
Trolling My Kids with Google Home [video] - dreamache
https://coursetro.com/posts/other/26/Trolling-My-Kids-with-Google-Home-(And-how-you-can-too)
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BuffaloBagel
Great troll but I would criticize using the cops as the Boogeyman.

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semi-extrinsic
Don't know why you're being downvoted. Having your kids be afraid of
contacting the police (IRL or on the phone) in an emergency situation could be
fatal for you or your kids.

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sedachv
A friend of mine works as a public defender in Los Angeles (and prior to that,
worked as a public defender in San Francisco). His advice is to never call the
cops in all but the most extreme situations. The risk of them maiming or
killing someone, performing unwanted illegal entries and searches, making an
arrest based on unrelated things they see (suspected drug paraphernalia, etc),
spurious complaints to child protective services, baseless detention and
arrest, or just plain mistreatment and harassment is too great. In addition,
if there is any person on parole or probation present when the cops show up,
that person's chances of going to prison are very high, because a cop can say
almost anything and have that be taken as a parole violation.

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gshulegaard
Having called the cops in a Domestic Violence incident in CA, I will say that
none of these horror stories happened to me. In fact, the Police handled the
situation well, it was the District Attorney's office that failed to follow
through with the case on a number of things.

I have a number of friends who ended up becoming officers and I sympathize
with a lot of their struggles.

There are problems with our Law Enforcement system. There are bad officers.
But let's try to not over-generalize, stereotype, and point fingers at a
single point of failure. It's a complex issue with many parts.

As far as LA police go, I am motorcyclist which randomly lead me to find out
about "OfficerRob" who motovlogs some of his on duty experiences as a
motorcycle cop in LA:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2DeutGisK66k4JdomiiUyw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2DeutGisK66k4JdomiiUyw)

I personally like his motovlog...

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sedachv
> I have a number of friends who ended up becoming officers and I sympathize
> with a lot of their struggles.

Oh yeah, I am not saying that all cops are bad or that you will get killed if
you call them. Just that there are risks to doing so. I should also mention
that my father worked as a cop and has given me similar advice in regards to
interaction with police (don't), based presumably on his personal observations
of the job and his colleagues, and it did not even occur to me to mention that
in the post above. I certainly don't mean to demonize cops.

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lisivka
So what advice you will give to your kids? "Don't call a police at all" or
"call police when dad is already dead only".

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sleepychu
The actual punishment made me laugh so hard. "Mommy, is that real?"

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mgv11
Smart girl to question to that!

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internaut
With Troll Dad I think you get taught critical thinking at an early stage.

We should use the Asch Test in schools.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4MkcfJA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4MkcfJA)

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6stringmerc
Ha! Very well executed and totally dig the 'having fun' part of it - eg. kiddo
still could doubt it was real.

Reminds me of _Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure_ when they hide the cassette
player on a timer to distract Ted's Dad at the police station, or of
'Soundboards' to call places with Arnold's voice. I do have a fondness for
pranks.

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megawatthours
> I am going to send over 15 cute boys for you to kiss

You're a cool dad.

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ChristianGeek
You had me at "you better get your kissy face ready!"

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kevin_thibedeau
I can see a future SO using that line on her.

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gnicholas
Would love to see a bot that listened for my burglar alarm and then just
played an audio file with a voice recording of an increasingly-worried
security dispatcher: Hello, this is [blah] security, and we've just received a
break-in notification from your home. Is everything alright? Hello? We are
calling your emergency contact numbers and if we do not receive a response
officers will be dispatched to [address]."

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knodi123
Doesn't your burglar alarm already do that? Or is it an unmonitored alarm?

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gnicholas
It doesn't talk out loud, which would strengthen the deterrent effect. It
would also work even if our internet/phones were cut, which makes the alarm
company unreachable.

But yes, it could also be used with unmonitored and very cheap solutions, like
door-stoppers with built-in alarms. It might not fool every criminal, but
compared to the cost of a full-blown, monitored system (thousands up-front and
hundreds/year) it'd be a steal (pun intended).

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agumonkey
I thougth he meant the Google Home app. Which can be either leaky or trolley,
since every phone on the network will be able to be remotes for ChromeCasts,
you can communicate through your playlist. Or get caught.

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BWStearns
_The Lady_ from Silicon Valley, v0.0.1

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pbhjpbhj
So when are Google shutting down Google Home ...

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macandcheese
I fear for the children of the future.

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learned
Just curious, but what about this of all things makes you feel that way? It
just seems like a fun moment between father and daughter.

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macandcheese
Robots raising children? Nothing wrong with this, and it's cute, admittedly,
but I can't help but think that in 20 years we'll have robot teachers
instructing rooms of children who go home to their robot nanny and rarely, if
ever, make human contact with their people parents.

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soylentcola
Not sure how this really relates to "robots raising children" though. More
just having a laugh with tech that young kids sort-of understand but don't
quite grasp the limits of yet.

I remember as a kid we got a Commodore 128 computer and I was teaching myself
to write BASIC programs. I had two younger brothers (I was maybe 9 years old,
they would've been 6 or 7) and while they generally grasped "computers", they
didn't really know the difference between what they saw in movies and what our
little home computer could do.

After seeing Wargames or something like that, I wrote a program that simulated
dialing into "the government" and displaying menu options. Even had the
Hollywood-style one character at a time by adding delays to my PRINT commands.

Basically it was just a bunch of menu options you could pick from but in the
end you end up selecting an option that commands it to launch nukes or
something like that. Like I said, I was a kid so my understanding of things
wasn't very subtle either.

Still, it scared the shit out of my brothers before my mom told me to quit
screwing with them. Hell, we didn't even have a modem hooked up to the
thing... Mom was a big no-fun.

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ansible
OMG, my friend pulled this exact prank on his younger brother and some of our
other friends. He had a "hack password" command that looked like it was trying
all the combinations and some other stuff.

I don't think he had a modem at the time either... though his dad did try to
build an acoustic modem from plans in Circuit Cellar. I don't recall if they
ever got that working.

Good times.

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soylentcola
Well, we did have a modem (Dad had bought the computer used from a guy at work
and it came with a load of cracked software on floppies and a modem) but I
think my folks were worried about me getting into trouble so they kept it
stashed away somewhere I couldn't access.

Looking back it was probably a good move. No "hacking" the DOD or anything but
I'm sure I'd have at least ran up some phone charges once I discovered BBSes.

