Ex Shazam tech here. The signatures that the Shazam app sends are very small, so bandwith costs should be minimal. Of course, I speaking about the technology of my day 2001+, so times may have changed
I did some measurements on shazam and it seems to send about 7kb/minute, which corresponds to 300MB/month, i.e. no big deal. I suppose it helps that shazam was designed in the age of expensive bandwidth.
I've learned when setting up a family plan that depending on how many devices you already have (my wife and I each had 1 phone and 1 apple watch) we could get an extra line with unlimited data for functionally nothing. (The sim's sitting in my dashcam right now, been silently plugging away for months)
Some phone plans like Google Fi will give you a data only sim card for free. It ends up being totally free as long as you have unlimited data plans. I use my old phone and a data only sim card for random projects.
NAL but in most jurisdictions anything that happens in public is freely recordable.
The illegal part here is likely the attachment of a device to public property without permission from local authorities.
However, the same service would likely be legal if a few people were hired to walk around with microphones. Or potentially if the microphones were attached to vehicles.
Edit - also might be legal if OP purchased / leased some property facing the street.
Who exactly is being surveiled here? How is their privacy being affected by this?
This device is not surveilling anyone as far as I can tell. It's logging music that's being played in public in its vicinity. It's not tracking individuals, it's not recording faces.
When someone does something in public, they sort of lose the claim/right to privacy, because they are doing it /in public/. If they wanted privacy they should have done their thing in private.
If you are not willing to grant consent to this thing listening to you, then maybe you should not walk around in public playing your music loudly. Or should everyone who is within earshot of you first get your consent, else they must stick their fingers in their ears?
If you select a title, you can play the full recording that led to the song being recognized. It's not just the song metadata that is recorded and uploaded to the website, but all the captured audio.
Ah I did not realize that. But again - if you have issues with your public statements and activities being, well, public - then you probably should not be doing these things in public in the first place.
Nobody's being tracked here, I'm not aware of some data model being built up, of specific songs played by specific individuals, with time and date and location being attached to it.
If you want to shout out your banking login on the sidewalk while you are playing a song out loud, then I guess that's on you and you can't be unhappy about the fact that this thing recorded you.
Point out what [constitutionally valid] law it’s broken; if it’s audible to the ear from a public location in San Francisco (or anywhere in the US) then you’re allowed to record it (similarly if you can see it from a public vantage point, then you can photograph it).
If you weren’t it would be legally impossible for any two people to leave two voice messages simultaneously while in earshot of each other. You also couldn’t use Spotify in public ever.
You can certainly get in trouble for the uses you put that recording to, but as the OP isn’t selling or rebroadcasting and would have a solid fair use defense for any incidental copyright infringement, I don’t see any colorable claim that anyone this thing can hear has any reasonable expectation of privacy from it.
BTW, it’s making a very good point about actual surveillance equipment that is quite possibly installed all around you.
He knew what he was doing, but YOU had no clue what he was doing. Low frequency audio is close to non-directional, you install subwoofers where it is convenient to fit them, not to "aim" the sound in any particular direction.
Mine is firing directly upwards. I'm not trying to knock birds out of the sky.
Subs are non-directional, as someone else pointed out, and bass sound waves need room to propagate. The actual direction they get "aimed" can also depend on the trunk area and shape.
My subs, while currently pointing backwards, would have been better firing upwards for no other reason than the manufacturer (Audiofrog) doesn't recommend grills. As it is, I have to be careful what I place in my trunk to avoid punching a hole in the cone.
Other cultures seem to feel more entitled, thinking that THEIR music could not possibly bother anyone. I've certainly heard people blast Wagner or Orff at high volumes.
The phrase "turn down" is the opposite of "turn up". To "turn down" would be to decrease the intensity of the party. And "turn down for what" means something like "don't stop the party for any reason".
Pretty sure that's not the case here. To "turn down" is a common phrase (at least in the US) that is used to describe changing something by use of a control.
As described at Wiktionary [0] - it's an idiomatic way of saying that you're going to lower the volume through use of a control to do that. The context that was used has nothing to do with party.
> At its core, turn down for what is a phrase used to promote having a good time. The phrase itself implies that there is no reason to turn down and stop partying.
OK, that makes sense in the context of "another round of shots".
But in my experience, party intensity and music volume are generally correlated, so you would probably turn down the former by turning down the latter.
