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.
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.
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.
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 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"
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chrome's combined search + address bar seems like a fantastic data source for reverse search warrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_search_warrant
Imagine a reverse warrant for any person who has searched “torproject.or” in the process of navigating to torproject.org
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.
You only need to AM demodulate it and you basically have a classic radar warning receiver for the internet age :-)
You mean interpret the noise as an AM signal and demodulate it? I wonder what that would sound like.
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.
Having those beeps would make data activity so much more transparent, just like the old days
Me every time I buy yet another Noctua fan https://i.imgur.com/XAEtm4P.png
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"
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).
Sounds like an anecdote. I find search suggestions useful as it saves typing a lot of the time.
(2022)
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
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.
I think it would be eye-opening to see just how many requests we’re actually sending out in a day
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.
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?
Install Firefox, add search bar back to the menu, disable URL bar search, job’s a good’un.
Firefox phones home every time it is opened.
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.
Install Librewolf or Mullvad Browser. Both are based on Firefox and shouldn't phone home.
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.
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.
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
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.
:(
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.
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.
This kind of setup could reveal which blockers are best at keeping data
If you want to scare people, do it while Incognito. And repeat the search bar suggestions while on it ;)
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
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.
The Daily Mail site sounds exactly like I expected: a throwback to my old dialup modem.
And all this data is stored permanently - to be analyzed by numerous marketing departments and (future|fascist) governments.
(current|democratic) governments
As well as (current|fascist) governments!
The future is here
For a second I thought this was a legislative proposal. If you thought cookie banners were annoying, just wait!
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.
Brilliant!
It would be also interesting stream of sounds for Android by Google :-)
upvoted
The year is 2022.
Great information
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.
> 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.
>> 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
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.)
If you really care about this kind of stuff, a simple AdGuard or Pi-hole setup can block all these requests across your network.
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.