Actually if you read the press release again - you will find that they EXPERIMENTED with high frequency tones and found them to not be very reliable because laptop microphones weren't designed for that frequency range and some speakers had trouble generating the sound. So they ended up using tones in the human range of hearing - since computer speakers and microphones are designed for that frequency range. Hence when you install the extension and press the tone button - you can hear the noise it makes and animals aren't bothered by it at all.
Google DOG WHISTLING fails to send URLs across the room
Google has released an experimental plug-in for Chrome that does something odd: sending URLs around the room using sound. The Tone plugin puts a button in Google's browser that, when clicked, makes a sound that other Tone-using Chrome browsers within earshot will interpret as an instruction to open the URL in the Chrome tab …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 21st May 2015 13:25 GMT Andrew Jones 2
Re: @Andrew Jones 2
And if you had read the article that was published in the early hours of the morning - you would know that the article has since been changed as the original article claimed that Google were going to be annoying dogs across the land by using dog-whistle type tones to send URLs from one machine to multiple machines. This wasn't true - because Google decided against it.
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Thursday 21st May 2015 13:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Love it.
"Be very wary of anyone who can whistle complicated tunes quickly."
I can see it now. Flocks of highly trained, lets say, North Korean Blackbirds being released. They make their way to a minuteman silo : a few specific birdsong tunes later, world war 3 starts. Perhaps penguins could be trained to launch Trident missiles. This is a clear and present danger to world peace. Wake up people!
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Thursday 21st May 2015 08:17 GMT VinceH
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.
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Thursday 21st May 2015 13:47 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: Full circle?
Got that sorted? Great, now we can add other useful information to the tones. Use it to save whole swathes of data.
Say, that would be rather useful for backing up a computer system! What will you call this new cassette tape backup storage system of yours?
Oh, I'll get started on a program to digitally compress the data intended for the archived tape. It's going to be a work of art! A work of art, Carl!
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Thursday 21st May 2015 08:56 GMT Jimmy2Cows
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?
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Thursday 21st May 2015 09:01 GMT Jimmy2Cows
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.
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Thursday 21st May 2015 09:37 GMT madmax4
drive by
That fateful night, Jimmy was staring through the shop display at all the nice computers for sale, running their demos. The shop next door was a pharmacy, and one of their computers was on too.
Jimmy reached into his backpack and took out the small device he had assembled the night before from plans he had downloaded. He pushed the small button and the amplified speaker let out a shrill series of tones. He quickly looked around, but nobody had heard him. All the computers diligently downloaded the toolkit he had placed on a specially crafted website
By tomorrow, Jimmy will be a millionaire as his trojan makes its way around the world. Mum would be proud, if she were still here. He slowly wandered off to return to his small wet space under Bridge Road, with his soggy sandwich in hand. Tonight's meal would be his last here. He smiled to himself and quickly looked up and whispered "thank you google".
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Thursday 21st May 2015 19:49 GMT Henry Wertz 1
"I want to keep my URLs secret, so I sit with my back the wall. Why would I want to broadcast my favorite xxx URLs to everyone in the room? Ok, some rooms, yes, but in the living room....nope."
Umm, your watching porn while in a room full of people? Classy 8-) But seriously, I don't see the point of this either; the fact of the matter is, I don't think Google sees a point either, it's an experiment.
I did have to ask, though, why would using this plugin involve "temporarily" storing URLs on Google's servers? Is a multi-ghz PC now not fast enough to do basic signal processing? Are they sending off the sent and received URLs (and/or sent and rececived sound when a URL is detected) to be able to analyze possible failure modes?