Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
Second of the proposed post-quantum crypto approaches for NIST to consider,
that has been broken on relatively small and cheap hardware (a laptop) in
minutes or hours.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/post-quantum-cryptography-scheme-is-cracked-on-a-laptop-20220824/
"It's a bit of a bummer", said Christopher Peikert, a cryptographer at
the University of Michigan.
[It's Summer, So maybe its Summer or Bummer cum laude? PGN]
A long-awaited upgrade to Ethereum, the most popular crypto[currency] platform, may make the technology more environmentally sustainable. But it comes with risks. The cryptocurrency industry has endured a terrible year. A devastating crash wiped nearly $1 trillion from the market, draining the savings of thousands of people. Several companies filed for bankruptcy. Now the industry is fixated on a potential saving grace: a long-awaited software upgrade to the most popular cryptocurrency platform, Ethereum, which provides the technological backbone for thousands of crypto-projects. The upgrade—known as the Merge—has gained near-mythical status after years of delays that left some insiders questioning whether it would ever happen. But if all goes according to plan, the Merge will take place around 15 Sep 2022, more than eight years after it was initially discussed. The change would shift Ethereum to a more energy-efficient infrastructure, addressing the widespread criticism that crypto[currency]'s climate impact outweighs its possible benefits. And it would lay the foundation for future upgrades to reduce the hefty fees required to conduct transactions in Ether, the platform's signature currency and the second-most valuable digital asset after Bitcoin. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/technology/crypto-ethereum-the-merge.html
Edd Gent, *IEEE Spectrum*, 24 Aug 2022, via ACM TechNews, 26 Aug 2022 German security researchers determined 5G networks can be hacked, having breached and hijacked live networks in a series of "red teaming" exercises. Poorly configured cloud technology made the exploits possible, they said, and Karsten Nohl at Germany's Security Research Labs cited a failure to implement basic cloud security. He suggested telecommunications companies may be taking shortcuts that could prevent 5G networks' "containers" from functioning properly. The emergence of 5G has escalated demand for virtualization, especially for radio access networks that link end-user devices to the network core. Nohl said 5G networks respond to the greater complexity with more automated network management, which makes exploitation easier. https://orange.hosting.lsoft.com/trk/click?refznwrbbrs9_6-2f1abx235868x069445&
Wireless carriers may be the next cast of characters to learn the hard way about the security risks created by IoT devices. This warning came in a recent briefing <https://www.blackhat.com/us-22/briefings/schedule/#attacks-from-a-new-front-door-in-g--g-mobile-networks-26971> at the Black Hat information-security conference <https://www.blackhat.com/us-22/briefings/schedule/> here by Altaf Shaik, a senior security researcher at Technische Universit=C3=A4t Berlin. "There is increased threat when it comes to 5G, and the impact is also quite bigger because here the hacker gets to target the industry and not just a single user," Shaik said at the start of this 40-minute presentation. <https://i.blackhat.com/USA-22/Wednesday/US-22-Shaik-Attacks-From-a-New-Front-Door-in-4G-5G-Mobile-Networks.pdf> The core issue here is 5G's utility in connecting not just people (who stand to get notable privacy upgrades with 5G, as Shaik explored in a presentation at last year's Black Hat conference <https://www.lightreading.com/security/5g-defends-against-imsi-catchers---but-implementation-is-critical/d/d-id/771471>) but machines. Carriers are now moving to turn that latter feature into new lines of business <https://www.lightreading.com/iot/t-mobile-venture-aims-to-bring-uncarrier-simplicity-to-enterprise-iot/d/d-id/775451> by offering IoT services to businesses that these customers can manage directly through new APIs. "For the first time, 4G and 5G networks are trying to bring this network exposure," Shaik said. "The proprietary interfaces are now changing and slowly moving to generalized or commoditized technologies like APIs." "So now any external entity can actually control their smart devices by using the service APIs and going through the 4G or 5G core network," Shaik said, citing a Vodafone test of drones in Germany. "This exposure layer provides APIs and shares information for the drone control center." Carriers sell these IoT services to businesses (as verified with a tax ID) willing to buy IoT SIMs in bulk purchases of a thousand or more. These business customers, in turn, can manage these SIMs through an IoT connectivity management web interface, with an IoT service platform web interface providing account-wide controls. "You can do plenty of stuff, provided you have access to these APIs," summed up Shaik. Open to compromise However, poorly configured or administered APIs can open the IoT devices of other customers and even perhaps a carrier's core network to compromise. For example, an attacker could start by exploiting vulnerabilities "to gain data of arbitrary users hosted on the same platform," then attempt to compromise a carrier's application server—and then possibly "penetrate from there into the mobile core network, because they are connected," Shaik continued. [...] https://www.lightreading.com/iot/the-next-wave-of-wireless-security-worries-api-driven-iot-devices/d/d-id/779825