I had to consult with my elders to verify this, but I can now confirm that in 1950s England, "turn it up" meant the opposite: "stop what you're doing, settle down".
It might be that you’re the asshole in this situation. I think the boundaries are pourous around this topic.
(Sure, I just called someone random on the web an asshole. I don’t mean it with any force. In London we get people riding busses playing their im-personal stereos loudly, sometimes. I often don’t like it either. I often use headphones for my own sounds but not the blocking kind, and will have to stop my music because of thwirs. One time someone got into the Tube/metro carriage I was in playing loud Brazilian music from a speaker on a trolley. At first it annoyed me, but after a few bars it got me grooving. Then I realised it was a funk-infused cover of a traditional capoeira song, so I steuck up a conversation with the other rider about Brazil and capoeira. Made my day.)
Realizing that you enjoyed being forced to listen to music you didn't decide to listen to doesn't mean you might be an asshole for not enjoying it at other times. That's ridiculous.
That's nice you can get some nice story out of it but I do think people who grew up in cities have a totally different mindset than the rest of us.
For me, I don't want to live in a cacophony of noises 24/7. That goes for music, non-stop ambulances, loud speakers, etc.
I tried and decided that those places are not for me, so I moved back to smaller and much quieter places (I very much prefer the sound of rivers, insects and wild birds to other people's sounds.)
It might make me an asshole but it's also quite natural to be drawn to peace, so there that.
I'm willing to bet 99.99% of the time you hear music from outside a car it's not due to someone being hard of hearing, unless they caused that issue themselves by listening to music too loud.
However, if you are hard of hearing to the point where you are actually disturbing others, I would recommend headphones.
It is not generally legal to drive while wearing headphones. In some US states it is specifically banned, and in many others you will get pulled over for distracted driving. (The thinking is partly because it makes it more difficult to hear emergency vehicle sirens).
Background noise makes it difficult for the hard of hearing to listen to conversation.
If we cared more for the hard of hearing we would reduce music volumes and make restaurants quieter. Our society doesn't care even though it pretends to.
I spent several years in South America, and down there (it varies by country, but by and large) it's totally normal for people to play music on loudspeaker on public transport, walking down the street, in the park, etc, nobody bats an eyelid. The same behaviour in most western countries is met with disdainful looks, and often with someone else blatantly telling the "offender" to put on headphones. So, yeah, it does depend on the culture.
Highly variable of course - but I've found these types of self-centered narcissistic attributes to be far more endemic to western culture. I don't remember a single time in my years of living in Taiwan where I heard somebody blaring loud music / subwoofers, both while walking around and in all the flats that I lived.
In my experience it is function of how a society values personal space and courtesy.
You do find a lot of social music in high density environments such as in found in global south or in America cities where personal space is not a much of a choice , while Taiwan (or Japan or Korea) is high density too the extreme courteous culture makes them different.
It is also different in what makes public music, it is not necessarily someone playing their favorite songs , in India for example things like religious events or weddings or funerals people tolerate and even expect public music but typically don’t accept say a guy with a boom box .
It is very different way of growing up and living if you have to no choice but hear neighbors fighting or having sex , public music wouldn’t feel so offensive when you hear a lot things you prefer not to daily.
I've spent a few more minutes than I should have trying to work this out. The only way I can figure this is it's related to the head movement? Still not sure. I sure do have very little love for this generation though
> For anyone who doesn't know, 'bop' to gen Z is a derogatory term for a sexually active woman, it basically means 'slut'.
I have never heard this and I'm "Gen Z". I looked at Urban Dictionary and the earliest definition that says slut goes back to 2005, so "Gen Z" definitely didn't come up with it.
We used "bopping around" as a term to describe a sexually confident woman enjoying herself on the scene, as a generally positive term, at least since 2015, so I'm not sure it's a zoomer thing. Did it become a derogatory term? As we used it it was explicitly in opposition to "slut," it was a word of empowerment. Like yeah she gets laid good for her.
First usage I can think of is "boppers" in Paul Wall & Kanye West's 2005 "Drive Slow." It'd be a hell of a coincidence if they weren't related. In Wall's oeuvre it just seems to denote "the women I'm interested in" without much in the way of connotation.
> The disco ball in my mouth insinuates I'm ballin'
> I'm leaning on the switch, sitting crooked in my slab
> But I could still catch boppers if I drove a cab
This is really cool. Imagine a map of this across a city, being able to see what different areas tend to listen to. I imagine you'd find some surprising and not-so-surprising things.
