Everything can be a microphone: audio recovered from chip bags, lightbulbs and lidar
emollick · x · 2026-09-19
Responding to talk of AIs communicating via CPU temperature fluctuations, Ethan Mollick resurfaced a thread on acoustic side-channel research: audio can be recovered from the vibrations of chip bags in video, the light fluctuations of hanging bulbs moved by speech, robot vacuum lidar beams, and even a phone camera's autofocus. The point: privacy is hard because everything can be a microphone.
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