Recently I have had to live in a building with severe noise issues, and running appropriately EQed white noise on my speaker helped mask it and maintain at least some sanity and sleep. The mynoise app might not be the fanciest but it does exactly what it says without fail or frills, and works across devices. I don’t think I knew who made it when I bought it, but this story put a face on the app.
When someone attacks you, it is additionally traumatic in that it undermines your trust in people. In this way, it can breed trauma if it makes you become more defensive/distrustful and/or offensive/trust-violating to others. This is not an excuse to the attacker, but if I were asked how we can end this vicious circle I would probably say it’s about long-term mental health (across generations).
The unfair match between good and bad has most likely been a conundrum for thousands of years. Multiple solutions has been proposed as to how to deal with the bad ones, including; kill them, forgive them, educate and reform them - but nothing really seems to work.
One solution might be to gather them all up and send them to another planet were they can live as they please without bothering the good ones - and some might suggest that this is exactly what they did and here we are :)
I'm a lifetime member and have enjoyed mynoise.net for many years. It's the best thing I've found for focus and distraction blocking. I have brain.fm, and YouTube music, but I keep coming back to his site because it's just better, more intentional, and more effective for me.
Feel for the guy. I had a couple of long owned domains stolen recently. They were so low value to anyone but me though, it makes me wonder why someone would bother.
I have found that there are people who just want to watch the world burn. There are many reasons, but, at its most basic, hurt people hurt people.
That's something I like to keep in mind, when I'm reacting to someone being ... less than friendly ... By reacting badly, I then make it all right for them to justify doing it again, to someone else. I've found that I can defend myself, without becoming a foaming-at-the-mouth maniac. We can enforce our boundaries with water pistols, most of the time. We don't need nukes.
Everything is connected. This chap may be naive, but he's actually trying to set good connections in motion. I applaud that.
I feel like a lot of people desperately want to make some kind of impact on the world. Something that causes some number of people to acknowledge their existence (or the effects of it).
It takes real effort to do that in a positive way with a society built around surfacing negativity.
I dunno, that reads a little too simple to me. People aren't magical black boxes of mysterious drives and unfathomable causes, they're components of a larger system and reflections of their environment.
Speaking as a reformed 'teen who wanted to watch the world burn', for some it isn't simple omnidirectional malice, but rather a deep and confusing sense that the world is out to get you (spoiler; in some ways it absolutely is) and an instinct to throw a haymaker just so you feel you didn't go down without a fight.
Once this kind of person begins investigating the causes of their discontent - I myself have come to the conclusion that outdated institutions and capitalism are prime suspects - you can do quite a bit more to focus down that energy on the deserving. If you're young and/or dumb enough to not know the difference between the mynoise guy and 'the system' it's almost a forgivable mistake.
That said, from a practical standpoint, yes. Some people just kinda suck real bad. The why isn't always going to get you closer to a cure.
It’s not targeted. Having maintained a site, my experience is the internet is a wasteland of AI crawlers, script kiddies trying to turn every form into an amplification vector, or vulnerability probers.
Right? I got his email too and man, I love what he does, I'm glad he's recovering from his illness etc. I've donated many times. But it's insane for him to think this was targeted. This was some bot/AI gone rogue. Or similar.
If someone wants to take you DOWN they will. And not by downloading a bunch of a files a heap.
It's just possible that someone at some big AI company just pressed a button to add this to their collection of training material. And lazily or otherwise just hit the checkboxes for 'repeat' and 'forever'.
Without knowing more about it, this coulda also just be one of the uncountable amounts of automated scanners that are iterating the whole internet constantly trying to find wp-admin etc. type vulnerabilities.
If all my years on the internet have taught me anything, it's that some people are just severely mentally unwell and will attempt to destroy anything they can get their hands on, purely because they can. Sometimes it's for attention, sometimes they just want to watch the world burn, but either way, asking "what did their target do to deserve it?" is pointless because the attacker likely never asked themselves that question either, and could very well just be a straight up sociopath.
As the internet grows, so grows the number of such people on it. In days gone, these people would've been rightly shunned from society, and their ability to cause harm to others was severely limited, unless they were willing to resort to more... extreme methods that would usually come with serious consequences. But the internet has given them a new outlet, a new way to ruin things for people from across the world that would've been far, far beyond their reach before, usually without any risk of punishment.
I, too, just keep going back to mynoise.net for ambient sounds. It just looks "right" for the task, and is clearly designed to get out of your way and let you choose the kind of sounds that you want. Amazing site, I highly recommend it.
The attacks are painful, I hope the creator can attract some competent help from here or elsewhere to mitigate this problem.
But naive in a way that most people (?) would like the world to be.
But ultimately, unfortunately, unrealistic.
Building has always been the kind of difficult that, had you known at the beginning then maybe you wouldn't have started. And still quickly and easily destroyed.
Keep creating and building, otherwise there's nothing else to do. Love the obstacles for challenge of defeating them, don't hate them for their existence. To build X you often have to build A, B, and C (and sometimes all the rest of the alphabet) just to have the right setup to maximise the success of X. It can grind, but focus on the benefits of X.
Which sounds like the position they've taken, thankfully.