And music fingerprinting is probably incredibly accurate, because it can work similar to linguistic fingerprinting.
There was a site posted to this place a year or so ago, which looked at work frequencies to find alt-accounts.
I don't hide the fact that I use a different account on different computers, so I have a personal account and work accounts and end up changing accounts each time I change jobs.
This site correlated all my accounts, using a very basic fingerprinting technique of looking for words which a user uses uncommonly often.
It found them all with a good degree of confidence.
I haven't seen reference to that site since, I suspect it got taken down.
Musical fingerprinting would be accurate to a similar degree. You wouldn't look for the music someone listens to most, you'd look for uncommon combinations.
A combination a just a few songs that someone listens to unusually more than other people is probably enough for a good enough correlation for fingerprinting.
Leaking 33 bits over time, especially a lifetime, is nearly impossible to avoid.
Although it's more difficult, it's also possible to be too "middle of the road": very few individuals are very close to the population average in all dimensions.
(Heinrich Böll's At the Bridge is a great short story; Böll had worked in a statistics department so he was probably well aware of the weakness in his protagonist's reasoning)
About the best I'd ask for is that custodes should ipsos be as correlatable as we all are: the amphiopticon?
Thank for finding that, yes that's the one. It was incredibly accurate.
I'm in two minds about the fact it's down.
1. It's probably a good thing that it isn't super-easy to quickly find everyone's alternate accounts.
2. The capability is clearly there and the technology is out there, but now in the hands of the few people who bother to re-implement it.
It was a useful tool for highlighting the naivety of believing that throwaway accounts were a real possibility when stylometry analysis is so relatively cheap to do.
I just gave up on ever being able to really be anonymous, after I had a rather sobering interaction with Disqus.
I had never used it, and wanted to leave a comment on a site (long ago -can't remember where or when).
I started to sign up for Disqus, and it helpfully asked me "We found all these comments from around the Web. Should we associate these with this account?"
It included some old, dead-and-gone-I-would-have-sworn-it troll postings that I had pooped out, back in the last century.
I immediately deleted my signup, and went and had a lie-down.
These days, I deliberately make it obvious who I am, and post as if I had to stand behind my words.
Absolutely. I'm not against anonymity, but am rather cynical about it, and appreciate the freedom (I have lived in nightmare totalitarian countries, and my father was in the CIA).
Good effort if that's what it is (I confess, I haven't looped back to check).
Sharing for people to check is useful to bed something in, I'm not fond of the "privacy violation" but I grew up in small communities .. if you said anything within earshot in a public area it went around town faster than 10 gigabit fibre, and that was before WWW, before even TCP or the IP it sat on.
Accessible storage and replay forever is a whole level up, but these are the days in which face recognition is being rolled out to giant billboards that can display different images to different positions and track several moving pedtrasians with targeted ads based on their preferences.
See I’m not sure that it is legal. If they are re-transmitting audio is being played in public over the Internet for potentially many thousands more people, I’m pretty sure the RIAA, the UMG, & the WMG would all have something to say about it.
The clips are a few seconds long and the use does not appear to be commercial, even then their inclusion could be seen as fair use to a reasonable person.
I recommend you sit this one out, as recording people, even if only audio and sending the sound over the internet is very much against the law in germany
Thinking this through more deeply, I agree and see your position. It is creepy to surveil audio and possibly send in full to Shazam. [edit: And post the original audio recordings online.] The ethical way to do this would be to use your own code to decimate the audio signal to extremely low dimensionality.
The music fingerprinting on my Android phone works in airplane mode, so it would be possible with modifications. Also, it's likely that Shazam is sending a "hash" of the audio rather than an audio stream in most cases.
Ctrl-F in that document for 'hashing'. That step reduces the audio information to a sparse collection of key points, one for each of four frequency ranges per time segment. I would assume that everything up to that step is done on the phone and only the key points are sent to the server.
Shazam is not illegal in Germany unless I missremember what the app does and instead of being to identify songs based on samples, it's being used to record people
Well it's you a person who is recording the music. So it's the user's responsibility to make sure you are not breaking any laws. So the app cannot be held at fault for this. No one cares if you do a Shazam in public so it all just works out.
But if you set up an autonomous recording device, no matter what you say you are doing, you will have problems.
