Slashdot is reporting an interesting vulnerability of Windows Vista–something I’ve actually worried about since I heard about voice recognition in programs. Evidently, Vista has an “ooh cool” called “Vista Speech Control”. This feature lets you dictate text, start applications, and control your computer with your voice, and is available in all Vista versions.
Evidently, it can be triggered by whatever it hears. Think about that for a minute.
It can be triggered by what it hears. Suppose a web-site you visit plays a malicious sound file. You got it. MS’s workaround? Either ‘A user can turn off their computer speakers and/or microphone’; or, ‘If a user does run an audio file that attempts to execute commands on their system, they should close the Windows Media Player, turn off speech recognition, and restart their computer.’
Back when speech recognition I always had images of folks running down the hall yelling “File, Close, No”. I never thought it would come true.
I think I’ll stay with XP a while longer…. but then again, we all know the world is coming to an end on March 22 11… and the fixes are none-too-pretty.
