It would be mostly quiet (remember that humans only hear up to ~20 kHz).
Sure, this is a joke today, but if we continue down our current path, we would probably hit ultrasonic rates in the not too distant future.
The video was fun and insightful to watch. Big fan of sonification of computer processes. We can hear such a large and important range of frequencies (more than the 'audible range' because we hear impulses in the subsonic range as events) and it works as a nice complementary in real time for an experience that charts can't convey.
I talked to a scientist who works on sonificantion over a cofee once. Whats interesting is, that they keep finding applications where sonification is superior to visualisation. it boils down to continuous monitoring being more efficient via an audio channel, because humans are not really able to focus on a monitor without occasional distractions. If you do the sonification right, its also easier to detect subtle changes over time.
So true. Although I often prefer silence, the sounds my devices make can be really nice. For example I open my Nextcloud app on my phone and the drives in my server start rattling. I find it soothing.
Reminds me of Picard lecturing a young engineer on how in the old days they “were trained to detect some warp core misalignment of .2 micron” (or something).
I understand that some astronomers listen to radio telescope outputs and my car mechanic can often hear what’s wrong in a heartbeat.
This would be like the old school computing environment where you get an audible beep every time something is written to your hard disk. People noticed abusive code much more easily then.
There's been times I've seen the HDD light blinking and I've thought to myself "You're running remote-desktop right now. Why do you need the hard disk so much?"
This is interesting little project, would love to see a counter somewhere of how many requests i've sent by the end of the day, definitely would be in the thousands! It's insane how 0 privacy, we humans have, given WE created this, every word we type, every word we speak, to some point is tracked
I tire of the notion that if we don't have the technical acumen to remove technical changes that provide data to third parties and know the implications of what it means that we opted ourselves into no privacy.
As opposed to the reality of these changes being relentlessly forced on us with often opaque privacy implications.
You are blaming a blind man for not seeing what people are taking from him.
The very framing that we've opted ourselves into a privacy-less world is a lawyer's shoehorned logic applied to modern technology. It's a tortured conception of the world.
I interpreted the GP comment very differently. I took it to just mean that “we” as “humanity as a whole” have constructed the no privacy world we inhabit. Which seems quite true. I don’t get any sense of casting blame on individuals for lacking the technical acumen to secure their own data. I absolutely agree with your sentiment though.
Humans aren't a cohesive team acting with a common goal, so we do a lot of things to other humans that would be crazy if those other humans counted as "ourselves" and we were a team, such as trade sanctions, closed borders, chemical warfare, resource competition, Coldplay, and of course greenhouse gas emissions. But we've never been a team, and it's an implausible expectation.
Presumably it's google analytics. Some ad blockers will block google analytics. Also Google Analytics claims to not do cross site tracking or build user profiles, whether you believe that is up to you, but it's incredibly commonly used by website owners to track their own traffic.
A friend of mine in university 10+ years ago wrote a simple utility to feed web request data bytestreams directly to audio output, essentially creating static noise when webpages were doing things. He said it led him to some interesting discoveries.
I absolutely hate the combined location/search bar. I get the autofill of previous locations visited, but sending every single key press is not something I'm interested in at all. Is this a Chrome only feature or any browser that has default search engine set to Google?
No, the reason doesn't matter. Seemingly-benign things like update checks, NTP syncs, and weather apps still create metadata about the fact that you're awake and using the computer plus your physical location. Not even VPN avoids this.
So you're telling someone that's looking for an alternative to Google automatically collecting every keystroke they make and using it for ads, not to switch to Firefox because Mozilla collects, uhm, telemetry?
That's not what I said at all ... not even remotely close. I said Firefox phones home, which it does. Firefox is OK but it's not all rainbows and unicorns.
Some people can, but I've disabled that shite. Also, I don't use Chrome, so it would still be interesting if the default search was not Google in Chrome to see if Chrome still sends the keystrokes to Googs. It's one of those things that I've always hoped Chrome keylogging was just a conspiracy theory, but never cared to look one way or the other. There are some things that even for science I just don't have the time, so hoping others will/do.
1. Quick and easy: Install pihole and add every reasonable list you can find of tracker urls to block. And just watch the live log.
2. Takes a bit more time: install opnsense or pfsense. Block dns out of your network (but allow pihole) and watch the live log of blocked dns requests. Assuming everythong has been told to use pihole
3 (bonus round). A bit more time again: create vlans or similar put the devices that you have checked every do not call home option on and block their internet access. And watch the live logs of blocked traffic
Its quite a depressing process and not sure its worth maintaing as a live setup, but its certainly an eye opener.
Each one of these steps blocks an order of magnitude less stuff, but is interesting whats in each bucket. Pihole gets hits at an astounding rate
I tried this exact setup with a combination of Ubiquiti and pihole config. It is really unmaintainable and I missed a verification / audit layer, especially for verifying that the Chinese grass/vacuum robots didn’t leak data, etc.