The legality of it only matters if you get caught. So don't use hardware or software that's traceable back to you, and be sufficiently careful to remain undetected when you install it. People often weigh the likelihood of being caught much, much higher than it actually is, and therefore conclude "I mustn't do anything illegal", which is irrational.
What more could one possibly need than "it'd be fun to build"? Does everything in the world have to be novel and important? Or can some things just be cool and for fun?
What I was going for (but poorly expressed) is that if your goal is to figure out what people listen to within a geographical area, streaming service data seems far more comprehensive than putting one mic on one random street.
The goal here seems more focused towards informing people about the existence and imprecision of shot spotters than actually trying to determine anything about regional music interests.
The music industry has a long, long history of people paying to put songs in prominent places. If you built it yourself you would be 100% confident that nobody was paying the person compiling the playlist to put songs on it.
Well, at least at first. If your playlist derived from the ambient music of a particular streetcorner in Berlin becomes popular enough, someone would probably try hanging out there blasting their new song 24/7. Someone else might try approaching you about working out a deal to pay you to slip their new song into the mix. And of course you can never know who's paying to put songs on whatever stations or playlists the locals are listening to.
Some pretty interesting things would probably happen as the result of your goofy little fun project getting big enough to start having these problems though.
The Mission is a variegated place. It's been undergoing gentrification for 4 decades but it never seems to get there - so much so that you could say that that's become its "thing."
The exact location where the phone is placed makes a huge difference. Going from Valencia to Shotwell to the BART plazas to the Latino bars and back to the hills your soundtrack would change quite a few times.
Where does gentrification begin and end? The mission went from Ohlone to Spanish to German/Irish/Italian immigrants, then Mexican immigrants, then Central American, then LGBT, then wider punks/misfits and other immigrants including Filipinos, before the techies started moving in. I don’t really understand this term because it seems to suggest before a richer class moves into an area it displaces “the true inhabitants,” but those true inhabitants have almost always displaced someone else.
It involves a massive increase in housing prices, primarily brought about by artificial supply restrictions, that results in unintentional displacement. The reason the Mission is still variegated is rent control, along with various forms of affordable housing, housesharing, master tenant slumlords, SROs, extended family arrangements, etc. It's a pretty unique and amazing place really.
Yeah I'm sure handshake politics goes a long way in these neighborhoods often to the detriment of the unsuspecting, unconnected and un-special-interest-group attached renters and owners.
Ellis evictions suck particularly hard because they can happen out of the blue for any building, even if you chose one suited for long tenancies. I don't know what percentage results in protests, but it's quite a few. Some of the contested ones fail on technical grounds before they get to the protest stage [1].
The amount of gentrification in the Mission varies a lot based on where you go.
I volunteer on 24th st. weekly, something I've been doing since 2019. The crowd at the volunteering is mostly immigrants. I am white, native English speaker but I speak decent Spanish.
It's mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don't often overlap. I remember one time I went into a restaurant and they engaged with me in Spanish right off the bat, we never switched to English, I got a table to dine-in and they waited on me and it felt pretty much like dining at a restaurant like in travels I've had in central America... A few months later I brought a friend to the same place and I ended up getting a 100% gringo restaurant experience.
Another place down the street and the cashier is like some very pale upper midwest looking hipstery guy who looks "whiter than me", and it felt like a totally different world, one that didn't overlap at all with description above.
Just offering another point of data, your observation of the "same space with no overlap" and the anecdote about the restaurant hits so true for me! Almost the exactly same thing happened to me, Spanish nearly the whole time. Later, with a coworker, 100% gringo experience. Hilarious! The alternation between places like this as you walk up 24th always struck me as notable.
This couldn't have been later than 2011, at which time the zeitgeist was replete with jabs at the ongoing gentrification. :)
That's funny, I was heading uptown the other day, sipping on an elixir and thinking about shaving another kilowatt off my bill, when some casanova got out of a phone booth and asked me for directions to the daytona 500 club or some other make out room. I lolo'd out loud and docs clocked him in the teeth. Pretty sure he had to change his napper tandy after that.
you really clinched the zeitgeist of the mission district, are you a professional writer, part time? I'm just grateful to be in your orbit. that kind of success will cost you a mint. I'd wake up in a fit of delerium. What's the ABV of that drink you just gave me? But okay, let's get down to brass tacks. it's last call, and I've got work to so I'm not going to go on a bender. I'm not a flying pig so let's just sit down where the willows and the sycamore trees meet and hideout there and wait for someone to give us last rites.
> mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don't often overlap
You may enjoy China Miéville's The City & the City [1]. The less you read about it ex ante, the better. It's one of those books that gives you a mental model and language that proves surprisingly useful in describing what you saw.
I'm not a Bay Area person, but was visiting a few months ago and got a new tattoo at Rose & Thorn right off the 16th BART station. Took a walk around waiting for the appointment and it's crazy how fast the vibe changes from block to block.
As far as I can tell, by boosting each recording and listening to the purported song in full, I can eventually hear just a snippet of that song. Shazam's algorithm is extremely good.
I'd suggest playing darude - sandstorm on loop, fairly loudly but with a (cone) directional speaker pointing straight upwards, spiraling in towards mission & 20th st starting ~6 blocks out in each direction. Record the time when you reach each intersection, and you'll know exactly which street segment you were on when your song got shazam'd, without having to actually ride on every segment (save roughly 50% travel time compared to doing the full grid).
Space-filling curve with a single song sequence? …Non-Euclidean space-filling curve, technically, because it has to fit the city grid topology.
Large phased-array speaker on a stationary balloon platform above the city, capable of rapidly scanning and blasting every telephone pole in the neighborhood?
If you’ve never lived in a major urban area in the US, I imagine this might seem strange. People drive around with music playing loud enough that a crappy mic would easily pick it up.
> As of 12:30am PST I have located the Box and successfully executed a Rickroll Injection Attack on the target system. Out of respect for the artist I will not be revealing the Box's location, but for any veteran Mission resident only a couple obvious locations exist.
I bet the hardware will take a bit more - the script could be just something like https://github.com/loiccoyle/shazam-cli running every minute and, when there's a valid result, upload to your backend/Sheets API/Telegram bot etc
403 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadThe illegal part here is likely the attachment of a device to public property without permission from local authorities.
However, the same service would likely be legal if a few people were hired to walk around with microphones. Or potentially if the microphones were attached to vehicles.
Edit - also might be legal if OP purchased / leased some property facing the street.
The “use of a public pole” isn’t really the issue.
This device is not surveilling anyone as far as I can tell. It's logging music that's being played in public in its vicinity. It's not tracking individuals, it's not recording faces.
When someone does something in public, they sort of lose the claim/right to privacy, because they are doing it /in public/. If they wanted privacy they should have done their thing in private.
If you are not willing to grant consent to this thing listening to you, then maybe you should not walk around in public playing your music loudly. Or should everyone who is within earshot of you first get your consent, else they must stick their fingers in their ears?
Nobody's being tracked here, I'm not aware of some data model being built up, of specific songs played by specific individuals, with time and date and location being attached to it.
If you want to shout out your banking login on the sidewalk while you are playing a song out loud, then I guess that's on you and you can't be unhappy about the fact that this thing recorded you.
If you weren’t it would be legally impossible for any two people to leave two voice messages simultaneously while in earshot of each other. You also couldn’t use Spotify in public ever.
You can certainly get in trouble for the uses you put that recording to, but as the OP isn’t selling or rebroadcasting and would have a solid fair use defense for any incidental copyright infringement, I don’t see any colorable claim that anyone this thing can hear has any reasonable expectation of privacy from it.
BTW, it’s making a very good point about actual surveillance equipment that is quite possibly installed all around you.
The best way to get consent.
Love this so much.
A collogue:
Someone who sees their role on the team as to annoys others.
Mine is firing directly upwards. I'm not trying to knock birds out of the sky.
My subs, while currently pointing backwards, would have been better firing upwards for no other reason than the manufacturer (Audiofrog) doesn't recommend grills. As it is, I have to be careful what I place in my trunk to avoid punching a hole in the cone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMUDVMiITOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_IWlPHMziU
Other cultures seem to feel more entitled, thinking that THEIR music could not possibly bother anyone. I've certainly heard people blast Wagner or Orff at high volumes.
As described at Wiktionary [0] - it's an idiomatic way of saying that you're going to lower the volume through use of a control to do that. The context that was used has nothing to do with party.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/turn_down
EDIT: My bad, thought it was in response to...
> I guess it will mostly reflect the musical taste of assholes who turn their music up loud. Hmm, but maybe all culture works like that.
