[HN Gopher] Tracker Beeper (2022)
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Tracker Beeper (2022)
Author : gaws
Score : 364 points
Date : 2024-11-06 03:21 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (berthub.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (berthub.eu)
| hifikuno wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| This kind of setup could reveal which blockers are best at
| keeping data
| Zeetah wrote:
| 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.
| java-man wrote:
| And all this data is stored permanently - to be analyzed by
| numerous marketing departments and (future|fascist) governments.
| RedComet wrote:
| (current|democratic) governments
| notpushkin wrote:
| As well as (current|fascist) governments!
| java-man wrote:
| welcome to November 6, 2024
| downboots wrote:
| The future is here
| tills13 wrote:
| 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.
| calrain wrote:
| >> 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| Lammy wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| It would be also interesting stream of sounds for Android by
| Google :-)
|
| upvoted
| ned99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| I think it would be eye-opening to see just how many requests
| we're actually sending out in a day
| goodlinks wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| smolder wrote:
| 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.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Having those beeps would make data activity so much more
| transparent, just like the old days
| Lammy wrote:
| Me every time I buy yet another Noctua fan
| https://i.imgur.com/XAEtm4P.png
| billpg wrote:
| 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?"
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| uzyn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Install Firefox, add search bar back to the menu, disable URL
| bar search, job's a good'un.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Firefox phones home every time it is opened.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Install Librewolf or Mullvad Browser. Both are based on
| Firefox and shouldn't phone home.
| Lio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| talldayo wrote:
| So... we should all protest any form of device that
| features DNS caching or OCSP?
| yoavm wrote:
| To do what exactly?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Toggling everything off in "Data Collection and Use" in
| settings doesn't change this?
| Lammy wrote:
| 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
| Kapura wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You only need to AM demodulate it and you basically have a
| classic radar warning receiver for the internet age :-)
| danhau wrote:
| You mean interpret the noise as an AM signal and demodulate
| it? I wonder what that would sound like.
| uzyn wrote:
| 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).
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Sounds like an anecdote. I find search suggestions useful as it
| saves typing a lot of the time.
| JimmyWilliams1 wrote:
| Great information
| cloudking wrote:
| If you really care about this kind of stuff, a simple AdGuard or
| Pi-hole setup can block all these requests across your network.
| talldayo wrote:
| 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.
| albumen wrote:
| Citation needed. This 2018 study [1] looks at google data
| collection on android and iOS in various aspects, and
| concludes that android devices send quite a bit more to
| Google than iOS devices.
|
| [1]: https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/08/DC...
| talldayo wrote:
| Android lets you control your phone's firewall completely.
| iOS doesn't, case closed.
| Lammy wrote:
| 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.
| dentalperson wrote:
| 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.
| teekert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lynx23 wrote:
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| For a second I thought this was a legislative proposal. If you
| thought cookie banners were annoying, just wait!
| SushiHippie wrote:
| (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
| killjoywashere wrote:
| 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.
| theanonymousone wrote:
| The year is 2022.
| yosito wrote:
| The Daily Mail site sounds exactly like I expected: a throwback
| to my old dialup modem.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| 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
| haolez wrote:
| If you want to scare people, do it while Incognito. And repeat
| the search bar suggestions while on it ;)
| hcfman wrote:
| Brilliant!
| gloosx wrote:
| 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"
| mnadkvlb wrote:
| The name reminds me of the south park episode with trapper keeper
| :)
|
| was a crazy episode
| Bluecobra wrote:
| 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.
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