@nprofile1q...

If nothing else, if the police don't follow proper procedure then that's a recipe for people being acquitted on a technicality.

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From a security perspective, they should be equivalent (nothing that can talk to a network sees the microphone data, just a 1-bit wakeup signal). Modulo side channels, of course.

@nprofile1q...

If I understand correctly how this works: There is a small always-on low-power core that is recording everything to a small buffer and doing a small amount of signal processing to see if there's a reasonable chance that you've said the activation phrase. When it detects this trigger, it wakes up the main core, which grabs the buffer and does some more complex signal processing to see if you really (or, at least, with much higher probability) said the activation phrase. If so, it's then forwarded to the thing that processes the command.

If the code on the main core doesn't have microphone access, the core is still woken up, but then the process that tries to check if you really said the activation phrase fails because it can't access the microphone.

There's probably an interesting side channel where a malicious version could (assuming the low-power core doesn't hardcode 'Okay Google') rapidly program different activation phrases to get a reasonably high probability of whether specific things are said.

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Oh, they almost certainly weren't, but the financial systems were simpler to understand and, even though the consequences and power structures are now the same, they're less obvious to people who don't look closely.

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I have no interest in debating the strawmen that you keep bringing up.

If you ever feel like reading what I actually wrote at the start of the thread, we can possibly have a useful conversation.

@nprofile1q...

Huh. The problem is a bit tricky on Windows because their futex-like abstraction doesn’t work across processes. Other operating system can do better.

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No, but I am considering how to implement them for CHERIoT RTOS and finding exciting failure modes / bugs in every implementation I look at as a reference.

@nprofile1q... I believe it needs WSL2. WSL lacks compatibility with this feature.

@nprofile1q...

Finally, a good use case for AI-generated images!

@nprofile1q... I am running the latest, but it looks like this started a couple of months ago, so might be the last major version or one of the point releases of the current one.