Sergio Esposito – författare

As a young child in Naples, Italy, Sergio Esposito sat at his kitchen table observing the daily ritual of his large, loud family bonding over fresh local dishes and simple country wines. While devouring the rich bufala mozzarella, still sopping with milk and salt, and the platters of fresh prosciutto, sliced so thin he could see through it, he absorbed the profound relationship of food, wine, and family in Italian culture.Growing up in Albany, New York, after emigrating there with his family, he always sat next to his uncle Aldo and sipped from his wineglass during their customary hours-long extended family feasts. Thus, from a very early age, Esposito came to associate wine with the warmth of family, the tastes of his mother’s cooking—and, above all, memories of his former life in Italy. When he was in his twenties, he headed for New York and undertook a career in wine, beginning a journey that would culminate in his founding of Italian Wine Merchants, now the leading Italian wine source in America. His career offered him the opportunity to make frequent trips back to Italy to find wine for his clients, to learn the traditions of Italian winemaking, and, in so doing, to rediscover the Italian way of life he’d left behind.Passion on the Vine is Esposito’s intimate and evocative memoir of his colorful family life in Italy, his abrupt transition to life in America, and of his travels into the heart of Italy—its wine country—and the lives of those who inhabit it. The result is a remarkably engaging and entertaining wine/travel narrative replete with vivid portraits of seductive places—the world-famous cellars of Piedmont, the sweeping estates of Tuscany, the lush fields of Campania, the chilly hills of Friuli, the windy beaches of Le Marche; and of memorable people, diverse and vibrant wine artisans—from a disco-dancing vintner who bases his farming on the rhythm of the moon to an obsessive prince who destroys his vineyards before his death so that his grapes will never be used incorrectly.Esposito’s luscious accounts of the wonderful food and wine that are so much a part of Italian life, and his poignant and often hilarious stories of his relationships with his family and Italian friends, make Passion on the Vine an utterly unique and enchanting work about Italy and its eternally seductive lifestyle.

Voice-controllable devices allow hands-free interactions, offering a modern user experience and helping impaired users. However, the voice channel that enables this interaction is also one of their main weaknesses.Higher usability often comes with higher security and privacy risks. As Voice-Controllable Devices are no exception to this, a plethora of new attacks have been carried out against them in recent years. In this book, several attacks are analysed against the voice channel available in the literature; it then devises a bespoke kill chain to facilitate the classification of attack steps and future research. Additionally, the work analyses the design of the notorious Alexa vs Alexa attack, which turned Echo Dot devices against themselves in 2022. Finally, the present volume explores measures against all these attacks and raise important questions about their suitability for user needs.Topics and features:Discusses timely security and privacy challenges in IoT devices, with an emphasis on voice-controllable devicesProvides a framework for assessing and studying attacks against the voice channelAddresses practical attacks successfully carried out against real devices, showing that an impactful attack need not be complexExplores advanced safeguards from a new perspective, questioning whether research is proceeding in the right directionThis powerful volume—containing tips, tricks, and techniques used by ethical hackers to breach the voice channel—serves as the perfect guide for researchers conducting security and privacy research on IoT. It also provides food for thought for graduate students and enthusiasts of these subjects who do not shy away from the mathematics behind the world of machine learning.