“Ultrasonic cross-device tracking” embeds inaudible tones in advertisements
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This kind of system should be opt-in only, with hand-signed agreements.
What system are you referring to? If the system is "opt in to being tracked if you want to read this/use this service for free" then plenty of people would opt in. Look at Facebook.
In short, only a few religions have anything to say against being a donor at death, and a few have something against being a recipient from a dead person.
If you think your religion might affect your decision to be a donor, check with a trusted authority figure and make sure.
A person's choice is probably always valid regardless of what it is, it's their body at the end of the day. In the normative sense I think everyone should donate their organs, but I'm not sure it can be reasonably codified.
Doctor's don't need to consciously change their behavior for there to be a difference in care. It's just that incentives are like really awesomely powerful things.
Because I have fundamental issues with the economics of organ donation. I do not want my organs used in million-dollar surgeries to save elderly rich people. I would much rather that money be spent more efficiently on younger/poorer people where it can save more lives. How many flu shots could be purchased for the cost of one heart transplant? I cannot change the economic realities of modern medicine, but the least I can do is not contribute my own flesh towards the problem.
I wish I had recorded something I saw at the gym years ago. An old and obviously ill man was bragging about how his firm could hire young interns, pay them nothing, and fire them at the drop of a hat. A young man overheard, walked over to him and said "I;ll never have your money or power, I cannot stop you from being a jerk, but when your liver starts failing you aren't getting even a piece of mine." He then ripped up his organ donation card.
Do you have a source for this? To me, it seems extraordinary that we're capped out of medical resources in such a way that, were someone to not have donated their organs, ~10k flu shots would be provided instead of the various potential transplants. (I tried some internet searching but everything talking about resource constraints was talking about the organs themselves, not the general medical resources).
Also, technically there is no difference between cannibalism and organ transplants - ingesting the flesh of others of your species to save your life.
If you have something really useful and good for the kids, sell it to their fathers. If you want to scam their money then get out.
A platform that doesn't let me block ads is a platform I won't use.
The biggest issue with blanket interference across the entire ultrasonic band is that there are some legitimate uses that don't involve cross-device tracking. That's why we need to address this issue by selectively interfering with only known tracking schemes.
* Authentication: http://www.copsonic.com/
* Shopping deals: http://www.shopkick.com/
Some common examples are:
* guest mode discovery on a Chromecast
* pairing to videoconference system (both Cisco and Polycom do this in their current gen devices), building control, wireless presentation system etc
* a means for transmitting a 2FA code from a personal device for auth / payments
* micro-location service - particularly for temporary events or spaces where BLE is not possible (e.g. embedded in FOH audio at different stages at a music festival)
* proximity based peer discovery for mobile games
You'd be surprised at how common a technique it is. I regularly face issues with environments that have had enough different devices all attempting to use some form of ultrasonic pairing / localisation etc that there's issues with interference.
Some preliminary work was done last year to reverse SilverPush[1], but my group and I are planning to take it further.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/374876/lets_t... [2] https://vimeo.com/177586203
Somewhere in an advertising conference dark side corridor there is a booth advertising snake oil "ultrasonic cross device user tracking as featured by Ars Technica."
Is that really the case, or is the Ars piece suggesting I would be walking around with the advertiser's enabled app open all the time? (And I'd guess Android is in a similar boat.)
Edit: In Firefox it seems this website is constantly playing audio. I think it is using a WebSocket to do this. Since I don't hear a thing I'm not sure what is going on here.
Reading the blurb on their site, they state they're the only people doing this, oh, and they reference India too (something that happened a bit on Silverfish's site). Coincidence?
Click on the gem and the web page will play a "chirp," which is loud and beepy and not ultrasonic or secret at all. It's an analog modem type system, except probably way slower than 300 or even 110 baud. Everything old is new again, I guess.
In any case, the point is: the Chirp system is distinct from the supposedly-possible secret systems the Ars story is fretting over.
I've seen several articles worrying about the use and abuse of data transmission via secret ultrasound, but I've never seen any claims that named names or that offered a way for readers to verify or check anything.
I don't think you can count on the average laptop/phone speakers, mics, and digital audio systems to deal with ultrasound.
If a computer's audio drivers and audio hardware are set up to play back at standard CD/DVD sample rates (44KHz or 48KHz), then ultrasonics are not happening there, period. The same principle applies to inputs.
Even if all the hardware and software on two devices is capable of and configured for producing/receiving ultrasonic frequencies, it seems pretty likely that loud ultrasonic screeches played on a 50-cent cell-phone speaker would produce audible harmonics, and the jig would be up.
I expect secret ultrasonic data transmission over commodity systems is the sort of thing a well funded state organization might turn to for a targeted operation. Because it might work under exactly the right circumstances, but it would be fiddly and terrible for general use.
Is there power circuitry, etc that could likely (a) generate inaudible frequencies that overlap with mass-market microphone capability & (b) would be sufficiently controllable (albeit likely indirectly) for data transfer?
Harmonics are integer multiples of frequencies. Harmonics of an ultrasonic signal are even more ultrasonic. If there's any aliasing, those harmonics might map back to audible frequencies. However, no matter how cheap a speaker is, no aliasing happens. Perhaps there's another reason why an ultrasonic waveform might be audible when played through a cheap speaker, but not because of harmonics, right?