Ravie Lakshmanan, *The Hacker News*, 22 Aug 2022, via ACM Tech News Northwestern University researchers have discovered an eight-year-old vulnerability in the Linux kernel, dubbed DirtyCred, that exploits a previous unknown flaw to escalate user privileges to their maximum. The researchers described DirtyCred as "a kernel exploitation concept that swaps unprivileged kernel credentials with privileged ones to escalate privilege. Instead of overwriting any critical data fields on kernel heap, DirtyCred abuses the heap memory reuse mechanism to get privileged." They added that it "is like the dirty pipe that could bypass all the kernel protections, [but] our exploitation method could even demonstrate the ability to escape the container actively that Dirty Pipe is not capable of." https://Orange.Hosting.Lsoft.Com/Trk/Click?Ref=znwrbbrs9_6-2f175x235780x069284&
Carly Page, *TechCrunch*, 24 Aug 2022, via ACM TechNews, August 26, 2022 Security researcher Mordechai Guri at Israel's Ben Gurion University identified an experimental exploit for stealing data from Internet-disconnected computers. Guri said the Gairoscope attack uses a smartphone's gyroscope to exfiltrate information from air-gapped computers just "a few meters away." He said an attacker monitoring sounds emanating from the speakers of the air-gapped system could gain data like passwords or login credentials. Guri said these inaudible frequencies generate "tiny mechanical oscillations within the smartphone's gyroscope," which can be rendered as readable data. In addition, he said, attackers could conduct the exploit using a mobile browser, since phone gyroscopes can be accessed using JavaScript. Suggested countermeasures include removing loudspeakers from air-gapped systems to create an audio-less networking environment, and screening resonant frequencies produced by the audio hardware through an audio filter. https://orange.hosting.lsoft.com/trk/click?refznwrbbrs9_6-2f1abx235864x069445&
The move comes amid heightened sensitivity to criticism of the software that is under public and regulatory scrutiny SAN FRANCISCO --Tesla is demanding an advocacy group take down videos of its vehicles striking child-size mannequins, alleging the footage is defamatory and misrepresents its most advanced driver-assistance software. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/25/tesla-elon-musk-demo/
[What makes the Elon guard his Musk?—MONEY! MSL] Some superfans are so determined to prove that Elon Musk's `autonomous' driving technology works that they are willing to put their kids in harm's way. https://ablink.editorial.theguardian.com/ss/c/TBl-lE0k4WbTlFRn6v-lQXxTpTslqnvUsR2ofAkC00tCgPKhs9TO5NKUUP4fsU1haDJl1Kd74PRGAhcFeH-vjLodfcqoVIfgsQoQlwiSCxj-f9YbeTCQDALOSj2Fv0EIINF4A0ooB5viiURaNm3STmUAYt8EH2Oc-lX68A2stBkzaUNlzgWhSaPFRUEeSXhVhcYq4IcN5wE4p2mYQfct8aPCS5w6HOLNoT0kbRVTQYDlZiaWJB8ZU-KOxWg47zelDPgzslfWQRPdWveRARdwo8a-3-mKBk2iZ8dRnXFWgioz75wELS2Acj3J5y4gBkDJ/3ov/3lRBtT0ZT5GhyBbbuKgeaw/h73/FIVD5jp4dDIYopRzwCfcFQ4mQ3UN2Ghgkm5h-sZGNm8> [Mark gave me the above horrible URL, but browsing on the title instead gets me the article with the generic Guardian top-level URL! Bummer. PGN]
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/privacy-win-for-students-home-scans-during-remote-exams-deemed-unconstitutional/
Nearly $400 million went to a veteran retraining program as part of the American Rescue Plan The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was tantalizing: A year of online courses courtesy of the federal government. Graduates would be set up for good jobs in high-demand fields from app development to graphic design. Schedules were disorganized and courses did not follow a set syllabus. School-provided laptops couldn't run critical software. And during long stretches of scheduled class time, students were left without instruction, according to interviews with Culbreth and 10 other veterans who attended the school. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/covid-veterans-retraining-program-school
(was STD 7, RFC 9293 on Transmission Control Protocol > Date: Wed, Aug 24, 2022 at 7:43 AM > From: geoff goodfellow via Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org> > Subject: Weaponizing Middleboxes for TCP Reflected Amplification (was Fwd: STD 7, RFC 9293 on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)) Weaponizing Censorship Infrastructure Reflective amplification attacks are a powerful tool in the arsenal of a DDoS attacker, but to date have almost exclusively targeted UDP-based protocols. In this paper, we demonstrate that non-trivial TCP-based amplification is possible and can be orders of magnitude more effective than well-known UDP-based amplification. By taking advantage of TCP-noncompliance in network middleboxes, we show that attackers can induce middleboxes to respond and amplify network traffic. With the novel application of a recent genetic algorithm, we discover and maximize the efficacy of new TCP-based reflective amplification attacks, and present several packet sequences that cause network middleboxes to respond with substantially more packets than we send. We scanned the entire IPv4 Internet to measure how many IP addresses permit reflected amplification. We find hundreds of thousands of IP addresses that offer amplification factors greater than 100Γ—. Through our Internet-wide measurements, we explore several open questions regarding DoS attacks, including the root cause of so-called mega amplifiers. We also report on network phenomena that causes some of the TCP-based attacks to be so effective as to technically have infinite amplification factor (after the attacker sends a constant number of bytes, the reflector generates traffic indefinitely). We have made our code publicly available. > Date Aug 11, 2021 1:30 PM > Event USENIX Security 2021 > Location USENIX Security 2021 > https://www.cs.umd.edu/~kbock/talk/usenix21/ > Date: Wed, Aug 24, 2022 at 6:29 AM > From: John Kristoff via Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org> > Subject: Re: STD 7, RFC 9293 on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) > From: <internet-history@elists.isoc.org> On Wed, 24 Aug 2022 09:58:11 +0200 Craig Partridge via Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org> wrote: > I have not tracked closely in a while but believe that we haven't > seen a new attack in over 10 years and that various TCP tweaks have > dealt with these issues. While not an attack directly on TCP, it has been shown there is a way to conduct source address-spoofed TCP-based amplification and reflection attacks with relatively little effort. The problem is not in TCP itself, but in how middle boxes maintain TCP state for the end points between boundaries, or don't maintain state as is the case here. Most attacks are mostly now found in the larger tweaks. For those that haven't seen this paper, it is worth a look, and may result in a lot of "I told you so's" for those who have been skeptical of middle boxes. :-) <https://www.cs.umd.edu/~kbock/talk/usenix21/> Internet-history mailing list Internet-history@elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
I tell people that everyone fights about which field of technology is changing the fastest. I don't fight about it. I figure security has a lock on it. Regardless of what else changes in whatever other field of technology, it has an implication for security. We need to keep up. We need to keep up with each change in technology. We need to keep up with the vulnerabilities that are being created as people create more "solutions." We need to keep up with the latest threats; the latest exploits; the latest attacks; the latest news about who has been attacked, and how. We have to pursue the news avidly, and effectively, to try and keep up with the most relevant issues of the day. There are of course people who try to produce newsletters to help us out. Well, sometimes not to help us out. Vendors, and trade rags, frequently produce such newsletters themselves. Unfortunately, since their aim is to promote their own products, they put minimal work, and pretty much no analysis, into retailing whatever stories they consider to have security implications. There are, however, some useful ones. The oldest, and preeminent, one is the RISKS-Forum Digest. ( http://www.risks.org ) It's contributors make up the cream of the cream of those who are interested in the dangers of technology, and to technology. And Peter, over thirty-five years, has set the standard for the moderation of a quality topical mailing list on the Internet. The Department of Homeland Security used to produce one. It's ceased publication on January 27th, 2016. Odd, that. Another one is put out by the Security Branch of the office of the Chief information officer, of the province of British Columbia. <http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/governments/services-for-government/information-management-technology/information-security/security-news-digest> It's pretty good. And it has been running for long enough to develop a track record that I can use to say that. Les Bell has recently started one <https://www.lesbell.com.au/classroom/blog/index.php?courseid=1>. He's got a background in trade media, but, unlike most of the editors and writers in trade rags, he also knows the field of security. In a recent version of the newsletter <https://www.lesbell.com.au/classroom/blog/index.php?entryid=63>, he talked about the fact that Amazon has purchased iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Les noted that Amazon makes a number of home IoT devices. Amazon can collect a great deal of information from the devices in your home. But one thing the devices can't do, is map your home. Until now. The Roomba is built to map your home, in order to make its vacuuming more efficient. So now, in addition to all the other data that Amazon is able to collect, it is able to look inside your home, in a sense. Les doesn't go any farther than that. I don't think he goes quite far enough. Because iRobot doesn't just make vacuum cleaners. They also make robots for the military, and law enforcement. And, now that all of this is under one roof, so to speak, Amazon will be able to sell a service to law enforcement. When