It would be a full time job, and then some, when the kids’ apps didn’t work due to my block lists…
Since then I have surrendered and now use a custom Cloudflare DNS endpoint.
Fwiw ubiquity devices are some of the "set every setting to never call home but still did" devices. I cant remember if they also tried to bypass the configured dns.
I still use it but keep the devices on a vlan that cannot dial out.
And use the software not an appliance to manage it.
Its not just the slick ui, its the devices themselves, and how well it all works. I got fed up of wifi at home not being as good as at work. And unifi are cheap compared to some corporate grade stuff
Search suggestions are hardly ever useful, but cause a massive privacy leak.
They are shipped on by default for most browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), but at lease they can be disabled (search for "search suggestions" in config).
are they really able to claim to be democratic if they are analyzing and storing forever all this data without the informed and explicit consent of the surveilled?
I suggest that the number of people who are aware of the full extent of the scale of this surveillance AND have fully thought through all of the future implications of this comapred to the populations is a rounding error. A minority are capable of mouthing something cynical like "oh yeah they record everything." With no further thinking beyond that. Perhaps even here in this community.
Yes, they are able to. Democracy in no way prevents this level of surveillance, clearly. And in fact, the entire surveillance state/economy developed almost entirely under democratic governments. If you were to make any inference based on that alone, then, it would be that it at least enhances or enables it.
This reminds of little rat chrome extension https://github.com/dnakov/little-rat which tracks network requests by other extensions. This sound feature should be added to that or unblock as an extension
Wouldn't most of this just be analytics? Pretty sure most sites use Google Analytics. It's not like it's sending your darkest secrets and the fact you still call your mum mummy.
Hearing the actual frequency of data transfers to companies would probably make people much more aware of the constant data flow from their devices. And I think it would eventually start to scare me
Ok, now, can you add a think sparkline graph down the left edge of the page, either a whisker plot or a line graph, illustrating the density? If the information becomes too dense, maybe spread out to a spectrograph?
Interesting that the next thing down on HN right now is https://www.titledrops.net/ which actually implements this near the bottom of the page, just title drops instead of calls to google.
This is awesome! I would like the same thing for Windows though, but for every 1 GB of data sent to MS, Steve Ballmer would quote one of his classics, like "Microsoft is not a monopoly" or "Google’s not a real company"
Devil's advocate but it's disingenuous to say "when you click x it sends your click to Google"
Sure, it's sending that info to Google's servers, in the same way it's sending your click to your ISP. But that data is reasonably only accessible by the people who instrumented that tracking. Businesses -- and governments -- install these tools on their websites so they can better understand how people use them.
I bet it's possible to map every single human's social connections given enough time to correlate their network activity, e.g. a message-send on your phone that causes a notification to be delivered to your friend's phone. No need to break TLS or do anything other than encourage people to make as many network connections as possible all the time, record the fact that a given IP address has sent or received data, and wait days/weeks/years for enough correlations to filter out from the unbelievable volume of noise.
TLS-all-the-things actually makes this problem worse because now every single connection has to leave my network to hit some “““trusted””” origin/Cloudflare/whatever server instead of just being cached at my gateway.
>> But that data is reasonably only accessible by the people who instrumented that tracking.
... and Google... and the people they sell aggregated traffic data to...
CloudFlare (e.g. NSA [joke!]) also gets a truckload of data from each web call, and your ISP, and the hosts of any <script> tags, and the image hosts, and all the engagement tracking plugins in your site...
Yeah, it’s not like Google spins up a separate DB for you when you sign up for Analytics – everything’s in one pile, ready to be mined for that sweet sweet user data. (That’s the reason there’s such a generous free tier for website owners, of course.)
You are technically correct, but one shouldn't have to be In The Know to avoid this stuff. Computers should not be privacy-adversarial by default.
This is the same mindset that shames people for their “unhealthy food choices” when the most widely available, widely affordable, and widely advertised food is sugary corn slop.
I've always found it funny how is Android being better at blocking Google requests than iOS is. You'd think Apple wouldn't be so willing to sell out their users for a sketchy default, but apparently a captive userbase doesn't have much say in the matter anyways.
Citation needed. This 2018 study [1] looks at google data collection on android and iOS in various aspects, and concludes that android devices send quite a bit more to Google than iOS devices.
Sure, this is a joke today, but if we continue down our current path, we would probably hit ultrasonic rates in the not too distant future.
The video was fun and insightful to watch. Big fan of sonification of computer processes. We can hear such a large and important range of frequencies (more than the 'audible range' because we hear impulses in the subsonic range as events) and it works as a nice complementary in real time for an experience that charts can't convey.