Alexa admin commands

[Cramig88]

Hey everyone,

so I have had an Alexa echo or dot, whatever. Maybe for the last two or three years. Obviously I say “Alexa, turn on all lights” or otherwise. 
Power went out a few times knocking my internet offline (no UPS yet, that’s a project in the works) but she calls home every time to do something internal…

hmmm

so I got to thinking, any admin commands for Alexa?  Google says nothing and Alexa responds with nothing

 

hey Alexa, what is your Ip address? (I don’t know)

hey Alexa, can you map my network?

(she says yes if I install blah blah)

hey Alexa, can I alter your kernel? (Dono)

What is your DNS (describes what a dns is rather than her “father”)

 

any admin commands to control this… spy?

 

thanks!

[whispous]

In addition to reporting back on you, it also needs an internet connection to process a lot of your commands. It's not internet conencted just for the hell of it.

 

You can find it's IP address by visiting the management page for your router and looking at connected devices.

You can't make any significant modifications with any "magic" admin commands.

[Cramig88]

32 minutes ago, whispous said:

In addition to reporting back on you, it also needs an internet connection to process a lot of your commands. It's not internet conencted just for the hell of it.

 

You can find it's IP address by visiting the management page for your router and looking at connected devices.

You can't make any significant modifications with any "magic" admin commands.

I have the ip but I can’t ssh or otherwise to it. There is no “root” functionality - hence why I put open source as a tag

Odd a device needs outside “management” to turn my internal-net lights on. I mean, she can apparently map my network but don’t understand “nmap” as a command

… Point made I hope?

[Needfuldoer]

33 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

Odd a device needs outside “management” to turn my internal-net lights on.

All the speech recognition, command processing, and speech synthesis magic is done in the cloud. The Echo Dot device in your house is barely more than a dumb terminal.

[jaslion]

37 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

I have the ip but I can’t ssh or otherwise to it. There is no “root” functionality - hence why I put open source as a tag

Odd a device needs outside “management” to turn my internal-net lights on. I mean, she can apparently map my network but don’t understand “nmap” as a command

… Point made I hope?

This thing is dumb as bricks. Its literally just a microphone and speaker that HAS to do 99% of its compute in the cloud.

 

If you dont want it to spy on you get something that can work for you offline.

 

Its what Home assistant for example is all bout

[Cramig88]

Question remains. Admin commands and access?  Idk if she’s open or closed source but I’d love to see the code and modify it to suit my needs

map my network? While reporting to the cloud?  Nope. Map my network and report to 127.0.0.1 (172? Dyslexic, minor but meh)

[jaslion]

Its extremely closed source. Everything is in the cloud so there is no way you can even do basically anything with it even if you could see its code.

 

This shoulda been a question three years ago

 

But basically if you dont want a spy dont buy a cloud connected listening debice.

[Needfuldoer]

25 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

Question remains. Admin commands and access?

None. It hasn't been jailbroken and these little appliance boxes are locked down so customers can't accidentally break them.

 

25 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

Idk if she’s open or closed source but I’d love to see the code and modify it to suit my needs

Amazon has to link to any GPL packages they use, but without an unlocked bootloader you're not modifying squat.

 

25 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

map my network? While reporting to the cloud?  Nope. Map my network and report to 127.0.0.1 (172? Dyslexic, minor but meh)

It's not a general-purpose computer. It won't do that. It can't run nmap locally because it doesn't have nmap on it. You can probably set up a custom Alexa command to run nmap on another computer then read it back to you, but again it's all going to go through the cloud because that's where all the horsepower is.

 

If you don't want anything going to the cloud, throw the Echo away. It's literally a loss-leader marketing device designed to get you hooked into Amazon's ecosystem so you buy more of their products and generate ad revenue for them. It's a hot mic that always listens to you so it can insidiously tailor ads to whatever it is you're talking about, and also tell you the weather or a joke.

 

It can't locally do anything you're asking it to do. You're asking a fish to climb a tree.

 

For what you want, you'll have to build your own Alexa-alike clone stack from scratch.

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/