Terrifying Lamp Will Record Your Conversations Then Live-Tweet 'Em

If Crate&Barrell and Orwell collaborated on a modern lamp design, they might have come up with Conversnitch. The device, designed by Kyle McDonald and Brian House, was made for under $100, and can record near-by conversations and turns them into Tweets. The mind reels at what Woodward and Bernstein could have done with this contraption.

Conversnitch uses a Raspberry Pi-enabled computer, a microphone, and an LED that can be screwed into any bulb socket. It then sends out its recorded messages to the internet ether through the closest WiFi spot and Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, meaning random people get paid small fees to transcribe the recordings and post them on the surveillance lamp's Twitter Account, @conversnitch.

“What does it mean to deploy one of these in a library, a public square, someone’s bedroom? What kind of power relationship does it set up?” House said. While an interesting artistic statement, we imagine this actually being a pragmatic tool for suspicious lovers, sadistic co-workers, and even journalists. We don't know if we'll be buying one of these lamps, but this could give a whole new scope to the sub-tweet if properly employeed. What a time we live in…

h/t WIRED

@zachsokol

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