law enforcement once to do a raid, they would dearly love to know what they will face once they get inside the door. Well, if a Roomba is in the house, Amazon will be able to provide them with that information. Amazon/iRobot will be able to tell you the layout of the rooms, and where furniture is, and (possibly not in real time, but) where people are likely to be. I'm sure that law enforcement will be willing to pay for such information. After all, it will be a saving of lives to do it. Not just police officers, but the occupants of the house, who will be in less danger, given that the police have more information about where they are. More and more companies are getting more and more information about you. Some of this information is helpful, both to you, and the authorities. Some of the information is just useful to the authorities. And some of the information is going to be useless, and even misleading, and mistakes will be made.
[2205.11916] Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners, Takeshi Kojima et al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 If you feed a machine-learning language model "reasoning" questions, it gets some right and some wrong. Depending on the model and how it was "trained." If you give the same question to the model but add "Let's think step by step", it gets them right. Apparently the magic phrase depends on the kind of model, and the kinds of training. What phrase could we use on humans, to encourage them to reason in additional ways? Clearly it would have to be different for different native languages and cultures, and for different desired methods of coming to a conclusion; e.g., "Love thy neighbor as thyself" might potentiate some results and "Let's make America/France/Russia great again" might produce others. (This reminds me of Max Barry's fine science fiction thriller, Lexicon. In it, people are classified into "segments"—for each segment, a different sequence of nonsense words will force the person to obey orders.) I still think machine learning is Clever Hans. THVV
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6562076 > Nine per cent of the crime guns seized this year were homemade or 3D printed firearms. Police say that is a significant increase compared with previous years. Lawson said that in 2020, when the firearms investigative unit was founded, police seized one or two homemade guns, while this year they seized about 15. > "They used to be all only on the dark web because it was more of a nefarious activity. And now in lots of countries where you can legally print your own private firearm ΓΆΒ¦ which is illegal in Canada, it is becoming more prevalent to obtain those types of documents on the Internet," he said.
Different vendors, and different commentators, seem to have different ideas about the nature of the Metaverse. (It's difficult to opine about a technology when nobody can agree on what that technology actually is.) However, all seem to agree that the metaverse will involve some kind of artificial reality. Artificial reality or virtual reality will provide the interface to the metaverse, in the opinion of most. Virtual or artificial reality will provide a layer of abstraction, hiding the nuts and bolts of what is going on in terms of communication and processing, from the user. As has been famously said, any technical problem can be solved by the addition of a layer of abstraction, except for the problem of too many layers of abstraction. Anytime you hide something in information processing, you are in grave danger of introducing some kind of security vulnerability. We will be hiding, from the user, who or what they are actually talking to, in terms of machine and network connections. We will be hiding, from the user, any idea of where processing is taking place. There will be a lot of processing involved in creating the virtual or artificial reality itself. Is this processing taking place on the user's machine? Is this processing taking place on the host platform machine? Is this processing taking place somewhere else in the cloud? And then there's the question of what this processing is actually doing and how realistic, or consistent, the presentation to the user actually is. There are going to be differences in devices that users use to access the metaverse. We are already seeing inconsistencies and differences in communications devices, and the representations that they make of our communications. For example, Gloria and the girls and I tended to communicate via WhatsApp. WhatsApp has a number of communications functions, but we used it primarily for text messaging. When I wanted to indicate a joke, being old school, I would use the standard text-based emoticons: generally speaking a colon, a hyphen, and a close parenthesis. And now comes the first question about where processing takes place. When I typed in those three characters, something, either the soft keyboard that I was using, or WhatsApp itself, would change it to a graphic emoticon, for transmission. I don't know, for sure, which piece of software did that translation. (I suspected it was WhatsApp, because the soft keyboard did seem to work differently with other programs.) In any case the others would see a little happy face icon. However, Gloria, using an Android device, what often