I'm sure by now you've heard about
the Speech Recognition flaw in Windows
Vista (my mom knew about it before me...my excuse is I was busy working all day and
didn't have time to catch up on the news). The one that if a dodgy mp3 played on your
PC it could delete files. Here's how to do it:
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Record a voice clip of yourself saying 'start listening' followed by 'delete everything'
(im unsure on the exact voice commands).
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Send the recorded mp3 to a friend saying 'Lolz0r, l1st3n 2 d1s'.
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Hope they have a microphone.
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Hope they have a set of speakers.
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Hope the speakers aren't muted in the Sound Mixer.
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Hope the microphone isn't muted in the SoundMixer.
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Hope the speakers are turned on and set at an adequate volume.
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Hope they have Speech Recognition turn on and configured.
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Hope their microphone is close enough to their speakers to be able to pick up on the
sound properly.
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Hope their microphone isn't too close to the speakers for their to be horrible feedback.
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Hope the person you send it to is deaf so they don't hear the sound of your voice
with commands coming out of their speakers.
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Hope the person is blind so they don't see speech recognition is accepting commands.
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And finally hope speech recognition actually picks up your commands successfully in
sequence. If it doesn't hear 'start listening' as the first one to tell it to listen
for commands then I'm afraid it's not going to process them.
As you can see it's very easy to accomplish so we should all be turning off our speakers
and unplugging our microphones and putting tin foil hats on our heads. And if it is
accomplishable (and some people have tried and tested it with successful results)
doesn't that just goto show how good Windows Vista Speech Recognition is?
On another note:
BBC's technology news coverage is a complete joke. They have a video explaining the upgrade
process and make it sound like upgrading from XP is a real chore. 'Lets upgrade...oh
wait it won't let me continue...i have to go back and uninstall the virus checker
software...i start again...no more troubles...and its installed within 2 hours from
when i first started', bearing in mind it took 25minutes to uninstall shitty Norton.
They don't say 'oh look, it cant continue but its very helpful and points me in the
right direction at what I need to do, after that there are no problems and it installs
effortlessly'. So what are the 'unpredictable pitfalls' of upgrading. From the video
it seems there are non, since Vista points out the problems when you start and how
to resolve them. I'm not an English student but isn't this classed as predicting?
