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| The impudence of Microsoft has reached new (criminal?) heights |
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| NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on July 12, 2020, 01:15:55 pm ---I think the noise idea could work - but only if enough of the "prey" were doing it that it amounted to a kind of denial-of-service attack on the "predators"! :D Perhaps some kind of open source noise generating screen saver or other app that could devote a couple of percent of your CPU resources to generating noise. It would have to be very cleverly generated noise, and it would have to change and evolve to remain ahead of the "predators"... it would need to be designed to create plausible looking, but false patterns across millions of users... --- End quote --- Just draining their resources doesn't need very much sophistication at all and would be very easy to implement. The big question is exactly how much energy does it take on their side to do a search? |
| SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on July 12, 2020, 01:32:51 pm --- --- Quote from: SilverSolder on July 12, 2020, 01:15:55 pm ---I think the noise idea could work - but only if enough of the "prey" were doing it that it amounted to a kind of denial-of-service attack on the "predators"! :D Perhaps some kind of open source noise generating screen saver or other app that could devote a couple of percent of your CPU resources to generating noise. It would have to be very cleverly generated noise, and it would have to change and evolve to remain ahead of the "predators"... it would need to be designed to create plausible looking, but false patterns across millions of users... --- End quote --- Just draining their resources doesn't need very much sophistication at all and would be very easy to implement. The big question is exactly how much energy does it take on their side to do a search? --- End quote --- Just draining their resources wouldn't matter to them - they can just keep adding servers until you get arrested for conducting DDOS attacks! - whereas if the noise was "smart", it would be far more damaging to the predators, and much less of it would be needed. "Smart noise". You saw it here first! :D P.S.: It is easy to create a little "smart noise"... whenever you search for something, also search for two or three other things that you don't actually care about. This leaves the predators with a couple of false trails that they then have to figure out. Chances are they will waste their sponsor's ads... in other words, you will be wasting their resources. |
| bd139:
Considering Azure borked a while back because they ran out of servers, it probably wouldn’t take much :-DD |
| SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on July 12, 2020, 01:15:55 pm --- --- Quote from: NiHaoMike on July 12, 2020, 01:04:12 pm --- --- Quote from: Mr. Scram on July 12, 2020, 11:03:11 am ---Please don't start that "discussion" again. :palm: --- End quote --- The sure way to end it is to prove (or disprove) that creating a lot of random searches "costs them less than it costs you". Given the computer science of generating pseudorandom numbers is far simpler than that of searching databases, it would be quite a feat even if they have a 10X advantage in lower energy cost. If it is the case, it would be interesting to know how they do it. --- End quote --- I think the noise idea could work - but only if enough of the "prey" were doing it that it amounted to a kind of denial-of-service attack on the "predators"! :D Perhaps some kind of open source noise generating screen saver or other app that could devote a couple of percent of your CPU resources to generating noise. It would have to be very cleverly generated noise, and it would have to change and evolve to remain ahead of the "predators"... it would need to be designed to create plausible looking, but false patterns across millions of users... --- End quote --- Well yeah. Obviously by adding noise, you're going to decrease the "SNR". It would have a consequence only if the SNR has gone low enough that gathering data is not profitable anymore - and I guess there is a very LARGE margin there, so while the idea could work, in practice it's not very likely to have any sizeable effect. A large fraction of all connected users would have to do it. Also, all the more that I think there is also a large margin regarding how all users of "big data" analysis can actually detect that the data they gather is actually bogus. I'm pretty sure it would take a while before they even realize it. Another related thought - if enough people were actually flooding networks with "noise" and it had a noticeable effect on the effectiveness of data analysis, there are so many interests at stake here that doing it would probably become illegal in most countries. Sweet. Of course you could always try to outsmart it, and just release bogus, but credible information, instead of mere noise. But in that case, we would be back in the case I described just above: the systems wouldn't be able to really tell the data is bogus, and all actors of that would actually NOT care. They are just interested in selling data, and as long as this data looks credible, they don't care whether it's actually real or bogus. (Until of course it has a quantifiable effect, but IMHO it would take a long time before it does, or at least before we can analyze for sure it does.) All that said, even if not practical as a means of stopping data gathering as a whole, it can be a way of isolating oneself from it. So, basically an individual solution, but not a global one. |
| NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on July 12, 2020, 03:56:48 pm ---Just draining their resources wouldn't matter to them - they can just keep adding servers until you get arrested for conducting DDOS attacks! --- End quote --- Pretty easy to hide your IP address using free proxies and VPNs, or step up to Tor for even more protection. You can also use a VPN/proxy after Tor (that is, you connect to the VPN/proxy using Tor) to get the security of Tor without creating backlash against Tor IPs. |
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