? we merely need to observe the rate of evolution of various surveillance methods, online, in our devices, in shopping centers to see ‘enough’ is never enough. its always increasing, and at an alarming rate.

local processing of the mic data into topics that then get sent to their servers is more concerning is not much more feasible

sorry i didn’t quite understand, are you saying its not feasible or it is feasible? from the way the sentence started i thought you were going to say it could be, but then you said ‘not much more feasible’?

Voice data isn’t

voice conversations are near-universally prized in surveillance & intelligence. There hasn’t been any convincing argument for any generalised exception to that.

I am not sure they could write it off as a bug

it’s already been written off as a bug. i didn’t follow that story indefinitely but i’m not aware of even a modest fine being paid in relation to the above story. if it can accidentally transcribe and send your conversations to your contact list without your knowledge or consent (literally already happened - with impunity(?)), they can 1000% “accidentally” send it to some ‘debug’ server somewhere.

Are they actually doing it? It ofc remains to be seen. Imo the fallout if it was revealed would roughly look like this

• A few people would say “no shit”
• Most people would parrot the “ive done nothing wrong so i don’t care” line.
• A few powerless people would be upset.

If they truly wanted to have mic access, they could for a long time

agreed

and it would have been known

are you sure?

The reality is it is too expensive

imo this commonly repeated view has never been substantiated.

we’ve yet to see a technical explanation for why it’s “impossible/too expensive” which addresses the modern realities of efficient voice codecs, even rudimentary signal processing and modern speech-to-text network models.

and risky

how so? previously invasive features are simply written off as “a bug”. they barely even need to issue some b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶ fines (typical corporate solution to getting caught), that is the level we’re currently at:

“whoops it was a bug, we’ll switch it off”

“whoops another update switched it on again” (if caught, months/years later)

“whoops some other opt-in surveillance switched itself on again, just another bug ¯_(ツ)_/¯”

as long as they have deniability as a bug, there’s almost zero repercussions and thus virtually zero risk. that is perhaps why a company out and talking about it openly is such a no-no. discussing intent makes ‘bug’ deniability more difficult.

in my experience when reading past the “they’re not listening” headlines, and into the actual technical reports, noone has been able to conclusively rule it out. if you know of conclusive documentation, please post.

then there’s the “they have enough data already” argument. which is entirely without foundation, as we all know very well: nothing is ever enough for these pathologically greedy entities. ‘enough’ simply isn’t in their vocabulary. we all know this already.

[i didn’t downvote you btw]

no idea why you’re being downvoted.

you’re entirely correct, and i don’t interpret you as defending telegram’s lack of user protections

(noticing a real uptick in reddit hivemind around lemmy lately, it’s depressing tbh)

Everything that’s encrypted is generally more private and secure than the equivalent which isn’t encrypted

They gave a fuck about negative pr