Leaked Documents Show How Amazon's Astro Robot Tracks Everything You Do (vice.com) 36
em1ly shares a report from Motherboard: Amazon's new robot called Astro is designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties, according to leaked internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings obtained by Motherboard. The system's person recognition system is heavily flawed, according to two sources who worked on the project. The documents, which largely use Astro's internal codename "Vesta" for the device, give extensive insight into the robot's design, Amazon's philosophy, how the device tracks customer behavior as well as flow charts of how it determines who a "stranger" is and whether it should take any sort of "investigation activity" against them.
The meeting document spells out the process in a much blunter way than Amazon's cutesy marketing suggests. "[Astro] slowly and intelligently patrols the home when unfamiliar person are around, moving from scan point to scan point (the best location and pose in any given space to look around) looking and listening for unusual activity," one of the files reads. "Vesta moves to a predetermined scan point and pose to scan any given room, looking past and over obstacles in its way. Vesta completes one complete patrol when it completes scanning all the scan point on the floorplan." [...]
Developers who worked on Astro say the versions of the robot they worked on did not work well. "Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity. The person detection is unreliable at best, making the in-home security proposition laughable," a source who worked on the project said. "The device feels fragile for something with an absurd cost. The mast has broken on several devices, locking itself in the extended or retracted position, and there's no way to ship it to Amazon when that happens." "They're also pushing it as an accessibility device but with the masts breaking and the possibility that at any given moment it'll commit suicide on a flight of stairs, it's, at best, absurdist nonsense and marketing and, at worst, potentially dangerous for anyone who'd actually rely on it for accessibility purposes," the source said.
The meeting document spells out the process in a much blunter way than Amazon's cutesy marketing suggests. "[Astro] slowly and intelligently patrols the home when unfamiliar person are around, moving from scan point to scan point (the best location and pose in any given space to look around) looking and listening for unusual activity," one of the files reads. "Vesta moves to a predetermined scan point and pose to scan any given room, looking past and over obstacles in its way. Vesta completes one complete patrol when it completes scanning all the scan point on the floorplan." [...]
Developers who worked on Astro say the versions of the robot they worked on did not work well. "Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity. The person detection is unreliable at best, making the in-home security proposition laughable," a source who worked on the project said. "The device feels fragile for something with an absurd cost. The mast has broken on several devices, locking itself in the extended or retracted position, and there's no way to ship it to Amazon when that happens." "They're also pushing it as an accessibility device but with the masts breaking and the possibility that at any given moment it'll commit suicide on a flight of stairs, it's, at best, absurdist nonsense and marketing and, at worst, potentially dangerous for anyone who'd actually rely on it for accessibility purposes," the source said.
Sounds like fun. (Score:4, Funny)
Must get someone else to buy it and put up videos of its antics.
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Does it come with a machine gun or is that optional?
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Why would I put an autonomous version of this with cameras that can just move around the house spying on my and my family???
They couldn't pay me to put one of these in my home...or anywhere.
So what? (Score:3)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem is the marketing, the promises being sold. Sony AIBO sold itself as an entertainment device. [wikipedia.org]. Also in this day of surveillance one should question anything that comes into the home or business.
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Problem is the marketing, the promises being sold. Sony AIBO sold itself as an entertainment device. [wikipedia.org]. Also in this day of surveillance one should question anything that comes into the home or business.
Once in a while, or when adding anything new to my home network, I run deep nmap or zenmap scans on the whole internal network to look for open ports on systems.
I also have daily logs mailed from my router to my internal mail server.
Armed with all that, I can write new rules to control access to and from my network.
Yes, I do have a lot of free time on my hands.
Baseline (Score:4, Interesting)
You mention that you scan your network when you add a new device, and periodically thereafter. OK, that seems like a good place go start. But does “new device” include the installation of a new piece of software on your network? How do you handle silent installs?
The most interesting question for me, however, might be how you establish a valid baseline. Suppose that today you were to install your first Windows 10 device You monitor activity and you identify a bunch of Microsoft IP addresses where your W10 machine is exchanging data. It looks to be associated with the Windows Update feature. It seems legitimate. But what you don’t spot is that every now and then, at pseudo-random intervals, your W10 machine is pushing gigabytes of data to Microsoft. They might not do so in the same real-time way that Amazon does, but then maybe Microsoft’s use case is a bit different.
I applaud you for your diligence - you already do more than 99% of the population - but it’s always good to challenge assumptions from time to time.
