Slashdot Mirror
New Keyboard Accessory Shocks Users When They Try To Go On Facebook
cartechboy writes "Two Ph.D. students from MIT have created a keyboard accessory, the Pavlov Poke, that shocks you every time you go onto Facebook. The project comes as a result of the students finding the waste over 50 hours a week combined on the social network (instead of working on their dissertations) So the pair created an Arduino-based keyboard hand-rest that shocks computer users who spend too much time checking the social network. The hack is 'intended to generate discussion' — not actually turn into a business." Inventor Robert Morris describes it as "something of a joke," but I'm sure there's a market out there.
The real market is for sado-masochists that are addicted to farmville (or is that redundant). If you just want to stop wasting your life, give up or moderate your FB (and slashdot) usage.
And I need a second one for my sister!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
the rivalry continues! so harvard, how do you respond?!
Seriously, I only see this sort of thing being useful for a) folks who want to discipline themselves or b) sadistic overlords who think users need to not just be blocked, but punished for succumbing to their weaknesses.
In short, the target market is your average Megachurch.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
WE ARE NOT AMUSED!
I'll just ignore the fact that everyone has smartphones and tablets, which all have FB on them, shall I?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Thank Heavens this is for Facebook. I'd hate to see the burn marks on my hands from my Slashdot habit.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I have no self-control.
Anyway, time to go Troll the Libertarians ... Ayn Rand was a Slut - she couldn't control herself when she fucked around but yet rationalized her behavior.
Fuck up and rationalize
The Ayn Rand - Libertarian way!
Kidding aside, it is interesting how I'm drawn here - and why I won't register. Being an AC limits my posts here - unless on many occasions when I get mod'ed +5.
This could be extended to sites like Slashdot. And be used as a sort of aversion therapy for people who read posts by timo....[Ouch!]
Have gnu, will travel.
Last I heard Facebook was only open to Harvard students.
...penis stuck to electrocuting device.
Silence is a state of mime.
...EVER!
First there was Robert Morris that did the Internet worm and now another Robert Morris with a Facebook Shocker......
I realised I was wasting far too much time on Facebook a couple of years ago, along with other forums, and found it hard not to browse there - often, I found that I was just typing the URL without thinking about it, and loading the site without giving it any thought. A friend recommended BlockSite to me, and, whilst I felt a bit stupid at needing this crutch, I took it, and managed to get things back under control.
Just add in the URLs of the site in question, and it blocks access to the pages (and elements at those URLs from loading as part of other pages). Editing a hosts file is probably just as suitable, but this worked for me...
It shocks me whenever I waste time on Slashdaaarrrrgh
Tumbler, twitter, slashdot, reddit, 4chan, etc.
Facebook is only one.
Let them fail in school. If they can't control their addictions to Facebook, what kind of focus will they have once they hit the job market. Like a friend of mine said the other day: "Darwinism is dead". If they are too dumb to realize what they are doing, let them fail. Self elimination.
I wonder how good it is at improving spelling, grammar and sentence construction? I'd be willing try it out for a laugh.
Of course the real money is always in sleaze so I can see women buying this keyboard to keep their husbands, and sons, off porn.
When they graduate they might have learned enough to use the hosts file instead.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
EVEN BETTER, it can submit a task to Amazon's Mechanical Turk to have random people call you up on the phone and chastise you!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I've used this before, and it's been pretty helpful: http://selfcontrolapp.com/
It blocks off certain sites for a specified limit of time, and there's no way around it other than to wait for the timer to finish. Free, and much less painful.
Why can't this type of technology be adapted in to a car's steering wheel? After all, falling asleep while driving is still a problem.
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
What about my updates to the Facebook Electroshock S&M site?
The students discovered an unintended side effect of the keyboard, manifesting as a significant increase in the volume of emails from their thesis advisors asking them why they haven't made any progress on their dissertation. So they set out to create a modified version of their keyboard that shocks thesis advisors who spend too much time emailing their Ph.D. students.
I suppose you could get them to create a plug-in adapter that allows you to hook it up to your genitals.
A while back I realized that the most social sites are actually Pavlovian driven drool buckets where you get a "treat" for every like, or comment or whatever.. so this little device is somewhat like putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and letting them fight it out..
Socializing via Facebook is probably a lot faster and more efficient than socializing in the numerous ways that past graduate students used. So I'm not sure that this actually achieves what aims to achieve.
Just not go on facebook? It seems like there is an entire generation which has developed the inability to focus an anything for more than.... Oh look! shiny...
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Just use StayFocused https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?hl=en to limit the amount of time on certain sites.
(Really slashdot, you don't turn my links into clickable links automatically? This website is more outdated than I though...)
is BLOCK the url. How hard is that?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Need this to get my kids off minecraft!
You do realize Ayn Rand wasnt a Libertarian and considered them a greater threat than communists, right?
We need about 1000 or these pronto! (can we make it work for slashdot as well?)
