It started, as so many things do, with a 90-second video on X.
A young, bespectacled woman with a charming German accent speaks, to camera, about Spectre I, “the first smart device that stops unwanted audio recordings from happening around you.”
Then, like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the device appears—a sleek, black dome with small perforations, bathed in a ring of soft orange light.
It is beautiful. And it whipped the internet into a frenzy. Some were eager—“instant buy” and “excited to try it”—while others were skeptical: “This seems like the perfect Trojan horse for an intel agency or malign actor to infiltrate and actually use to monitor targets.”
The young woman in the video is Aida Baradari, the product’s inventor. And at the end of last week, she found herself, somewhat unexpectedly, in the eye of the latest technology hype hurricane.
“I did not expect it to blow up like this,” she told me.
