(It's getting down voted because that comment is adovcating for a culture where men never hold themselves publicly accountable for bad actions, thus perpetuating the same old screwed up power dynamic. It is not an interesting perspective.)
Hello all! Recent creator of a similar tool that has been getting a lot of buzz, I am here to throw some constructive thoughts out there!
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.
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.
Hey there - I like your project. Sounds like our tools are complementary, and you make an interesting point about the browser-vs-plugin based approach. I do think it's worthwhile to specifically browse news sites - I believe they're the worst "filter bubble" offenders right now, and this can help break that. The more efforts there are in this space, the better. Thanks for sharing your project!
You are correct -- this is only US Politics right now.
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...
It's all about the FREQUENCIES! Actually though, this system can be used to find copies of any sound -- sound bytes, commercials, music, whatever. We just happen to be using it for politics because we apparently hate fun.
Sorry guys, forgot that offering opinions that say something isn't really treating women properly is a akin four letter word on hacker news!
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.
Long ago in the dark days of the internet, before Facebook and social networks, and Reddit, everyone communicated using a group chat service called IRC.
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.
For those interested in improving the whole "screen lights mimic the sun and keep you awake" thing, consider checking out Flux -- https://justgetflux.com/
It adjusts the colors of your screen late at night.
If you're on Linux, Redshift is a good alternative to Flux. It's in Fedora and Ubuntu package managers - 'yum install redshift' or 'apt-get install redshift' respectively (if memory serves).
Sure, in the same way you would water a sapling more than you would water a tree. You need to take special care when it is needed -- right now women face a toxic environment in the tech industry; men do not.
It isn't sad that we are training ourselves to be more sensitive to things that worsen that divide.
First: This isn't acceptable, especially in the current ecosystem where we are all working incredibly hard to change a sexist tech culture, and when women have very solid reasons to feel like an objectified minority.
Second: Since part of having an open mind is attempting to empathize with people even when they make mistakes (And understand the mentality behind the mistake, since we are ALL IN THIS TOGETHER), I would like to try to un-demonize this guy at an individual level -- again, not trying to detract the larger, meta picture: jokes at the expense of women are NOT OK.
I think a lot of the outrage here comes from the fact that we are reading his slide as though he said "Maven is like a woman." He didn't, he said his girlfriend. The issue is that on a public presentation the goal is to say things others can relate to, so the natural conclusion is that he was indeed making a generalization.
I'm curious if we would have read it as a more appropriate joke if he had replaced "girlfriend" with a genderless noun like "significant other" or "schnuckums."
Really, though, next time you're making a slide like this spare yourself and all of us a lot of trouble and say "my cat" instead.
