Denial of Service Attack: People

Really excited to have spent 47 minutes and infinity seconds today forced to sit through an “online chat” with a sales person from Comcast. Instead of what should have taken 5 minutes to complete by filling out, oh I don’t know, a form, Comcast (seriously) forces you to load a Java chat applet, wait for someone to be elated to talk to you and take you step by step through the process of providing (and confirming twice) your home address, phone number, SSN, and crap tons of other bullshit.

Holy christ it was a massive waste of my time! But especially theirs — they must be replicating this across hundreds of reps. So it got me to thinking, I could DOS these guys by combining a few hundred Internet connections, some open source AI software (like ALICE), and a bit of programming.

From a link on the front page of Comcast.com you can immediately initialize a chat session with a human agent. Simply wire the output of this up to the human chat simulator and repeat. I decided to fire an instance of ALICE and see what would happen if acted as the proxy between her and, as it turns out, Comcast representative “Arnil:”

Comcast> Hello Guest_. Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Arnil, please give me a moment to review your information.

Comcast> How are you today?

Guest_> Ah. Fair to partly cloudy.

Comcast> I understand that you are interested in Performance (up to 15Mpbs downloads with PowerBoost) $19.99 per month, is this correct?

Guest_> I never knew I had this correct

Comcast> Let me check if your area is eligible for Internet. Would that be OK?

Guest_> It’s OK to check if my area is eligible.

Comcast>Can you confirm if all these information are correct: 1211 E JOhn ST, Seattle WA 98102

Guest_> Let me think.

Comcast> I need your exact address

Guest_> Are you getting paid to ask me that? That information is confidential.

Comcast> I need your exact address to process your order.

Guest_> Well, what is your credit card number?

Comcast> Are you interesting in proceeding with this order?

Guest_> What is your credit card number?

Comcast> If you are not ready to proceed you can always chat us back.

Guest_> What would chatting you back involve?

Comcast> You can visit www.comcast.com and click the Chat Live with Customer Service button in the upper right.

Guest_> Have you ever clicked the Chat Live with Customer Service button in the upper right?

etc. etc

This actually went on for a while and probably could have kept going for a long time. With modest resources you could tie up their entire Army of sales people*.

Silence Anyone

Sometimes when people talk, it’s incredibly annoying. I’ve often felt as HAL apparently did in 2001: A Space Odyssey when he said to Dave: “Nothing further can be gained from this conversation, goodbye.” How I’d like sometimes to say this and back it up with some audio muscle. So, how about a anti-noise device, modulated to a specific human voice such that the moment the target spoke, the exact inverse waveform was produced and broadcast at just the right angle to completely and immediately cancel their voice?

I imagine this would be really difficult to pull off for several reasons. First, you’d need probably to get the angles just right and account for the speaker being able to move this way and that. If you broadcast the inverted waveform and they tipped their head up, the waves would be at cross angles and wouldn’t quite be synchronized.

Second, you’d need somehow to capture the voice output close to it’s source. If you waited until it reached the receiver you’re too late as it will have spread out in all directions and most of the message will have gotten through to anyone else listening. One idea might be that you could somehow model the persons voice and use computer vision to predict how the person would sound by lip reading. You could then calculate the correct wave form to cancel the sound at roughly the speed of light.

Also, I’m left wondering if you could produce a Cone of Silence using the same setup except allowing for a thin “tunnel” of sound between the source and the target. Anyone outside could never hear what was being said since no sound would escape.