General > General Technical Chat
The impudence of Microsoft has reached new (criminal?) heights
Mr. Scram:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on July 12, 2020, 11:11:17 pm ---I think it's safe to say the real implementation of my idea would be done by someone with a lot more experience in network programming optimization than I do. Actually, it's not even my idea, just my thoughts on optimizing someone else's proof of concept.
--- End quote ---
Uh-huh. You're the Idea Guy. You're not investing anything nor doing the work, you're just the guy with the incredible yet surprisingly unspecific idea. The important part is that you just know, and we should know, it's going to change everything.
https://www.riskology.co/idea-guy/
NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: vk4ffab on July 12, 2020, 11:18:53 pm ---Or what about your cell phone? Its tracking your crap all the time, its apps are reporting back to the mothership all the time, its gps can locate you to within 20m. A smart phone is nothing more than a surveillance device in your pocket. How about your smart watch? Yeah you are being watched all the time. The question is how much of that being watched actually matters? And just remember, your TV is watching you too.
--- End quote ---
Both my smartphone and smartwatch run aftermarket firmware without Google. My TV isn't even connected to the network since there's no point doing that, I just have it connected to a Linux PC. I download videos using youtube-dl and play them using mpv, so Google doesn't know when I watch the videos unless I go to comment right afterwards. I always use Adblock so I don't see how they would profit from my data. I have considered switching to a stealth adblocker so they would waste ad views, but in the near term I think that will just feed such data collection efforts, so I'm sticking with uBlock Origin for now.
--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on July 12, 2020, 11:47:12 pm ---Uh-huh. You're the Idea Guy. You're not investing anything nor doing the work, you're just the guy with the incredible yet surprisingly unspecific idea. The important part is that you just know, and we should know, it's going to change everything.
--- End quote ---
The Javascript proof of concept, made by someone else:
http://makeinternetnoise.com/index.html
I just gave some input on how it could be optimized, but obviously someone who really knows what they're doing will do a better job at optimizing it.
vk4ffab:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on July 13, 2020, 12:18:29 am ---
--- Quote from: vk4ffab on July 12, 2020, 11:18:53 pm ---Or what about your cell phone? Its tracking your crap all the time, its apps are reporting back to the mothership all the time, its gps can locate you to within 20m. A smart phone is nothing more than a surveillance device in your pocket. How about your smart watch? Yeah you are being watched all the time. The question is how much of that being watched actually matters? And just remember, your TV is watching you too.
--- End quote ---
Both my smartphone and smartwatch run aftermarket firmware without Google. My TV isn't even connected to the network since there's no point doing that, I just have it connected to a Linux PC. I download videos using youtube-dl and play them using mpv, so Google doesn't know when I watch the videos unless I go to comment right afterwards. I always use Adblock so I don't see how they would profit from my data. I have considered switching to a stealth adblocker so they would waste ad views, but in the near term I think that will just feed such data collection efforts, so I'm sticking with uBlock Origin for now.
--- End quote ---
And still the point is, this mostly changes nothing. Does anyone really care that youtube knows I watch eevblog and elecroboom and that guy with the Swiss accent? See this kind of data collection only becomes a problem when people are using youtube for "RESEARCH" and allowing its suggestion algorithm to feed your biases, or if you use youtube or facebook and twitter to get your news and information. The only way to defeat this sort of thing is to be educated, scientifically literate and understand what sources of should be trusted and then have the ability to fact check it all yourself. Even if you defeat the data collection, its still very easy to fall for very same trap of only using untrustworthy sources of information that are there to feed your biases. You cannot get away from data collection and feeding it noise really does nothing, but you can be smarter than it and not allow it to have much influence over the decisions you make, and ultimately that is how you defeat them.
SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on July 12, 2020, 04:20:14 pm ---
[...] 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. [...]
--- End quote ---
Yes, that is pretty much exactly what would happen - compare with DMCA laws etc. that (almost) make it illegal to fix your own stuff, lest you deprive some corporate interest or other of the income that is rightfully theirs... ::)
Generating "smart noise" would be very hard to prevent and to make illegal. Say you are interested in Gillette shaving foam... your noisy search tool might create several decoy searches along with the real search terms, resulting in searches for "Mars Bar", "Vacations in Peru", "The relative merits of Constitutional Monarchy vs. Republic", "Gillette Shaving Foam", and "Cloning sheep Dolly". Not much traffic at all, certainly not enough to be considered denial of service or network abuse. But there is no way for Google and other predators to know which of your searches is a decoy search and which is real. So the effectiveness of their algorithms matching searchers and sellers takes a big hit, becoming much less effective.
If enough people did this, it would hurt them badly, because now the wrong ads get put in front of the intended audience, and the value of the advertising "space" drops as a result.
Red Squirrel:
--- 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 ---
I would love to see extensions like Privacy Badger and ublock implement a noise feature. Basically it would simulate normal internet usage and doing random searches and going on random sites even when the browser is idle so it feeds junk data into all the spy algorithms. Though I think to make it more realistic you almost need something that runs in a VM and actually controls the browser - like actually clicking and typing and moving the mouse. All this spying is doing stuff like reading your history or reading your mouse position etc and probably even reading your hard drive so it's not so much that you have to send them junk data, but rather produce junk data/activity locally so they take the junk data from you.
What I hate though is the fact that browsers are designed in such a way that all this spying stuff is even possible. The personal data these sites have access to and the fact that browsers provide it is part of the problem.
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