Google DOG WHISTLING fails to send URLs across the room

I wonder if you could use the sensor in a mouse to read QR codes off a screen?

Would that be easier?

@Andrew Jones 2

Actually if you read the article you will find that's what it says:

Google tried dog-whistling, but found that PCs are set up for sound humans can hear, so reverted to a trilling series of notes.

Re: Love it.

...or set someone's ringtone to Goatse

Re: Full circle?

"or a ZX Spectrum loading a game from tape"

Or any other home computer from way back when. I'm glad I'm not the only one who made that connection as we see, yet again, something old becoming something new.

Why not avoid the noise, by using a simple male/male 3.5mm jack lead - plug in one end to the sending computer's speaker socket, the other to the receiving computer's microphone.

The next logical step after that? Plug the other end into the microphone socket of a cassette deck and record the tones. That way the URLs can be stored for later use, and even carried around if the intended destination computer is too far away to use the lead.

Got that sorted? Great, now we can add other useful information to the tones. Use it to save whole swathes of data.

Re: Full circle?

I personally would have no problem if the sounds of the ZX Spectrum loading became something I would normally hear in daily life - just as long - as it didn't last 20 minutes at a time, accompanied by an expletive and a cry that "it got to 99% and just stopped!"

Re: I can see it now...

... and just think of those offices/workspaces with some radio station playing in the background...

Re: Google Tone temporarily stores a URL on Google’s servers

Yeah I thought that. I have a feeling it doesn't broadcast the URL at all, but some unique code that other Chrome browsers with the active Tone extension can use to lookup the shared URL. Otherwise why bother committing the URL to a server at all?

Face it, it only needs to be a GUID or some other kind of fixed-length unique identifier. Fixed-length makes it much easier to pluck the codes from background noise. Broadcast-starting tones, ID, broadcast-ending tones. Keeps the message down to a short audio burst, and is more reliable than missing part of the URL in the broadcast. At worst Chrome can't find the URL corresponding to the code and reports this.

This way they get to track every URL shared this way and feed it into their advertising machine along with the IDs of everyone who viewed the shared URL, and where they went from there etc. But to be fair to Google, when do they not try to do that?

Re: Google Tone temporarily stores a URL on Google’s servers

URL length doesn't seem to change the duration of the tones - so I'd assume the URL is first shortened (hence stored on a server) and then the shortened URL is converted to tones.

Re: What about the microphone that has to be constantly on ?

Good point. They say the mic is only used while the Tone extension is "active" but that could mean anything from "Hey Jimmy, turn on your tone thing I wanna send you this URL" to it starts when Chrome does and stays on until Chrome is shut down - which if you're anything like me and your browser is open all day means yeah, el Goog gets to hear everything trivial and pointless going on in my life. Well, they would if I used Chrome.

Re: Another airgap-proof virus vector?

So how long before we have to keep secure systems in a vacuum box isolated from the outer box and running through 2 Ups systems and probably some other steps to keep it locked down?

meh, been sending urls with sound since forever...

Me: "Hey mate, check out www.dwarfnunsmakingwhoopeewithdolphins.org.asm"

Mate: *upchucks*

Maybe over some sort of system already set in place perfectly capable of sending sounds long distance. Possibly with some convenient connector to allow this transfer to take place.