1. Forum
  2. USENET
  3. uk.tech.broadcast

  • Radio 4 World at One

    From JMB99@mb@nospam.net to uk.tech.broadcast on Mon Oct 20 13:22:35 2025
    From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

    I was just listening to the World at One on a Amazon ECHO and they did a report on the big Amazon fault today.

    Some genius at World at One decided to start his report with "ALEXA
    ......." at which point my ECHO switch off so had to switch a real radio on.




    --- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Andy Burns@usenet@andyburns.uk to uk.tech.broadcast on Mon Oct 20 13:49:50 2025
    From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

    JMB99 wrote:

    Some genius at World at One decided to start his report with "ALEXA ......."

    There really ought to be some inaudible signal, that broadcasters can
    embed which tells smart speakers "don't listen for a second" ...

    --- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Roderick Stewart@rjfs@escapetime.myzen.co.uk to uk.tech.broadcast on Mon Oct 20 19:54:27 2025
    From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

    On Mon, 20 Oct 2025 13:49:50 +0100, Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>
    wrote:

    JMB99 wrote:

    Some genius at World at One decided to start his report with "ALEXA ......."

    There really ought to be some inaudible signal, that broadcasters can
    embed which tells smart speakers "don't listen for a second" ...

    Hmm. I'm not sure how that would work. Every radio and TV set would
    have to be capable of playing the inaudible signal, and every smart
    speaker would not only have to be capable of hearing it, but also
    programmed to respond to it... by not responding to it. That's a lot
    of modifications to a lot of equipment.

    Much better would be an inaudible signal in every professional
    presenter's brain telling them to be careful what they say on air.

    Rod.
    --- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From NY@me@privacy.net to uk.tech.broadcast on Mon Oct 20 20:26:28 2025
    From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

    On 20/10/2025 13:22, JMB99 wrote:
    I was just listening to the World at One on a Amazon ECHO and they did a report on the big Amazon fault today.

    Some genius at World at One decided to start his report with
    "ALEXA ......." at which point my ECHO switch off so had to switch a
    real radio on.

    We have got used to using euphemisms such as "Lady A" instead of "Alexa"
    when referring to her in normal conversation.

    I heard of a case where a TV advert was causing people's Alexas to order
    the device being advertised. We turned off auto-ordering to guard
    against that happening by accident during our own conversations.

    Hopefully AWS will have learned lessons from today's huge outage. I
    wonder what the problem was? I've heard that it was related to DNS.
    Presumably a bad DNS record as opposed to just the loss of a DNS server, because I'm sure AWS will have loads of duplicate DNS servers for load-balancing. I hope it turns out to be a cock-up rather than hacking...
    --- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From =?UTF-8?B?Um9nZXIgV2lsa2luc29u?=@RogerPWilkinson@proton.me to uk.tech.broadcast on Thu Oct 30 11:35:39 2025
    From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

    On Mon Oct 20 19:54:27 2025 Roderick Stewart wrote:
    difications to a lot of equipment.

    Much better would be an inaudible signal in every professional
    presenter's brain telling them to be careful what they say on air.
    Probably as likely as finding a competent Labour chancellor....
    --- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2