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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3056 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Beware of ads that use inaudible sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC

I call bullshit.

Run a spectrum analyzer on pretty much any online ad and you'll notice it brick walls at 12-16k. Any sort of compression and you'll never so much as hit 20k, which is the upper end of 'sonic.' You want ultrasonic? Guess what. You're now running at 96k or above because St. Nyquist shits all over you at half your clock speed - your 44.1kHz CD player is only good to 22.05KHz, for example, which is fine because you can't much hear above 18k anyway.

Besides which the only people advertisers care about are the 13-25yo kids and their hearing isn't blown out the way everyone over 30's is. You REALLY think your online advertising is using a dog whistle to make your phone and your television work in league against you? Then you're either Andy Rooney or a venture capital firm. Fucking people.

Sorry. 6th 16 hour day in a row and I just busted up the rest of my bushmills amongst the crew.





mk  ·  3056 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It sounded unbelievable to me, but I did recall reading about it before. I don't remember where, but some Googling brought up this paper:

On Covert Acoustical Mesh Networks in Air

Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you?

Also, cheers.

kleinbl00  ·  3056 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Proof of concept and deployment are very different things. Ultrasonic transducers are commonplace, ultrasound-capable speakers are rare, consumer gear capable of hitting those frequencies without heinous harmonics down where you can hear them are a figment of the imagination.

It's the equivalent of saying that your smartwatch can beat Deep Blue at chess because after all, they're both computers.

Also, cheers. Let's see if this shit works over EDGE.

mk  ·  3055 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Many many years ago, my father decided to take us off-roading in our Laredo after church in the UP of Michigan. Way back into a two rut, we came across a puddle, maybe 20 feet long. My mom tried to talk him out of it, but he went for it.

We bottomed out. We spent the next hour jamming branches under the tires in our Sunday best. Ready to go, we climbed in, and the jeep wouldn't start. My brother and my dad then went for help. A long time later, they returned with an old timer that quickly found a loose connection, I think it was the distributor, but I can't recall. We then rolled right out.

My mother was not pleased.

user-inactivated  ·  3056 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Someone told a venture capitalist that the technology they wanted to play with had applications to marketing in order to get funding to play with it. They are going to have a lot of fun, and VCs are asking for it. More power to 'em, I say.