crisp

Every now and then, someone in my social circle wonders how they have been talking about some product or service with someone, only to see an ad for it a bit later in their social media feed.

Then they wonder how this happened. Paranoia kicks in like "this phone is listening to us" or "they can read our encrypted chat messages".

I've tried to find ways to explain this topic in simple, layman's terms, but mostly failed by going too much into details and confused them even more.

What's equally important is that I'd like to give them actionable tips so they can protect themselves and their friends & family.

What's your go-to explanation on this topic, and the best (simple) actionable advice on how they can protect themselves?

Inspired by the comments[1][2] about lost source code, what's your story? How did you or somebody else lose source code, and what were the implications?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700830

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28701093

The other day I had a chat with a friend of mine about noise-cancelling headphones. For the people not familiar with the technology, they are basically fully closed headphones with microphones outside the cups. The collected noise is passed through processors inside the headphones, effectively generating cancelling sound waves.

The chat left me wondering would it be possible to, even in theory, build generic noise-cancelling speakers? I tried to Google the subject but couldn't find any meaningful results. Also, I know there are a lot of problems to tackle, such as reflections, positions relative to the source of noise, latency and whatnot. But the technology could be used in huge amount of applications, basically everywhere where there is noise.