So, any output stage after a DAC necessarily incorporates a low-pass filter to eliminate the aliasing artifacts. A cheap low-pass filter will allow these aliasing artifacts through. You can simulate this e.g. by digitally upsampling a, say, 8 kHz sampled signal to 48 kHz without any interpolation.
You're right. I was thinking of resonances. Even in that case, I might be wrong.
What do you mean? All you need to do is sample the received audio at 44.1 kHz. Android at least has a low-level API which allows you to customize sampling rate.
So with 44.1 kHz you could only represent audio up to 22 kHz. There are kids who can hear at these frequencies.
https://cdt.org/files/2015/10/10.16.15-CDT-Cross-Device-Comm...
Also, doesn't the electronics in the phone already filter out everything outside the audible part of the spectrum, just because it is more efficient to do so (lower sampling rate = better performance / lower power consumption)?
With the permissions system in Marshmallow, you can selectively disable microphone access, which is good. Those of us stuck on Lollipop will just have to be careful what apps we install.
They use this to determine how many people are listening to their station.
edit: Hey wait, let me read the article--just poured my first morning cup of coffee and reading HN.
Some food for thought.
"Ultrasonic" beacons are like any other beacon technology, whether audible, inaudible, bluetooth based or otherwise.
All a beacon does is transmit an identifier or URL. It isn't and CAN'T track you. It is just a simple one-way broadcast that is saying "X is here". You need an application that knows to listen for beacons an knows how to translate the identifier of the beacon.
For example, if Starbucks is using a beacon and you go near it with your phone, your phone will do nothing with that beacon unless you have the Starbucks app that is looking for Starbucks beacons so the app knows when you are near a Starbucks.
There is nothing nefarious about this....
Ultrasonic is just another method to achieve the same result, although it seems like a bad way of doing it since it is fairly obvious when your app is "listening" on iOS.
If my devices are transmitting identifying beacons, then they absolutely ARE tracking me. What exactly do you think that "identifier" is?
"The technology, called ultrasonic cross-device tracking, embeds high-frequency tones that are inaudible to humans in advertisements, web pages, and even physical locations like retail stores."
"any device microphone—like those accessed by an app on a smartphone or tablet—can detect the signal"
How is this any different from a bluetooth beacon being detected by a mobile app? You are just broadcasting the identifier in a different manner.
This is FUD. iOS does not give an app this ability without it being obvious (a banner across the top of the screen).
Maybe decode them.
easiest way to block them is to know they are there in the first place.
i am suspicious that occasionally my laptop makes high pitch noise correlated to mouse movements when its running windows 10.
edit:Thinking about it. seems possible that might actually be facebook. never installed their phone app untill i had android 6 because it wants mic permissions (disabled) and facebook and reading hn is about all i use win 10 on the laptop for.
doesnt stop a phone app decoding it though. it was only when i moved the mouse. and came then went.
And i definately still have reasonable high frequency hearing. for example filing a complaint with Morisons in the UK for those high frequency speakers aimed at stoppping kids loitering. Don't know if they got rid of them or not because i stopped shopping there.
But electrical interfance from a trackpad? - made me suspicious at the time.
And one way or another, a proof of concept is only a few lines of javascript.
A very very easy way to link people in a room together.
And it would explain why the facebook app wants mic permissions when afaik it offers no audio features. it doesn't even need to be audio the maker of the app controls - just "fingerprint" sounds and report them back to facebook (or whoever).
In my informal tests, most people are unable to hear any tone above 20khz or so. This is discovered, naturally, by starting with the highest pitch tone I can generate at the loudest volume, and lowering the pitch gradually until somebody covers their ears and starts screaming. This is usually the youngest person in the room.
You can generate and receive audio using web audio APIs. Creating a browser extension to detect ultrasonic comma would be fairly straightforward.
"You can't hear" doesn't have to be high frequencies though.
It can be more subtle like phase shifts and other "in audible range" fingerprinting.
While I've not used it for getting on 20 years now, I did do a lot of software audio engineering back in the day, everything from RF to DSP.
It only altered in any meaningful way to trackpad movements and clicks.
Actually, the inability of the human ear to hear ultrasound is because the impedance matching function (mechanical gain) of the bones in the middle ear rolls off at high frequencies. So the energy in ultrasound is dissipated before it reaches the inner ear.
That being said, exposure to >120 dB ultrasound can damage your hearing (I believe this is because response functions of the ear start becoming nonlinear). According to Wikipedia, above 150 dB ultrasound can even start heating your flesh, and above 180 dB it can be fatal.
That being said, exposure to >120 dB ultrasound can damage your hearing (I believe this is because response functions of the ear start becoming nonlinear).
Seems self contradictory on your part, unless you're saying people who otherwise can't, can still hear ultrasound, so long as it's over 120db. So, my top frequency for hearing is down to 14.5k from before, last time I tested it. Are you saying that 15.5k sounds now won't damage my stereocilia? That doesn't make sense, unless those things actually get stronger with age. Usually, things in the body get weaker with age.
Experts recommend wearing a minimum of three tinfoil hats.