slifty
Joined 16 years ago
Joined 16 years ago
These ideas are useless from a technical level (for all the reasons that have been mentioned already.)
Where they are useful is at a social level. People are energized and ready to fight. Many of them didn't know about this issue. Many of them didn't know that there are things they can do as individuals to fight back. Your tool (and mine) are getting attention because they open eyes and tap into pain.
As useless as noise might be, people understand the idea and that makes it accessible. That means people will try it, get it, and share it.
We need to leverage that attention in order to teach those people things they need to understand about privacy. Our tools should be seen as a gateway into impactful approaches like Tor, VPN, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, and the EFF at large.
Tooting my own horn: that's what I've been doing with https://slifty.github.io/internet_noise/index.html
In all interviews I make sure to explain that while this is an amusing form or protest, it is not effective and people who care need to go take the steps outlined on the project page.
A website can do this. A chrome plugin, however, risks being harmful with minimal benefit. It minimizes the potential for communication to your audience, it is also harder to access which means you are touching a more narrow audience.
Here's the good news! The project I linked to is open source -- https://github.com/slifty/internet_noise/ -- you could contribute to it directly and then update your plugin so that instead of generating noise and hijacking their browser information you just direct them to the website version of the concept.
The biggest limitation we face is simply getting reliable access source material / TV content. In order to count airings of ads in another country we would need access to video streams.
We do have a few international channels in our TV Archive (although we don't use them for the Political TV Ad Archive). We'd love to expand that some day...
We're using the python port of audfprint though: https://github.com/dpwe/audfprint
And yes -- we have a big bucket of known ads, and a big bucket of archived programming, and we're comparing new content with the appropriate buckets.
NOTE: we are talking about ways to release the fingerprints of all the TV we archive so anybody can "search" TV for copies of sounds.
Anyway, my point was that the most recent bash contribution (currently voted -40) doesn't represent what bash has to offer, but that newbies shouldn't be turned off by it.
wait give me a minute...
But I would implore folks to look past that type of thing (by voting it down) and find true gems :)
On IRC people often said very funny things!
Bash.org is a collection of user contributed quotes from IRC conversations. When you would see someone say something funny on IRC, you would instantly load up bash.org and submit your quote. Moderators would then approve the ones they thought were funny. If they were actually funny they would get upvoted.
About two years ago the site simply stopped updating with new quotes. People like me, who had incorporated bash.org into their "I have 30 seconds to kill, type random urls into my browser and hit enter" process still visited pretty regularly in desperate hope to see a new quote.
Finally a few days ago, after years of silence, a new one appeared.