> At its core, turn down for what is a phrase used to promote having a good time. The phrase itself implies that there is no reason to turn down and stop partying.
But in my experience, party intensity and music volume are generally correlated, so you would probably turn down the former by turning down the latter.
(Sure, I just called someone random on the web an asshole. I don’t mean it with any force. In London we get people riding busses playing their im-personal stereos loudly, sometimes. I often don’t like it either. I often use headphones for my own sounds but not the blocking kind, and will have to stop my music because of thwirs. One time someone got into the Tube/metro carriage I was in playing loud Brazilian music from a speaker on a trolley. At first it annoyed me, but after a few bars it got me grooving. Then I realised it was a funk-infused cover of a traditional capoeira song, so I steuck up a conversation with the other rider about Brazil and capoeira. Made my day.)
For me, I don't want to live in a cacophony of noises 24/7. That goes for music, non-stop ambulances, loud speakers, etc.
I tried and decided that those places are not for me, so I moved back to smaller and much quieter places (I very much prefer the sound of rivers, insects and wild birds to other people's sounds.)
It might make me an asshole but it's also quite natural to be drawn to peace, so there that.
However, if you are hard of hearing to the point where you are actually disturbing others, I would recommend headphones.
If we cared more for the hard of hearing we would reduce music volumes and make restaurants quieter. Our society doesn't care even though it pretends to.
You do find a lot of social music in high density environments such as in found in global south or in America cities where personal space is not a much of a choice , while Taiwan (or Japan or Korea) is high density too the extreme courteous culture makes them different.
It is also different in what makes public music, it is not necessarily someone playing their favorite songs , in India for example things like religious events or weddings or funerals people tolerate and even expect public music but typically don’t accept say a guy with a boom box .
It is very different way of growing up and living if you have to no choice but hear neighbors fighting or having sex , public music wouldn’t feel so offensive when you hear a lot things you prefer not to daily.
For anyone who doesn't know, 'bop' to gen Z is a derogatory term for a sexually active woman, it basically means 'slut'.
Redefining existing words is something that really irritates me, particularly when it's used to attack women.
I've spent a few more minutes than I should have trying to work this out. The only way I can figure this is it's related to the head movement? Still not sure. I sure do have very little love for this generation though
I have never heard this and I'm "Gen Z". I looked at Urban Dictionary and the earliest definition that says slut goes back to 2005, so "Gen Z" definitely didn't come up with it.
It's black slang and it's decades old.
Rather than being some Woke Simp the truth is you don't like the way lower class black people speak.
Or maybe you don't like TikTokers speaking like lower class black people?
Or you could get over yourself and just explain words?
> The disco ball in my mouth insinuates I'm ballin' > I'm leaning on the switch, sitting crooked in my slab > But I could still catch boppers if I drove a cab
https://genius.com/20328302
Then you'd get profiling to potentially pick out who in particular moved across the city and the exact time of path of their movement.
While this is a nice idea on a local scale, when scaled up it has horrendous privacy implications.
There was a site posted to this place a year or so ago, which looked at work frequencies to find alt-accounts.
I don't hide the fact that I use a different account on different computers, so I have a personal account and work accounts and end up changing accounts each time I change jobs.
This site correlated all my accounts, using a very basic fingerprinting technique of looking for words which a user uses uncommonly often.
It found them all with a good degree of confidence.
I haven't seen reference to that site since, I suspect it got taken down.
Musical fingerprinting would be accurate to a similar degree. You wouldn't look for the music someone listens to most, you'd look for uncommon combinations.
A combination a just a few songs that someone listens to unusually more than other people is probably enough for a good enough correlation for fingerprinting.
Although it's more difficult, it's also possible to be too "middle of the road": very few individuals are very close to the population average in all dimensions.
(Heinrich Böll's At the Bridge is a great short story; Böll had worked in a statistics department so he was probably well aware of the weakness in his protagonist's reasoning)
About the best I'd ask for is that custodes should ipsos be as correlatable as we all are: the amphiopticon?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ7skMnxly0
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
I'm in two minds about the fact it's down.
1. It's probably a good thing that it isn't super-easy to quickly find everyone's alternate accounts.
2. The capability is clearly there and the technology is out there, but now in the hands of the few people who bother to re-implement it.
It was a useful tool for highlighting the naivety of believing that throwaway accounts were a real possibility when stylometry analysis is so relatively cheap to do.
