Fungi of the rain forest can be nasty parasites. Eager to reproduce, they’ll infect a far larger, more powerful insect , taking control of its brain, and using its strength against it–animating the zombie insect to climb to the far reaches of the rain forest canopy. The insect dies, of course, but the spores are released in the perfect spot, giving the fungus its best chance of living on.

Project Alias is the technological equivalent to parasitic fungus. But instead of latching onto an insect, it latches onto a Google Home or Amazon Alexa device–taking control of their strengths for its own purposes. Project Alias serves as a gatekeeper between you and big corporations. It effectively deafens the home assistant when you don’t want it listening, and brings it to life when you do.

It’s a dramatic metaphor, but an apt one to Tellart designer Bjørn Karmann and Topp designer Tore Knudsen. After all, Google’s and Amazon’s voice assistants are now listening on more than a billion devices worldwide, even sharing them by mistake.

“This [fungus] is a vital part of the rain forest, since whenever a species gets too dominant or powerful it has higher chances of getting infected, thus keeping the diversity in balance,” says Tore Knudsen. “We wanted to take that as an analogy and show how DIY and open source can be used to create ‘viruses’ for big tech companies.”

Project Alias is designed as a completely open-source hardware/software solution for a world where big corporations have the ability to listen to us all the time. The hardware is a plug-powered microphone/speaker unit that can sit on top of your smart speaker of choice. It’s powered by a pretty typical raspberry pie chipset, the tool of choice for homebrew electronics aficionados.

The speaker sounds like a white noise machine to the assistant, covering your speech with an inaudible, omnipresent static. That is, until the software side comes into play. You can train the Alias through local machine learning (no cloud here!) to learn how to wake the assistant to a unique keyword, disabling the static.