I can't hear you over all this white noise
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New sound may ensure privacy, but could also help bank robbers
Most microphones are designed to emulate the human ear, hearing sounds that we hear, and not hearing ones that we don't. Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, however, have created a new sound that we can't hear but that is picked up by mics of all kinds. It could have...
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I have to wonder how generic such a thing could be made to be. There are all sorts of different microphones around and surely they would have different mechanical / acoustic characteristics.
It seems to me you'd need to tune it to a specific device, which makes most of the postulated uses look unlikely, especially things like "defeat hidden microphones" where you have no idea if the target hardware is even present, let alone what it might be. "Block illegal recordings in movie theaters" might be more achievable since you could get most of it by targeting a relatively small number of devices.
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Seems like people with unusually sensitive ears are going to have as horrible a time as people whose eyes are unusually sensitive to flickering already have.
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@scarlet_manuka said in I can't hear you over all this white noise:
It seems to me you'd need to tune it to a specific device, which makes most of the postulated uses look unlikely, especially things like "defeat hidden microphones" where you have no idea if the target hardware is even present, let alone what it might be. "Block illegal recordings in movie theaters" might be more achievable since you could get most of it by targeting a relatively small number of devices.
I also wonder how easily it's defeated. Like, if you can somewhat trivially filter this, it's useless for blocking illegal recordings. I doubt the people who record illegally in a movie theater are doing so casually, so slight modifications to a microphone don't seem entirely unreasonable.
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Um, people with cochlear implants?
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@cvi said in I can't hear you over all this white noise:
I also wonder how easily it's defeated. Like, if you can somewhat trivially filter this, it's useless for blocking illegal recordings. I doubt the people who record illegally in a movie theater are doing so casually, so slight modifications to a microphone don't seem entirely unreasonable.
The other thing to consider is how far down the tail you have to go to make a real impact on the end problem. If you get 90% of the problem but that just means there are 10 people who seed the initial torrents of your movie instead of 100, does it really help?