(Where X represents "anything" and is specifically not the <whatever it's classified as> platform formally known as Twitter).
The melancholy will return, just ride it out each time. It gets easier, gradually.
I really like this perspective, it's right along there with what the Stoics would do:
"The wise act with a reverse clause--meaning that they not only consider what might go wrong, but they are prepared for that to be exactly what they want to happen--it is an opportunity for excellence and virtue.
Regardless of the moral and ethical implications brought up in response to the individual in TFA, you’re spot on. One of my favorite reasons for creating is that it’s me against myself vs reality. Theres not an endeavor I find myself in that this is not true… of course I have the privilege of having accomplished all of my life goals from childhood at an early age, which only led to depression. So I set loftier goals only to complete them. It was only the third time around and confronting failure did it finally click that it wasn’t about accomplishing things and it was all about the journey. I was a latch key kid, so basic stuff like this and everything else that people from well adjusted families that are not poor af I’ve had to learn the hardest way possible. Which I guess in a way is a super power because now whatever I want to do I know what the learning curve looks and feels like and I know that failing a lot is the only way to crawl out of the trough of disillusionment.
Poor guy probably got crawled by LLM bots. The "attacker" probably doesn’t know who this person is. Just a faceless corporation using his sound or white noise content to train and feed llm.
I get similar "attacks" on daily basis, but find out it’s just a bot crawling the certificate transparency logs. Inspecting site certificates, and it’s issued by Let’s Encrypt CAs. Script kiddies, at best, trying to pick off the low hanging fruit.
Hope he doesn’t take these "attacks" too personally going forward. Seems like a good guy overall, maybe too good for this world.
sorry to hear that and i can absolutely relate to this feeling of losing something, of perhaps even being dragged into a game you never wanted to even play, where no one wins and everyone loses something.
the one silver lining is that it seems to have strengthened your resolve, to keep planting and keep building instead of just letting chaos and destruction stop you in your tracks. so in that way maybe you haven’t lost after all and maybe this isn’t even a bad thing, it helped clarify the things you find important in life and even inspire others (me included). thank you!
The MyNoise app has tangibly improved my life. I use a white noise machine at home, but when I travel, MyNoise is my sleep companion and I particularly appreciate that I can set the EQ to block the particular noises that are likely to wake me.
Agree completely and have been doing the same for years.
And what I find especially nice, when I'm on a spotty connection, is that once you load up your preferred noise it runs locally in your browser, so when your connection craps out it keeps playing seamlessly.
It does suck. Because it’s a reminder that they’re are jerks out there and hard to avoid. Especially on the web. It also must sting because he’s trying to be a good citizen.
We see this in abusive behavior towards open source maintainers. It saps their will. And 100 thanks < 1 savage attack.
About a year ago the site I worked on had a hacking attempt. I’m not sure why, it was a site that provided online genetic tools for researchers. We had no financials, or even logins. I felt bad in a similar way as when someone broke into my car years ago, or when I had a package go missing.
Universal connectivity was the internet’s biggest promise and it turned out to be its biggest flaw. It turns out if you allow literally anyone on this planet to walk up to your front door, you will end up with the world’s criminals, psychopaths, you know, the ones in a more civilized time would be driven out of town by townsfolk wielding pitchforks, all hanging out on your porch figuring out how to pick your lock, or just to spray paint your house for the lulz and cred.
Look around and you will see every piece of cybersecurity knowledge assumes your porch will be inhabited by bad actors and there is nothing to stop them, so you absolutely need to harden your server as if you are a bank. Have you ever lived somewhere you genuinely don’t need to lock your front door to feel safe? I have, it was amazing, and it depresses me to no end to see the polar opposite to be what is expected on the internet. We were promised a world of peace and unity and total freedom of information but instead we got the tyranny of the petty cyberdelinquent, with no way to enforce prosocial values as we ought to do in a sane society. “On the internet no one knows you are a dog” was a warning, but we would be in a much better world if it’s only dogs we have to share an internet with. When humans get low they can get way lower than the worst dogs ever born.
We are already seeing a Brazilification of the internet. Crime is rampant, so you live in a gated community with private security if you can afford it. On the internet the name of this private security operation is Cloudflare. I hate one private company becoming the de facto gatekeeper of the internet but I cannot blame any individual website (including the one in the article) for using Cloudflare. It’s the thin orange line between a somewhat usable service and getting knocked off the internet by smart fridges every other day because some kid somewhere on the planet got bored.
I hope Stéphane doesn't let this sort of thing get to him too much - focus on the happy users of the site, learn to combat this sort of attack, and move on. Don't give these assholes any sort of attention.
I heard of this on other websites. AI chatbots are web scraping data off websites, and you have to use fail2ban to block them. People are learning how to teach AI Chatbots to hack websites as well. My website http://blastar.in/ was affected, and I don't host it; a friend runs it for me, but he doesn't respond to email.
When someone attacks you, it is additionally traumatic in that it undermines your trust in people. In this way, it can breed trauma if it makes you become more defensive/distrustful and/or offensive/trust-violating to others. This is not an excuse to the attacker, but if I were asked how we can end this vicious circle I would probably say it’s about long-term mental health (across generations).
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