Comment by saadn92
21 hours ago
The irony runs deeper than the free analysis offer. The whole Mercor contractor relationship was this exact pattern: hand over studio-quality voice recordings and ID scans to get paid for data labeling work that didn't require either. "Explicit consent" was buried in the terms, and people clicked through because they needed the paycheck.
Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.
This is an important point with biometrics that most people don't realize. When I say that biometrics aren't good security, most people are perplexed because they have seen movies and such that are high-tech where iris scans or fingerprints are the pinnacle of security.
I like to tell them this story that I read somewhere a decade or so ago. It might not be a true story (I never checked) but it's a helpful way of thinking about it.
Bob landed a great job and decided to celebrate by buying a new luxury car (a BMW in my recollection, but could be wrong) that had a thumbprint authentication for unlocking and for starting it, so you never have to carry external keys. One day a thief decided to steal Bob's car. They broke in to his house and tied him up. When they demanded the keys and he said there weren't any, they decided to cut off his thumb and use it as the key. Now Bob has no thumb and his car still got stolen.
The story I remember is French police units specifically launching focused investigation on the sudden explosion of crypto people / family members getting kidnapped and having a finger or more chopped off.
I did find your story from 2005 about a man having his finger chopped off once the thieves realized they would need his appendage every time in order to start the car2.
https://news.sky.com/story/french-police-investigating-serie...
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18624943-600-finger-c...
> biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.
"My voice is my passport. Verify me."
I have to renew my passport every 10 years or so. How do I do that with my voice? I guess it's time to take some vocal lessons.
Reminds me of the Interrail data breach [https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/eurail-data-breach-3080...]
The fediverse take on that was "customers are advised to rotate their faces and birthdays."
Vocal lessons are both a lot of fun and a lot of work. I haven't been using any voiceprint systems but I know most humans are unable to tell that my trained voice is the same physical person as my old voice. Would be curious to find out if an AI voiceprint system can discern whether it's the same or not.
You’ll really like this then, it’s a clip of Phil Hendrie who I recently discovered. He does tons of voices and sound effects, his studio has multiple microphone and switches between them for different speakers.
Here is a clip of him when someone called his studio thinking they were the local Pizza Hut. Phil does all the other voices, including the phone system.
https://share.google/QHNkgsOdvGj7tapfk
Are you talking about singing lessons, or actual talking training? Singing lessons helped me sing but didn't change the way i talked at all, but i was only able to afford them for a summer so maybe it takes more time than that
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I always answer my likely spam calls in a weird high pitched fake voice just in case.
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>> "My voice is my passport. Verify me."
Well met, fellow Uplinker!!
>Well met, fellow Uplinker!!
I'm pretty sure this person worked at Playtronics.
Biometrics are "what you are", not "what you know" or "what you have".
Voice fingeprinting is essentially useless because it is easily recorded and reproduced.
I have been telling people for years that biometrics (face, fingerprint, voice) is your username, not your password. But people are easily swayed by convenience.
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just take up smoking heavily
Easier to inhale an undisclosed amount of helium before recording your password voice
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Despite popular belief, even heavy smoking does not alter your voice in a significant way.
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Smoke 40 cigarettes a day, your voice will be unrecognisable in no time
Also: it’s not just the first order smoking, respiratory issues, increased chance of illness, and chronic coughing can damage your voices presentation.
> Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.
The problem is that even if you know that, you still get bombarded by banking apps promising "biometrics are more secure than passwords, switch now!"
You can rotate your voice with substantial effort. Just speak differently: higher or lower pitch, a different accent. Your friends may look at you funny for the first few years.
I doubt 1% of the 40k will learn anything.
also this took me way too long to realize it had nothing to do with warhammer.
This comment is pure LLM.
I feel like we're right on the threshold where we give up and start interacting with slop like it's human written.
What makes you think that comment is LLM?
An LLM comment from an AI booster. How poetic.
> Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.
Voices aren't strong.
There just aren't that many unique characteristic parameters behind a voice - it's largely dictated by an evolutionary shared shared larynx and vocal tract. They aren't fingerprints.
The fact that human voice impersonation is not only widely possible but popular should give you an indication of this. Prosody, intonation, range, etc. - it's all flexible and can be learned and duplicated.
The signals are simple too, because we have to encode and decode them quickly. You may or may not be able to picture and rotate an apple tree in your head, but you can easily read this sentence in the voice of David Attenborough.
Moreover, you can easily fine tune a voice model to fit any other speaker. You can store the unique speaker embeddings in a very thin layer. Zero and few shot unseen sampling can even come close to full reproduction. You can measure this all quantitatively.
Voices are not, and never have been, fingerprints. They're just not that unique.
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