Worried that the cops might bust in your door any minute, or simply really paranoid? How cool would it be if you could initiate a self-destruction sequence for your Mac using only your voice, just like Captain Picard would use to destroy The Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Well, awesomely, you can. And it’s pretty easy to do!
As pointed out by blogger Jacob Salmela, Automator actually supports dictation in the latest versions of OS X Yosemite.
All you need to do is enable Enhanced Dictation under the Dictation & Speech section of System Preferences, then create a new Automator action using Dictation Command as base, and then modify it to run a command like rm -rf / whenever you say your “self-destruct” word within ear distance of your Mac. Obviously you’d want to set your secret self-destruct code to something pretty obscure, and unlikely to come up in conversation: “Antidisestablishmentarianism” might make for a good one.
Check out Salmela’s full post at the link below to be walked through the step-by-step setup.
Source: Jacob Salmela
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
2 responses to “Give your Mac a voice-activated self-destruct sequence”
I’d like to point out that since you’d be running this workflow in userspace and not as root, a rm -Rf / won’t do anything but give back a ton of permission denials. Even a rm -Rf ~ won’t allow you to nuke your home folder.
A better option would be to enable FileVault, use a voice command to fire some applescript to force a shutdown and you’ve got a locked disk. Make the voice command something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNrWgjh9tnU&channel=00banky00
Orange Monkey Eagle