It would be interesting to see something like this with but tweaked to produce sounds like, say, the background bleep bloop perchweeep noises in Star Trek.
Note that this technique has a pretty neat malicious use case: bridging air gaps, in a way that removing/disabling wireless chips won't stop. You'd have to have already installed malware to the airgapped machine, of course, but once that's done, chances are it'll frequently be in range of (presumably easier to compromise) Internet-connected machines, and ultrasound allows slow but bidirectional communication.
This was alleged in 2013 to have been done in a piece of malware dubbed "badBIOS", but said malware is likely imaginary.
With usb3 and the ara project, there's a possible window for an 'ATX' standard for portable devices to exist. Tiny connectors, form factors over usb or pcie. It's not a big market. The MacBook Air way is aiming at the opposite but I'm not sure it's going to go much further; these things have almost everything soldered, the next step is closer to a large SoC rather than a mainboard.
I've been poking this the last few hours. It uses both audible and inaudible (ultrasonic) frequencies. The URL is passed to a Google service called Copresence to transform it into a short token - it's this token that's played. The Copresence client, and the playing/listening code are part of Chromium/Chrome 43.x. I think earlier versions won't work with the extension.
This is based on Copresence, which will probably ultimately include something like AirDrop. The audio portion would be used for neighbour discovery, before hand off to e.g. wifi direct. Copresence is already used for the guest play feature of ChromeCast.
Listening browsers require the extension. Neither require a Dev release of Chrome - 43.x is the current stable release.
Nothing you'd call documentation. Copresence is part of Chromium, so you can dive into the source code if you wish. I'm attempting to reverse engineer the audible portion (just for fun). I'm tweeting as I go https://twitter.com/moreati
Oh hey, I actually built something extremely similar in a hacknight recently [1]. Except instead of just converting URLs to fixed size tokens (also how chirp.io works), I allowed arbitrary bit streams and forward error correction.
would be nice if humans and computers could both produce/consume the audio. That way you would have a secret language that you could perfectly communicate to computers with.
I think it's worth mentioning that this is yet another fairly cool project that relies on an always-on* microphone. I don't remember who said it, but there was a very nice quote on HN recently about the currency of freedom i.e. it's not something you should never spend, but you should be certain you're getting your money's worth. :I
*I realize you can turn it on and off, but it's not designed to be done easily.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] threadThis was alleged in 2013 to have been done in a piece of malware dubbed "badBIOS", but said malware is likely imaginary.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mys...
Such as the camera or microphone built into every machine potentially listening/watching at all times.
Add a bongo and some beatnik poetry as extra data channels, and use it for the network connection at coffee shops.
Google Tone is similar to http://chirp.io/, which has iOS and Android apps. There are third-party transmitters (but not listeners) which work across browsers. http://piupiu.ga/ is the most complete. I wrote a bookmarklet https://moreati.github.io/chirpweb/.
Do listening browsers require the extension or just that the Dev version of Chrome?
Is there any information published about the token?
Listening browsers require the extension. Neither require a Dev release of Chrome - 43.x is the current stable release.
Nothing you'd call documentation. Copresence is part of Chromium, so you can dive into the source code if you wish. I'm attempting to reverse engineer the audible portion (just for fun). I'm tweeting as I go https://twitter.com/moreati
[1] https://github.com/rraval/pied-piper
*I realize you can turn it on and off, but it's not designed to be done easily.