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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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
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.
upvoted
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.
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
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.
:(
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
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.
Imagine a reverse warrant for any person who has searched “torproject.or” in the process of navigating to torproject.org
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).
[1]: https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...
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.
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.
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.
Similarly now with when my 3D printer is leveling, or about to finish the print, or which part it's printing.
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
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
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.
