Tracker Beeper

Before I played the video and heard the sound it made, my first thought was that it would make a haunting clicking sound like a Geiger counter. Sure, it would be annoying, but I think it would be somewhat fitting.

Back in the days of yore there was this thing called 'Peep, the Network Auralizer'. It made your server produce jungle sounds based on the type and amount of traffic passing through it. I had this installed on the server-under-the-stairs for a while but eventually got tired of living in the ever more crowded Amazon (the rainforest, the book store did not exist back then) and disabled it. There is a Usenix paper on this thing [1] which links to the original distribution site which - alas - no longer exists. It was mostly written in Perl and as such quite hackable so those who want to go a step beyond having your terminal bell bleep may want to hunt for an extant copy of Peep.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

I can only imagine the scenario...

lay person: See? Even though i turn the volume up on my speaker, there's no noise during our zoom/Teams call, etc.

tech support: oh, i see the problem...you've somehow disabled your audio. why would you do that, i'm curious?

lay person: oh, right i had forgotten that i did that...well, i started using some tool to audibly inform me whenever my data was being sent to google...so it go so annoying - constantly dinging all the bloody time, like incessentaly! - that i just disabled the audio, and its been peaceful ever since...but i see now, that my approach isn't ideal...maybe i should uninstall that tracker beeper thingy?

tech support: slaps their palm to their face, multiple times...

This of course should not take away from the awesome value that this toool - for those of us who really care about privacy - would bring! Kudos to the author (and ignore my jokey scenario)!!!!

This is amazing! We all know, here, how much of a problem this is, but this idea seems to solve the problem of "how do I explain this to my parents/grandparents?"

Dupe, already discussed twice in recent days, and this article doesn’t look to add anything substantial, though it is finally from the author’s own site rather than Twitter or GitHub.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549604 (8 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32617787 (2 days ago)

Bert is well-known and respected in the DNS world and at this point follows his own drummer.