see the little Android character, bearing a smile. The girls, using iPhones, would generally see the more usual yellow happy face icon. The three of us would see three different representations of what I had typed. That is a minor inconsistency, and probably would not lead to any great misunderstandings. But it is an inconsistency. It is a difference. A layer of abstraction has been added, and other people do not know, accurately, what it is that I actually did or said. Now multiply that by an extensive range of devices from handheld smartphones to vision systems and sensing gloves. Multiply that from input via text, or speech recognition. Multiply that by speech recognition using artificial intelligence. Multiply that by graphical representation systems, that are possibly also using artificial intelligence to both generate, and represent, communications. The possibilities for mixed representation expand enormously. Misrepresentation or inaccuracy is not the only possible problem of abstraction. A number of issues can be hidden from the user and may threaten the security of both the user and the metaverse system itself. Communication protocols, and authentication procedures and protocols, will also be hidden from the user. Many issues and many security factors will be abstracted and therefore hidden from the user. This abstraction will add layers of complexity to an already extremely complicated security situation. Authentication will become much more important. The protocols of communication, and authentication, will be hidden from the user. They will be hidden in layers of abstraction that will add complexity to an already complex mix of communications protocols, networking protocols, middleware applications, and authentication. The Metaverse, like the world wide Web before it, will attempt to become a grand unified field theory of the Internet. Everyone will want their application to work in the Metaverse. Everyone will want their business to function in the Metaverse. Banking, finance, business transactions, and even real real estate sales, will take place in the Metaverse. E-commerce will be apart of the metaverse, and will be one of the major drivers. Therefore, authentication will become even more important. Authentication will have greater significance. At the moment, most authentication for many e-commerce functions will operate on the basis of some kind of cookie left on the machine. This is node authentication, in a way. But node authentication will be insufficient in a situation where the bulk of commerce is being done on the Metaverse, and individuals must be identified, authenticated, and their authorization verified. Authentication will become much more complex, and, at the same time, attempts will be made to make authentication simpler for the user and more transparent. The user will not want to remember passwords or pull out tokens to verify themselves. Users are already used to the node authentication that places a cookie on their machine so that their banking, purchasing, online shopping, games, and other entertainments are all instantly accessible when they sit down at the computer, or when they pull out their smartphone. They will not want a more complex system to verify themselves to the Metaverse. The grand unification of communications and authentication, under the Metaverse, will add complexity, to an already complex environment. And, of course, complexity is the enemy of security. Therefore there will be many aspects of the Internet of the metaverse that will be extremely complex with layers of abstractions, authentications and communications protocols that must all be verified, and must all work properly together. If the Metaverse is to be a universal interface to the Internet, and all forms of communication, there will be issues of compatibility. We are already seeing a variety of problems in this regard, with the existing Internet, and the World Wide Web. Websites are being programmed in such a way that they will display on any device, screen, or window. But in order to do this, the displays can be significantly different. Indeed, in many situations, certain functions will not appear on the wrong sized device, screen, or window. Certain websites can demonstrate this fairly easily simply by resizing an existing window very slightly. Thus, in the name of compatibility, we have sites that can display completely differently to different users. This can create enormous misunderstandings when users are, apparently, using the same website, and see completely different things. At the very least, it is an enormous problem for technical support. With the automation of web development, and the inclusion of application programming interfaces, and functional libraries, and point-and-click and cut and paste programming/citizen programming, these differences may not even be apparent to the system's managers, or owners. Those charged with technical support may be completely unaware of the lack of functionality that different users will see depending upon their device, screen, or window size. With such differences in our existing Web interfaces, how much greater will be the problems when we are dealing with the Metaverse, and devices ranging from three-dimensional artificial reality goggles, to simple smartphones.
