Whilst I’m not disputing the fundamental veracity of the claims made in this article, like far too many I see in OneZero, the argument itself is poorly made and its conclusions unjustified inferences rather than logically validated deductions.
There are many ways to hide databursts in a standard datastream (not least, not making them bursts at all but part of the background stream from the device/apps). I’m not going into them here, there are lots of places to find out how to hide data inside other data (‘steganography’ is a good starting search term for those unversed in the topic), but … even allowing for correctness of the general thrust of the argument that Apple/Amazon/Google/MS/whoever aren’t spying on us as such … the many, recurring, documented cases of digital assistants being triggered by non-trigger sounds are just that: many, recurring and documented — and, however unintentionally, it’s disingenuous to claim that means there’s nothing to worry about in the same way that it would be negligently bad advice to suggest that, because people don’t deliberately pass on sexually transmitted infections, STIs don’t, therefore, exist.
However, all that aside, the idea that the ‘laws’ ¹ of Probability dictate <something or other> is bandied around so often that I all but despair of the human race and seriously wonder how we have managed to survive this long, let alone evolve as far as we have.
A roulette wheel is a closed system, in which every number from 0 to 32 has a 1/33 chance of being the result of spinning the wheel and launching the ball.
That does not, however, mean that, if the wheel is spun an infinite number of times, sooner or later, each and every number must be the result at least once. It is not the wheel that defines the event space but the different sequences of results that may occur as a result of spinning it.
For a single spin of the wheel, each result is 1/33 likely.
For more than one spin, each possible sequence of results is equally as likely: for three spins, the chance of the sequence being ‘0,0,0’ is equal to it being ‘1,2,3’ or ‘32,9,12’ … or any other sequence.
Given an infinite number of spins, the chance of the sequence being ‘0,0,0,0 […] 0’ is the same as any single other and the fact that there are more alternative sequences is entirely irrelevant, because … for any sequence … there is the same number of alternatives that could have resulted instead. The alternatives do not interact with each other but exist in isolation. So, even giving something that is highly likely the chance to occur does not mean it must inevitably occur, let alone that something unlikely to occur must do so.
To take the properties of a closed system and use them as the basis of prediction for those of an infinite one is such a fundamental class/category error that, as I said, I’m at a loss to explain how our species isn’t long since extinct, given how fundamentally irrational we are. There can only ever be one sequence that occurs from an infinite number of events … and each one has no more chance of occurring than does the one in which a specific event never occurs — the specific does not imply the general … inference is not deduction.
The fact that something could happen does not mean it must.
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¹ They aren’t actually laws, but descriptions of observations. They are no more facts than it is a fact that (in a gendered language, like German, French, Spanish, etc.) a table is masculine/feminine. The ‘laws’ are defined by the terms used to describe the observed phenomenon, not by the phenomenon itself … and, if any of them do coincide with the external reality they describe that is no guarantee that any other so-called ‘law’ does … nor indeed that any given law will always do so — that’s the thing about the halting problem … our ‘laws’ are only such until we finally find an exception to them, but the fact that we don’t find any doesn’t imply that there aren’t any, only that we haven’t found one ².
² No, the ‘laws’ defined within a closed system (such as Maths) don’t count. They are no less self-supporting constructs than is the linguistic ‘law’ in French that a table is of the female gender. In German, tables are masculine. In English, tables have no gender (not even neuter). All three languages are correct about the gender of tables … tables, however, continue to be whatever they are, irrespective of the ‘laws’ defining their gender as far as any given speaker is concerned. Maths, Physics, Biology are closed systems, their ‘laws’ having no more pertinence outside themselves than does the 1/33 chance of any individual result of spinning the roulette wheel have any influence on the chance of any specific sequence of spins occurring.