I had never used it, and wanted to leave a comment on a site (long ago -can't remember where or when).
I started to sign up for Disqus, and it helpfully asked me "We found all these comments from around the Web. Should we associate these with this account?"
It included some old, dead-and-gone-I-would-have-sworn-it troll postings that I had pooped out, back in the last century.
I immediately deleted my signup, and went and had a lie-down.
These days, I deliberately make it obvious who I am, and post as if I had to stand behind my words.
Only if someone can move across the city in three minutes.
Apple and Google could do this if you use their music services, but they already know where you are.
I suppose if I have very unique taste in music and someone else knew about it, they could track me, but this is easily foiled by wearing headphones.
but bonus points for picking up that Virreinato de Nueva España vibe.
I don't like that it shares the recordings though. It doesn't add much value and it's a privacy violation, even if it's legal.
Sharing for people to check is useful to bed something in, I'm not fond of the "privacy violation" but I grew up in small communities .. if you said anything within earshot in a public area it went around town faster than 10 gigabit fibre, and that was before WWW, before even TCP or the IP it sat on.
Accessible storage and replay forever is a whole level up, but these are the days in which face recognition is being rolled out to giant billboards that can display different images to different positions and track several moving pedtrasians with targeted ads based on their preferences.
You're keeping charts, right? I wanna know what the top hit on that block is next month
:chef’s kiss:
[edit: It would be awesome if others could collaborate on this and had a guide on how to do it!]
https://www.dechicchis.com/assets/Joseph-DeChicchis-Music-Id...
Like having a distinctive click impulse and get the cathedral from that.
But if you set up an autonomous recording device, no matter what you say you are doing, you will have problems.
I expectation is that the microphone above the rooftop will not pick up on normal conversations, only louder stuff.
Well, at least at first. If your playlist derived from the ambient music of a particular streetcorner in Berlin becomes popular enough, someone would probably try hanging out there blasting their new song 24/7. Someone else might try approaching you about working out a deal to pay you to slip their new song into the mix. And of course you can never know who's paying to put songs on whatever stations or playlists the locals are listening to.
Some pretty interesting things would probably happen as the result of your goofy little fun project getting big enough to start having these problems though.
The exact location where the phone is placed makes a huge difference. Going from Valencia to Shotwell to the BART plazas to the Latino bars and back to the hills your soundtrack would change quite a few times.
[1]
Protesters Gather at Google Lawyer’s Apartments
https://missionlocal.org/2014/04/protesters-gather-at-google...
[1] https://sftu.org/ellis/
I thought it might have died because the site mentioned it is solar powered.
I volunteer on 24th st. weekly, something I've been doing since 2019. The crowd at the volunteering is mostly immigrants. I am white, native English speaker but I speak decent Spanish.
It's mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don't often overlap. I remember one time I went into a restaurant and they engaged with me in Spanish right off the bat, we never switched to English, I got a table to dine-in and they waited on me and it felt pretty much like dining at a restaurant like in travels I've had in central America... A few months later I brought a friend to the same place and I ended up getting a 100% gringo restaurant experience.
Another place down the street and the cashier is like some very pale upper midwest looking hipstery guy who looks "whiter than me", and it felt like a totally different world, one that didn't overlap at all with description above.
This couldn't have been later than 2011, at which time the zeitgeist was replete with jabs at the ongoing gentrification. :)
You may enjoy China Miéville's The City & the City [1]. The less you read about it ex ante, the better. It's one of those books that gives you a mental model and language that proves surprisingly useful in describing what you saw.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City
I'd like to see this rolled out widely so we can get some map of music.
Edit: There's clearly a bus stop right near the pole.
Could also place a directional speaker on top of your cars roof to not listen to it yourself or interrupt neighbors, just to be able to locate it.
Large phased-array speaker on a stationary balloon platform above the city, capable of rapidly scanning and blasting every telephone pole in the neighborhood?
> As of 12:30am PST I have located the Box and successfully executed a Rickroll Injection Attack on the target system. Out of respect for the artist I will not be revealing the Box's location, but for any veteran Mission resident only a couple obvious locations exist.
12:36 AM Flores LATIN MAFIA
12:36 AM Never Gonna Give You Up Rick Astley
12:32 AM El F Natanael Cano & Junior H
BTW I'm curious what the solar setup is?