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That's a fine approach for you, but how about the other 99.99% of the population in the industrialized world who 1) don't know how to run nmap, 2) don't know how to interpret the results, 3) don't know how to craft rules for their home router, 4) don't have a router they can a) access and b) supports such rule-based network management, 5) don't have the time to do that kind of m
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I applaud you. I want to copy you. Can you list and detail everything you do? I leave tcpdump running on my firewall for a couple days, then my pythons scripts scan through the data and plot IP traffic and remote host counts. I have all known DNSoverHTTPS IP's blocked and port 853 (DnsOverTLS) blocked at my commercial-grade hardware firewall that sits between the home networks and the cable modem. I have a pihole and Cisco opendns blocking all known bad sites. Other than lots of matplotlib graphs
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So this is just like the autopilot in Tesla cars- a perpetual performance promise. It boggles the mind how companies can make these outright lies to their customers and stay in business.
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It boggles the mind how companies can make these outright lies to their customers and stay in business.
People have been buying snake oil for all of recorded history. cf. Ivermectin. This is no different. Once in a while some government body heaves itself over and sues someone, but a couple of months later everyone forgets and out come the next round of bogus products.
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When I first started working remotely, I was semi-seriously debating getting a temi robot [robotemi.com] to go to meetings and things like that. It's about $4000, which is a quite a bit more than I'd like to pay for something of this sort But it would have been amusing to see how well it might work in an office. Give it a parking space in the corner or something and people can come over and ask me questions, go hang out in the lunch room, etc.
At $999, assuming there's a development system for controlling it, it could b
Someone remind me... (Score:1)
... why is Amazon allowed to exist?
Re:Someone remind me... (Score:5, Insightful)
... why is Amazon allowed to exist?
Because they make lots of money and give some of it to the people who make the rules
Re: Someone remind me... (Score:2)
They also give valuable information to the scary 3 letter agencies on demand.
The cat's out of the bag, and no way the government will do anything about this except put on a good feels show to shut you up.
Get back to making your sprockets, (Score:2)
Jetson.
Investigation action (Score:2)
cat and dog (Score:2)
If it would take the dog out to pee when we're away from home, or clean the cat litter box, it might be worth it. Otherwise...
(and yes, I know there are so-called self-cleaning cat litter boxes)
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Nuts, I just posted this to the wrong thread. Apologies.
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Nuts, I just posted this to the wrong thread. Apologies.
And yet still oddly appropriate. A home robot that could let the animals out, feed them, and clean up after them would be huge... even if you just rented it while on vacation.
Re: cat and dog (Score:3)
Re: cat and dog (Score:2)
"(and yes, I know there are so-called self-cleaning cat litter boxes)"
Which require DRM super special cat litter (mentioned here on /. some time ago IIRC)
Leave it to a modern corp to come up with something awesome, something exciting, something people may even rush out in droves to buy, only to fuck it to hell and gone with DRM, spyware, "golden screwdriver", ad nauseum, and it happens because some greedy fuck within the company ordered their engineers to include this millstone.
That's the point? (Score:3)
If I were to get a robot like this, I'd expect it to be tracking everything I do like some sort of butler. Seems a bit creepy and weird, but I don't see it as anything useful unless it had some sort of learning built in
Re: That's the point? (Score:2)
As it stands, it's functions are fairly limited. AV/recongnition, mobile screen and speaker, ability to patrol the house when you are away. I saw what looked like a place where you could put a small drink bottle and have the robot carry it to a guest, but that is about the extent of it.
The price tag is too steep. If it was 300 to maybe 500 dollars, they would have a lot more buyers.
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It's nice to see that Markov Chains can still post to Slashdot. Especially on a story about an incompetent robot. The symmetry is pleasing.
Privacy? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: Privacy? (Score:2)
At least the telescreen is mobile, so you don't have to worry about the Ministries coming for you because you were standing away from it for too long.
Someone at Amazon saw "Automated Customer Service" (Score:2)
at Netflix and thought "Oh! That sounds awesome!
Astro tracks everything (Score:2)
Well Jesus Christ on a bike, I would never have expected that in a million years from such a staunch privacy minded company like Amazon! :-}
Management (Score:2)
Developers who worked on Astro say the versions of the robot they worked on did not work well. "Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity. The person detection is unreliable at best, making the in-home security proposition laughable," a source who worked on the project said. "The device feels fragile for something with an absurd cost. The mast has broken on several devices, locking itself in the extended [position]
So management said, "Is it ready?" and engineering said "No, it's not ready," and management said "Ship it!"
Sounds familiar.