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Sound shield foils office eavesdroppers
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‘Cone of silence’ keeps your conversations secret IN Get Smart, the 1960s TV spy comedy, secret agents wanting a private conversation would deploy the “cone of silence”, a clear plastic contraption lowered over the agents’ heads. It never worked – they couldn’t hear each other, while eavesdroppers could pick up every word. Now a modern cone of silence that we are assured will work is being patented by engineers Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their idea, revealed in US patent application 2009/0097671 on 16 April, is to make confidential conversations possible in open-plan offices and canteens. It will even let a conversing group move around a room and still remain in a secure sound bubble. “In increasingly common openplan offices, the violation of employees’ privacy can often become an issue, as third parties overhear
JEAN FRANCOIS CAMPOS/AGENCE VU
such questions unless someone has performed these calculations and placed the results on appropriately labelled web pages – but that may be about to change (see “Google to give Alpha a run for its money”). Wolfram’s team developed software that understands the difference between questions such as “what” and “who”, and turns them into queries that the database can process. In theory, Alpha requests can be made using everyday language, but the level of natural-language processing is very limited, so results are hitand-miss. I asked “$25 million 1945 dollars in 2008” and Alpha successfully worked out that I wanted to know the modern equivalent of a sum of money in the past. Sure enough, out came the answer: $300 million. But it got confused when I entered the request in another form – “$25 million 1945 in 2008”. The phrase “1945 in” was interpreted as 1945 inches, which Alpha multiplied by $25 million and then 2008 to give 98 trillion, measured in the bizarre unit of “inch US dollars”. That was not the only oddity. In a request to plot some data over the “period 1990-2000”, for instance, Alpha interpreted “period” as referring to one of the three 20-minute sections of an ice hockey game. Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and editorial board member at Encyclopaedia Britannica, warns that internet users have little tolerance for sites that do not work as expected: “Any level of frustration sends people away.” Foltz-Smith says that some of these problems will be ironed out before the 11 May launch and that others will be corrected by watching how people use the site. Users will also be able to pay for premium access to Alpha, allowing them to write code to extract and combine data and, if they wish, integrate it with their own data sets. ■
shield”, they do so on their desktop computer. Knowing the position of the computer, the sensors identify the person and map out the locations of people around them. Software their conversations intentionally or assesses who is so close that they unintentionally,” the inventors say must be participants in the in their patent. Their aim is to relieve conversation, and who might be people of that concern. a potential eavesdropper. Instead of plastic domes, they The array of speakers then aims use a sensor network to work out a mix of white noise and randomised where potential eavesdroppers are, office hubbub at the eavesdroppers. and speakers to generate a subtle The subtle, confusing sound makes masking sound at just the right level. the conversation unintelligible. It sounds simple, but it needs quite The ideas are not completely a bit of infrastructure. The walls of new – but what has gone before has big limitations, says Paradiso. “In open-plan offices, the “Current systems put sound out from one source. The sound isn’t violation of employees’ generally placed optimally between privacy can often become potential listeners and the people in an issue” conversation so there can often be the room must be peppered with too much or too little masking noise.” light-switch-sized units that include For instance, the Babble, from a microphone, a speaker, an infrared Sonare Technologies, is a radiolocation sensor and networking sized machine with two speakers circuitry connected to a server. When that emits white noise from your somebody wants to activate what desk to mask what you are saying the MIT researchers call the “sound on the phone. But it is over-noisy, say the MIT team, and also fixed in place, whereas their system’s sensors can track people as they move around, and shift the masking noise accordingly. If they decide to press ahead and exploit the idea, the system will also advise users whether there are other people too close by for it to assure secrecy. “With people often working in large open-plan spaces now, the time has come for ideas like this,” says Paradiso. Klaus Moeller, founder of soundmasking systems maker Logison of Oakville, Ontario, Canada, is impressed with MIT’s ambition but doubts its practicality. Logison uses a proprietary technology called Accumask that masks only speech frequencies to deaden voice transmission in offices – and it needs few fittings. “I wish MIT the best of luck with their idea,” says Moeller. “It sounds very expensive and not very practical in an office environment.” He thinks architects may object to the many wall or ceiling-mounted devices the system needs to follow people –What’s private stays private– around the office. Paul Marks ■ 9 May 2009 | NewScientist | 19
