Author: Karissa Bell / Source: Mashable
As if we needed more reasons to be freaked out by increasingly powerful digital assistants, there’s a new nightmare scenario: The music you listen to or conversations you hear on TV could hijack your digital assistant with commands undetectable to human ears.
This is known as a “Dolphin Attack” (because dolphins can hear what humans can’t), and researchers have been aware of the possibility for years. The basic idea is that commands could be hidden in high-frequency sounds that our assistant-enabled gadgets can detect, but we are unable to hear.
Researchers proved in 2016 they could use the technique to trigger basic commands, like making phone calls and launching websites. At the time, they hypothesized that it might be possible to embed these audio cues into music and other recordings, which would significantly amp up the creepy factor.
Now, that day has come. In a paper first reported on by The New York Times, researchers proved it is in fact possible to hide audio inside of other recordings in a way that’s nearly undetectable to human ears.
The researchers were able to do this using recordings of music and speech; in both cases, the changes were almost completely undetectable. Notably, the researchers tested this with speech recognition software, not digital assistants, but the implications of the experiment are huge.
In one example, they took a…
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