dentalperson 7 days ago | next |

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.

lynx23 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

teekert 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

stavros 7 days ago | root | parent |

Back when HDDs were noisy, I could tell when my computer was stressed, or about to crash, or hung, etc just from the drive noise.

Similarly now with when my 3D printer is leveling, or about to finish the print, or which part it's printing.

smolder 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

billpg 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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?"

ned99 7 days ago | prev | next |

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

rockskon 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

varenc 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

card_zero 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

jay_kyburz 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

On my Gmail tab, the unlock origin icon tells me it has blocked over 10k requests, and I'm fairly sure I rebooted my computer yesterday.

hifikuno 7 days ago | prev | next |

This is interesting. I always new the big tech companies had trackers all over the place, but I didn't realize it was so bad.

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.

tracerbulletx 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

Kapura 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

anilakar 7 days ago | root | parent |

You only need to AM demodulate it and you basically have a classic radar warning receiver for the internet age :-)

danhau 7 days ago | root | parent |

You mean interpret the noise as an AM signal and demodulate it? I wonder what that would sound like.

dylan604 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

robin_reala 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

Install Firefox, add search bar back to the menu, disable URL bar search, job’s a good’un.

willtemperley 7 days ago | root | parent |

Firefox phones home every time it is opened.

Lio 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Tye key question is why.

For example, if it phones home to check it’s up to date then I’m OK with that.

If it’s for advertising then I’m not OK with it.

Lammy 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

yoavm 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

To do what exactly?

willtemperley 6 days ago | root | parent |

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid#:~:t....

yoavm 6 days ago | root | parent |

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?

Do you really not see the difference?

willtemperley 15 hours ago | root | parent |

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.

uzyn 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I would assume it's most browsers. You can see Google suggestions popping under the address bar as you type on many browsers: Safari, Firefox, etc.

dylan604 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

goodlinks 7 days ago | prev | next |

For me the two things that show this well are:

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

lokimedes 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

goodlinks 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

:(

lokimedes 7 days ago | root | parent |

Yeah, I have noticed that I may have bought into a bit too much "slick Apple UX" syndrome with my Ubiquiti "conversion", but it was sooo pretty.

goodlinks 6 days ago | root | parent |

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

uzyn 7 days ago | prev | next |

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).

java-man 7 days ago | prev | next |

And all this data is stored permanently - to be analyzed by numerous marketing departments and (future|fascist) governments.

RedComet 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

(current|democratic) governments

harry8 6 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

RedComet 6 days ago | root | parent |

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.

harry8 5 days ago | root | parent |

Democracy requires the consent of the governed, which I say is absent here.

Dictatorship can and has come out of democracy, this does not make dictatorship democratic.

haolez 7 days ago | prev | next |

If you want to scare people, do it while Incognito. And repeat the search bar suggestions while on it ;)

Zeetah 7 days ago | prev | next |

This reminds me of the Atari 8 bit computers making sound when data was being transferred to the floppy drive and the cassette.

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.

Bluecobra 6 days ago | prev | next |

Reminds me a bit of the -a flag for snoop on Solaris in where you can listen for packets on /dev/audio. I wonder if that ever made it into tcpdump.

harry8 6 days ago | prev | next |

https://pi-hole.net/

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.

n0id34 6 days ago | prev | next |

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.

ErigmolCt 7 days ago | prev | next |

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

modeless 7 days ago | prev | next |

For a second I thought this was a legislative proposal. If you thought cookie banners were annoying, just wait!

yosito 7 days ago | prev | next |

The Daily Mail site sounds exactly like I expected: a throwback to my old dialup modem.

killjoywashere 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

gloosx 7 days ago | prev | next |

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"

tills13 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

Lammy 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

> But that data is reasonably only accessible by the people who instrumented that tracking

No way — the network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

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.

calrain 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

>> 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...

The list is endless

notpushkin 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.)

cloudking 7 days ago | prev |

If you really care about this kind of stuff, a simple AdGuard or Pi-hole setup can block all these requests across your network.

Lammy 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

talldayo 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.