‘Cone of silence’ keeps your conversations secret IN Get Smart, the 1960s TV spy comedy, secret agents wanting a private conversation would deploy the “cone of silence”, a clear plastic contraption lowered over the agents’ heads. It never worked – they couldn’t hear each other, while eavesdroppers could pick up every word. Now a modern cone of silence that we are assured will work is being patented by engineers Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their idea, revealed in US patent application 2009/0097671 on 16 April, is to make confidential conversations possible in open-plan offices and canteens. It will even let a conversing group move around a room and still remain in a secure sound bubble. “In increasingly common openplan offices, the violation of employees’ privacy can often become an issue, as third parties overhear
JEAN FRANCOIS CAMPOS/AGENCE VU
such questions unless someone has performed these calculations and placed the results on appropriately labelled web pages – but that may be about to change (see “Google to give Alpha a run for its money”). Wolfram’s team developed software that understands the difference between questions such as “what” and “who”, and turns them into queries that the database can process. In theory, Alpha requests can be made using everyday language, but the level of natural-language processing is very limited, so results are hitand-miss. I asked “$25 million 1945 dollars in 2008” and Alpha successfully worked out that I wanted to know the modern equivalent of a sum of money in the past. Sure enough, out came the answer: $300 million. But it got confused when I entered the request in another form – “$25 million 1945 in 2008”. The phrase “1945 in” was interpreted as 1945 inches, which Alpha multiplied by $25 million and then 2008 to give 98 trillion, measured in the bizarre unit of “inch US dollars”. That was not the only oddity. In a request to plot some data over the “period 1990-2000”, for instance, Alpha interpreted “period” as referring to one of the three 20-minute sections of an ice hockey game. Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and editorial board member at Encyclopaedia Britannica, warns that internet users have little tolerance for sites that do not work as expected: “Any level of frustration sends people away.” Foltz-Smith says that some of these problems will be ironed out before the 11 May launch and that others will be corrected by watching how people use the site. Users will also be able to pay for premium access to Alpha, allowing them to write code to extract and combine data and, if they wish, integrate it with their own data sets. ■
shield”, they do so on their desktop computer. Knowing the position of the computer, the sensors identify the person and map out the locations of people around them. Software their conversations intentionally or assesses who is so close that they unintentionally,” the inventors say must be participants in the in their patent. Their aim is to relieve conversation, and who might be people of that concern. a potential eavesdropper. Instead of plastic domes, they The array of speakers then aims use a sensor network to work out a mix of white noise and randomised where potential eavesdroppers are, office hubbub at the eavesdroppers. and speakers to generate a subtle The subtle, confusing sound makes masking sound at just the right level. the conversation unintelligible. It sounds simple, but it needs quite The ideas are not completely a bit of infrastructure. The walls of new – but what has gone before has big limitations, says Paradiso. “In open-plan offices, the “Current systems put sound out from one source. The sound isn’t violation of employees’ generally placed optimally between privacy can often become potential listeners and the people in an issue” conversation so there can often be the room must be peppered with too much or too little masking noise.” light-switch-sized units that include For instance, the Babble, from a microphone, a speaker, an infrared Sonare Technologies, is a radiolocation sensor and networking sized machine with two speakers circuitry connected to a server. When that emits white noise from your somebody wants to activate what desk to mask what you are saying the MIT researchers call the “sound on the phone. But it is over-noisy, say the MIT team, and also fixed in place, whereas their system’s sensors can track people as they move around, and shift the masking noise accordingly. If they decide to press ahead and exploit the idea, the system will also advise users whether there are other people too close by for it to assure secrecy. “With people often working in large open-plan spaces now, the time has come for ideas like this,” says Paradiso. Klaus Moeller, founder of soundmasking systems maker Logison of Oakville, Ontario, Canada, is impressed with MIT’s ambition but doubts its practicality. Logison uses a proprietary technology called Accumask that masks only speech frequencies to deaden voice transmission in offices – and it needs few fittings. “I wish MIT the best of luck with their idea,” says Moeller. “It sounds very expensive and not very practical in an office environment.” He thinks architects may object to the many wall or ceiling-mounted devices the system needs to follow people –What’s private stays private– around the office. Paul Marks ■ 9 May 2009 | NewScientist | 19