The Security Mentor

It's funny, though. If you turn on the Vista feature that lets you give voice commands to your computer, it will obey voice commands from sound files on Web pages. If you needed another reason to hate web pages with obnoxious noises that play without your permission, now you've got one.

This kind of news catches everyone's attention because it's easy to understand and sounds scary, but here's why it's not particularly newsworthy:

• It's got nothing to do with Vista. Any speech recognition software has the same problem. Theoretically the computer could ignore anything that comes out of its own speakers, but that's way harder than it sounds because of room reflections and distortions. Of course, Microsoft could have set up speech recognition to require you to start with some distnct keyword before it believed it was getting a command, something you could think of as a "Sim Says" feature. Like Apple did fifteen years ago.
• Speech recogntion is off by default. Most people won't have it on. Nasty web sites look to get as many victims as they can.
• There's no money in it. That's the really important issue. Offhand I can't imagine how a crook could do something profitable with this trick. Computer threats today are all about money, not practical jokes
• It only works if you have your speakers turned on. I'm so fed up with background sounds on web sites that my speakers are turned off except when I'm making a Skype call or playing a movie.