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.
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.
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
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?
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
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).
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.
Tracker Beeper (2022)
(berthub.eu)394 points by gaws 6 November 2024 | 77 comments
Comments
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.
Imagine a reverse warrant for any person who has searched “torproject.or” in the process of navigating to torproject.org
Would be interesting to run this with and without ad blockers and other filter lists to see how good they do at actually protecting you from tracking.
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
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).
Previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32617787 - Tool beeps every time data is sent to google - 108 comments - Aug 2022
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549604 - Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google - 206 comments - Aug 2022
The TRS-80 flashed an asterisk in the upper right corner of the display.
I wish this was an option with modern computers if nothing else, for old times sake.
Easier than you might think to set up. Set and forget. Do it for your family and friends maybe. Sell routers pre-configured maybe.
Not /the/ answer. Just one not-nothing step.
upvoted
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.
was a crazy episode
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.