Before I played the video and heard the sound it made, my first thought was that it would make a haunting clicking sound like a Geiger counter. Sure, it would be annoying, but I think it would be somewhat fitting.
Back in the days of yore there was this thing called 'Peep, the Network Auralizer'. It made your server produce jungle sounds based on the type and amount of traffic passing through it. I had this installed on the server-under-the-stairs for a while but eventually got tired of living in the ever more crowded Amazon (the rainforest, the book store did not exist back then) and disabled it. There is a Usenix paper on this thing [1] which links to the original distribution site which - alas - no longer exists. It was mostly written in Perl and as such quite hackable so those who want to go a step beyond having your terminal bell bleep may want to hunt for an extant copy of Peep.
lay person: See? Even though i turn the volume up on my speaker, there's no noise during our zoom/Teams call, etc.
tech support: oh, i see the problem...you've somehow disabled your audio. why would you do that, i'm curious?
lay person: oh, right i had forgotten that i did that...well, i started using some tool to audibly inform me whenever my data was being sent to google...so it go so annoying - constantly dinging all the bloody time, like incessentaly! - that i just disabled the audio, and its been peaceful ever since...but i see now, that my approach isn't ideal...maybe i should uninstall that tracker beeper thingy?
tech support: slaps their palm to their face, multiple times...
This of course should not take away from the awesome value that this toool - for those of us who really care about privacy - would bring! Kudos to the author (and ignore my jokey scenario)!!!!
This is amazing! We all know, here, how much of a problem this is, but this idea seems to solve the problem of "how do I explain this to my parents/grandparents?"
Dupe, already discussed twice in recent days, and this article doesn’t look to add anything substantial, though it is finally from the author’s own site rather than Twitter or GitHub.
The previous posts were only about Google specifically, this includes all common trackers. It also suggests a live demonstration that I haven't seen in this context before. I wouldn't say it doesn't add anything substantial.
> The post doesn't add anything to the previous posts.
The article mentions that they added filters for "Facebook and dozens of the other trackers" and includes an additional video demonstrating just how gross the tracking is.
Calling it blogspam implies it's not adding anything, but promoting something from "buried in the comments" to "on the front page" means more interested people can see it.
I did not imply any such thing, I said it directly.
Just because the word 'blogspam' is typically used in a derisive and impolite manner does not make this any less of what it is- content from an HN comment, transcribed to a blog, then returned to HN.
This remark should not be an affront to our sensibilities. I have higher expectations of HN and do my part to discourage myself from taking part in this for the longevity of the community.
Can you please point to the HN comment you claim the author took this from? All I can find is comments on previous discussion of the same project, and you can't really claim that Bert blogging about his own project is blogspam just because someone had beforehand submitted Berts project to HN already.
