Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data • Hacker News Board

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#71

Post by ntaylor » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:15 PM UTC

_wmd wrote: post #59

There have been a few of these plugins floating around recently, and really everything that needs said about them appears in the comments already. Fake traffic is wasteful, hard to make look authentic, and only serves to create more records of the end user around the web rather than less (e.g. your laptop IP was generating fake traffic? That probably means you had the lid open and were doing something with it at that…

Distributed caching is challenging enough to get right when you know the segmentation parameters; inferring these accurately from any old website would be incredibly difficult.

Still, it's a neat idea.

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#72

Post by throwaway2048 » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:15 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #66

doodpants wrote: post #39

Turns out it's only for Chrome, and the front page doesn't even mention this. Could we at least change the HN title from "A browser plugin..." to "A Chrome plugin..."?

It's hosted on Chrome Web Store, but otherwise it could very well work just fine in Edge, Opera and even possibly Firefox. They're all converging toward supporting WebExtensions, a mostly-Chrome compatible API.

Could? or does?

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#73

Post by mtkd » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:16 PM UTC

"creates meaningless web tracking data"

or

creates a massive botnet which will eventually be used for some nefarious PPC scam or worse

you decide ...

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#74

Post by jdormit » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:17 PM UTC

rishabhparikh wrote: post #35

liotier wrote: post #26

Distributed spidering for a community-fed search engine index would provide comparable end-user benefits while being considerably more socially useful.

You win buzzword bingo

How else would you describe the system liotier is talking about?

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#75

Post by TjWallas » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:24 PM UTC

bognition wrote: post #55

> Read and change all your data on the websites you visit While I applaud the authors for trying to solve a problem, I will not install this plugin unless its open source. There is no way I'm going to grant the above permission to some random plugin just because they tell a compelling story.

Same here with a tiny twist: opensource and has a SHA512 mentioned somewhere in the repo that could be verified against whatever comes from the chrome appstore.

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#76

Post by _lqaf » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:24 PM UTC

_wmd wrote: post #59

There have been a few of these plugins floating around recently, and really everything that needs said about them appears in the comments already. Fake traffic is wasteful, hard to make look authentic, and only serves to create more records of the end user around the web rather than less (e.g. your laptop IP was generating fake traffic? That probably means you had the lid open and were doing something with it at that…

Not quite what you're describing, but the venerable Squid cache can do distributed caching. Something, at least, to play with with your nerdy friends.

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#77

Post by sctb » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:24 PM UTC

doodpants wrote: post #39

Turns out it's only for Chrome, and the front page doesn't even mention this. Could we at least change the HN title from "A browser plugin..." to "A Chrome plugin..."?

OK, we've made that update to the submission title.

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#78

Post by cryptarch » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:25 PM UTC

r721 wrote: post #48

andy_ppp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an awesome idea - a browser that is also a node in a search engine; it would be possible to build an experimental search engine then without a £40 million + investment to even get started.

This exists: http://yacy.net/en/index.html

It's a distributed search engine deamon with a nice search + management web frontend but not a browser too?

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#79

Post by logicallee » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:25 PM UTC

jdormit wrote: post #74

rishabhparikh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You win buzzword bingo

How else would you describe the system liotier is talking about?

"Peer-to-peer web spidering for a crowdsourced search engine would create socially responsible end-user value."

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#80

Post by eecc » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 2:26 PM UTC

ntaylor wrote: post #71

_wmd wrote: post #59

There have been a few of these plugins floating around recently, and really everything that needs said about them appears in the comments already. Fake traffic is wasteful, hard to make look authentic, and only serves to create more records of the end user around the web rather than less (e.g. your laptop IP was generating fake traffic? That probably means you had the lid open and were doing something with it at that…

Distributed caching is challenging enough to get right when you know the segmentation parameters; inferring these accurately from any old website would be incredibly difficult. Still, it's a neat idea.

I'm hacking at an article repository for that, bloody difficult... Maybe I should try with https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs