Awwkk, lasers invading your home

So, a voice modulated laser beam that any clever kid can build in minutes from his or her junk pile can take over Alexa, etc?

Most of us could sketch the design in a minute or two. IR Laser (with small resistor) across the output of a small audio amp, or even using your computer is the easiest I'm sure.

Next folks will be gathering voices from videos (etc.) to over-ride folks' voice activated stuff...

How very not amusing...

Keep your curtains closed!

John :-#(#

Very interesting this hacking mechanism !

Somehow I don't think this will become a big problem though.

Many years ago when I was in college a chemistry professor was working with a self-built photo-acoustic spectrophotometer. It used a white light sour ce, monochromator and a rotating disk with holes to chop the light beam. T his would illuminate a specimen and the pulsating light would be absorbed b y the sample and produce sound from the heating effect. More absorption wo uld produced a louder sound. A mic would pick up the sound produced and th e monochromator would sweep a range of wavelengths to produce a spectrograp h.

I expect this microphone trick with the laser is similar in that the heatin g from the variations in the laser beam is producing vibrations directly in the microphone.

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  Rick C. 

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ISTR many decades ago it was postulated that a laser (still almost in the realms of SciFi back then) could be used to bounce light off a suspect's window to a photodetector, enabling the sound vibrations from within the room to be captured. So this isn't really anything new.

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Although common 60mW lasers are more of an industrial item. Interesting that the microphone in "she who must not be named" is sufficiently photosensitive for this photo stimulation trick to work.

There was an amusing one with smart assistants on BBC Radio4 last week when they tried to demo one on air. Google effectively crashed for a moment when they issued the fateful command live on air and every Alexa that was listening to the radio tried to respond at once (followed by the ones listening to DAB a second or two later). The result was that the one in the studio proved remarkably shy - as did all the others. Google had enough compute power for them all to wake up but not enough to service a huge number of synchronous simultaneous voice requests.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

I'm more worried about them setting fire to my curtains whilst trying this trick.

Never mind lasers. What about shouting "OK Google Open the door" through the window?

Sylvia.

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Cheers

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Clive

60mW! "Do not look into laser with your remaining eye".

As as aside, the authors note in section II-G: "However, despite the regulation, there are reports of high- power class 3B and 4 systems being openly sold as ?laser pointers? [34]. Indeed, while purchasing laser pointers from Amazon and eBay, we have discovered a troubling discrepancy between the rated and actual power of laser products. While the labels and descriptions of most products stated an output power of 5 mW, the actual measured power was sometimes as

Typically you only get small dot dash scarring with that sort of power level unless you are unusually stupid or very unlucky. Our lab technicians used to get the odd retinal laser burn from visually aligning visible lasers in the optics class. Back in the days of open power beams on the bench which would today all have to be inside pipes.

The scary ones are the laser pens 532nm green frequency doubled IR NdYAG

1064nm where to cut the price they have omitted the IR blocking filter so there is perhaps 5mW of green and 500mW of IR pump radiation emitted.

Various online sites will happily sell members of the public laser pens that are powerful enough to pop balloons (ie. dangerous power levels).

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

I'm sensitive to that kind of possibility, since I'm very deaf and blindness would be a death sentence.

Yup :(

Many hobbyists "repurpose" blue (bluray?) lasers as engravers. If they are clued up *they* might have a single pair of goggles of unknown provenance.

That's showing your age.

And mine.

Sylvia.

"I can't *allow you to* do that." IIRC

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Postulated??? It's been done many times and some considerable time ago.

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  Rick C. 

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level

ed to get

optics

day all

Too bad you can't share that thought with Helen Keller.

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  Rick C. 

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"Hal, open the pod bay doors."

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  Rick C. 

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