I posted my piece on the Metaverse and misrepresentation, and got an interesting URL in response: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/sanas-startup-creates-american-voice-17382771.php ... which is about a "service" that lets call centre workers use technology to make themselves sound "white." They had fun with the idea: > The solution, though, is pretty simple and should satisfy everyone: let the caller choose the accent they want to hear right at the start of the call. I mean, maybe you'd love to hear the IRS with a Jamaican accent, just to keep your mood up? Or Swedish chef? > Even better, let the caller decide how the help desk hears his or her own voice, like a sexy French accent or irate Irish, depending on the circumstances. > Also, letting white people change their voice to not sound so white could also be a big deal going forward. ... but, particularly in regard to the Metaverse, this leads nicely into the area that I *really* wanted to get into (and that a request to examine got me started on all of this), which is psychological factors (and dangers) of the Metaverse. Of which the "echo chamber" is definitely one. I suspect that there are significantly more dangers involved in this offering than are immediately apparent. This service, or product, or whatever we want to call it (and we should probably be careful to call it by family friendly, or at least printable, names), is an example of the echo chamber effect that social media seems to be concentrating on in very many cases. The echo chamber is, of course, the ability to talk only to those who agree with you and whom you agree with. This has significant dangers in the existing social media world, and this can only be exacerbated as the Metaverse comes into reality. We talk to people whom we think agree with us on a variety of issues, and we assume that they are like us in appearance, social status, economic status, and a number of other areas as well. (However, as the article points out, this type of deception is being done anyway, even without technology, by those who train themselves to speak with American accents. See Judi Dench's character's new job in "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.") There are two dangers inherent in this practice that cannot be easily addressed: people who assume, supported by the fact that everyone they talk to agrees with them, that *everyone* agrees with them; and the fact that people will assume that people who agree with them on one topic will agree with them on other topics, and therefore create problems and offend the people that they are talking to by raising offensive ideas that the other person *doesn't* agree with. (There are, of course, many more specific examples that can be imagined: these two only illustrate the two major sides of the echo chamber coin.) The company and investors, of course, present the idea in the most laudable terms: reducing bias. But, as the article points out, accents don't *cause* bias, they just trigger it. This is like treating the symptom, and not the underlying disease. (Recently I had exercise induced vasculitis. The doctor I saw was very concerned that I *not* attempt to get steroid cream to apply to it, which would possibly reduce irritation and itching, but would weaken the tissues, and possibly cause more serious problems.) In terms of the putative service call, a problem is that some white supremacist will think that he's talking to a fellow racist and say, in the course of the conversation, "I'm glad I'm not talking to one of those [offensive racial epithetic which just happens to apply to the person he's actually talking to]. Two immediately obvious problem possibilities arise. The first is, why should your staff be subject to such offensive comments? The second is that your service people may be offended enough to respond in kind to the person making offensive comments (probably to the total surprise of the racist who made the comments), and therefore generating bad will and bad reputation for your company. (In terms of this service as a business offering, I also suspect that many more people would be offended by the generated "white" voice than by accents. It will probably be quite a while before the service can operate with the speed, and the timbre, necessary to make it sound truly human. Until then, callers who don't know the service is being used will hear delays, and a fairly flat delivery, and assume they are talking to some kind of voice response system. The "uncanny valley" effect will probably kick in, and people will be annoyed at talking to, as they think, a robot.) But the jokes also point out some dangers. If you, and the person you are talking to, are friends, know about the technology, and know that it is being used, then, yes, it's fun. In any other situation, then, like I said in the original posting, it creates an opportunity for misrepresentation, and therefore can *cause* misunderstandings, far from eliminating them. I recently had to deal with a communications problem with multiple parties, where a number of those involved had become offended. It was, of course, a situation requiring delicate negotiations. I would *not* want Irish imprecations added to any of my communications with any of the parties involved. Nor would I want any musical lilt added to my delivery, lest those causing the problems see it as less serious than it was.
Article: Have you seen the 2018 movie Sorry to Bother You? It's about a young black man who gets a job at a call center and has trouble making sales until he adopts a "white voice." A new company called Sanas seems to have based its business plan on the movie. It has developed software that converts call center workers' accents into "standard American English." If you listen to Sanas' demo, it sounds remarkably like the white voice in Sorry to Bother You. https://boingboing.net/2022/08/23/startup-uses-ai-to-transform-call-center-workers-accents-into-white-voice.html
Not only that, but if you're listening to your laptop audio through headphones or earbuds, presumably that wouldn't be audible enough to cause the crash. Suppressing frequencies from the audio output would punish those users for no practical reason.
An Ohio judge ruled that such surveillance to prevent cheating could form a slippery slope to more illegal searches. https://www.wired.com/story/remote-testing-student-room-scans-privacy
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