this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
1762 points (99.3% liked)
internet funeral
6907 readers
3 users here now
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤart of the internet
What is this place?
• [email protected] with text and titles
• post obscure and surreal art with text
• nothing memetic, nothing boring
• unique textural art images
• Post only images or gifs (except for meta posts)
Guidlines
• no video posts are allowed
• No memes. Not even surreal ones. Post your memes on [email protected] instead
• If your submission can be posted to [email protected] (I.e. no text images), It should be posted there instead
This is a curated magazine. Post anything and everything. It will either stay up or be lost into the void.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's not much difference between a direct switch and a transistor, both will cut the signal and neither is over rideable by software
This is disingenuous at best and incorrect at worst. The mute button on the Echo is just that, a button; it is not a switch. It is software-controlled and pushing it just sends a signal to the microcontroller to take some action. For instance, one action is to turn on the red indicator light; that's definitely not physically connected to the mute button.
Maybe another response of pushing the button is to disable the transistor used for the microphone, but it's more likely that it just sets a software flag for the algorithm to stop its processing of the microphone input signal. Regardless of which method it uses, the microcontroller could undoubtedly just decide to revert that and listen in, either disabling or not disabling the red light at the same time.
But I personally don't think it listens in when muted. I don't think it spies on us to target ads based on what we say around it. I'm not worried that the mic mute function doesn't work as intended.
But I fully understand that it is fully capable of it, technically speaking.
I don't know the internal workings of the echo, I was responding to a comment that said it "operates a transistor". Which is way different than it being an input to a microcontroller.
If the button is just connected to a transistor, it's not software controllable, since transistors are electronical devices that don't interpret any software. A microcontroller does execute software. There's a big difference.
Transistors are simple electronical devices. They don't run software. You can control their inputs with another device (such a microcontroller) that does run software. You can also control their inputs with a button. You can't control their output with software.
I don't know how an Amazon echo is wired up, but if you just have a button connected to the gate of the transistor, it works basically the same as a mechanical switch.
There is absolutely no requirement that a transistor be controlled by software. They can be controlled by physical switches.
Transistors have no registers. They have no arithmetic logical units. They have nothing. They are so simple they can be made up of less than 100 atoms. Transistors have to be connected electrically to other device. Any reverse engineer can trace what it is connected to and it's behaviour cannot be programmed. If you know that it's a transistor and you know the inputs, you can know the output. The same cannot be said for a device which runs software, you'd have to additionally know what that software does, which is incredibly more complicated.
Software is ran by microcontrollers. Transistors can be connected to microcontrollers. But they can also be connected to buttons. If there is no microcontroller, there is no software.
Well, you claim that transistors can be controlled by software, and I claim that it is no more capable to run software than a mechanical switch.
It's about as likely that the transistor is attached to a pin that sends an interrupt to the processor and it then applies a soft mute as it is the transistor is attached to a flip flop or register that toggles the mic getting power physically.
My guess would be it's controlled by software rather than directly by the hardware because then they can do whatever they want with the button via firmware or software updates. This includes nefarious stuff like a fake mute mode, or more innocent stuff like special behaviour on a long press vs short press.
You could just connect the switch to an input pin on the processor. I don't see how a transistor makes this scenario more likely.
Please tell me. How exactly does software "run" a transistor?
Now tell me, how does the software communicate with the transistor? Wifi? Bluetooth?
Heh