Spectre I, shuts down microphones nearby you

(deveillance.com)

9 points | by Balgair 6 hours ago ago

8 comments

  • Duplicake 6 minutes ago

    I'm like 90% sure this is a scam that's never gonna ship or ship and not do anything

  • leblancfg 4 minutes ago

    2m is too small

  • rdevilla 10 minutes ago

    It's not going to work.

  • serf an hour ago

    one wonders why an 'inaudible signal' would affect microphones that are designed for human voice frequencies.

    unless of course that inaudible signal is actually a high power laser to destroy the offender.. but i'm not comfortable wearing laser goggles everywhere.

    thought : a gadget that says words in my exact tone intonation and style incessantly while I talk to throw the speech-to-text systems off via garbage injuection -- boy that'd be obnoxious to compete with in a conversation.

    tl;dr : sounds like a new high priced ultra-sonic mouse deterrent.

  • nativeit 6 hours ago

    Interesting, but coming from the perspective of an audio engineer it all sounds a little too woo-woo without specifics. The $1200 price also seems absurd for something that appears to emit ultrasonic noise and scan for IoT devices. The fact it's taking pre-orders is also something of a red flag.

    Maybe I'm too cynical, but these things strike me as money grabs that prey on peoples' understandable paranoia surrounding privacy. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise, but those were the first impressions of someone with a passable knowledge of how such devices ostensibly function. Unless it's doing something special I'm not aware of, a fairly basic filter on the microphone to limit any sounds outside of audible midrange would likely render these devices moot.

    • nativeit 6 hours ago

      To be less of a cynical idgit, here's some cool future tech that does work--not great, I imagine, but getting better and could certainly be employed to keep the sounds you emit localized to a single point (controlling/defining the point might be tricky, and would require the listener to stay stock-still):

      ‘Audible enclaves’ could enable private listening without headphones - https://www.psu.edu/news/engineering/story/audible-enclaves-...

    • nativeit 6 hours ago

      Related: This Jammer Wants to Block Always-Listening AI Wearables. It Probably Won’t Work - https://www.wired.com/story/deveillance-spectre-i/

    • verdverm 6 hours ago

      I don't know much about these things, but I can say it comes off as a scam to me as well.