Take that, Yale!
I seem to recall a (probably unethical by today's standards) animal psychiatric study where they subjected animals to mild electric shocks to try to discourage them from forming particular familial bonds, and discovered that not only were the shocks ineffective at discouraging those bonds, but they actually *enhanced* the bond so that it became abnormally stronger than was typical.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"New Keyboard Accessory Shocks Users When They Try To Go On Facebook" -- Oh look, the humans have finally invented brains.
What's really cute is watching you silly apes marvel at the invention of a global decentralized near instantaneous peer to peer communication system, and just piddle with it, like ameobas happening upon a Rubik's Cube.
The story thus reads something like: "Amoebic Scientists have discovered how to attach their displeasurable waste product to the red squares of the Rainbow Monolith that others have began congregating around." Completely ignorant of the thermal reasons metabolic processes are easier near its specific color...
Everyone's fascinated by just how popular some places on the Internet are that allow rapid exchange of ideas and mating status, only vaguely aware of the nagging sensation that there's maybe something a bit off about using a decentralized network in a centralized fashion. The names "client" and "server" are accepted and widely used while the foundational network layers make no distinction at all... "DNS" Pah! What rubes!
You ignore the wordless shouts of your ancient ancestors within your minds, and label the primal logic irrational even though evolution proved the timing of those feelings to be rational on average through millions of years of testing -- Even as the most important decisions of your lives, and nearly every one of your obsessions especially in entertainment are all ridiculously revolving around, "Monkey Mating Mischief". Your "greatest thinkers" kneel at the alter of conscious "rational" thought and utilize only half their heads, ignoring the fact that the other base instincts can be honed and utilized as well... You scoff at fear mongers and wonder "why are they so damn effective?" You hilariously assume, "Everyone must be stupid but me", instead of becoming self aware of your literally ignorant folly...
You ape about scratching armpits and screeching, "Slashdot Effect", making fun of poor websites which just couldn't withstand the enormous amount of traffic funneling into it.... I can almost hear it: "Should have gotten bigger pipes! Big pipes for everyone!" -- What lunacy. Oh, you're not completely daft, but you might as well be: I can sometimes sense a few of you brighter humans cycling your sluggish gears at 20Hz, esp. those familiar with packet radio, you turn the gear time and again and only just miss the tooth labeled "store and forward" ignoring the availability of cheap RAM and storage, and not even imagining that only a fraction of your traffic should have hit such downed sites were your "marvelous" web engineered by sentient beings instead of fools.
And you've attached a zapper to a keyboard to play Pavlovian pranks like the damn brain butchers you are. You'll never solve the Fermi Paradox at this rate. I need a fucking vacation.
I'd say they should make one for Slashdot....
And just like the other Robert Morris' great joke, you just know that everyone will get it, have a good laugh, and then carry on with their lives.
50 hours combined! So If I understand this correctly, between the two, they each spend about 25 hours on facebook per week. This would average out to just over 3.5 hours per day. Now I use facebook, sparingly, but I usually spend no more than 15-20 minutes when I check it. and that is about 4 or 5 times per week.
keyboards and mice need this! FB must DIE!!
That's the exact thought I had while reading GP.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
We put bumps in the road to stop people from going too fast, even when they're perfectly in control of the vehicle.
We can do no less but to deliver an electric shock for visiting Facebook.
What's missing is remote control of the timing and strength of the shocks, and access to the computer's camera to see the user's faces.
Then, any sadistic netadmin can reproduce the Milgram Experiment for amusement and profit (forget about the danger... think of the fun) .
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
What next? "New Keyboard Accessory Shocks Users When They Try To Go On Pornhub" ?
So two PhD students, realizing they're wasting their time on Facebook, decide to fix their problem by... wasting their time inventing a gizmo to keep them from wasting their time on facebook.
As a fellow PhD student, seems legit!
Hopefully they consulted the handy infographic "Is It Worth the Time?" by Randall Munroe before undertaking the project: http://xkcd.com/1205/
I love facebook!
Send it to all NSA operatives; will give them an electric shock when they look at someone's Internet data for whom they do not have a relevant court order.
thats just shocking
Should come standard with every computer.
With a slight modification: Shock people every time they try to type up a spam (or marketing) e-mail message
and
Shock people every time they are about to forward a chain letter or post something stupid on a mailing list or online forum
Seeing as 78% of FB users are mobile ( http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/13/facebook-mobile-user-count/ ), this seems to have a limited market.
In fact, many people (myself included) would be "forced" to use FB mobile, since it is blocked by the corporate firewall.
Maybe someone could write an Android version, which activates the phone's buzzer until the browser is closed.
The Google Plus one just makes you feel lonely. So... very... lonely...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have to deal with an offshore software development team whose members have a pathological addiction to copy/pasting code. Are these keyboards available to fire on use of Control-V? :-)
I prefer to add firewall rules at home to block such wasteful consumers of time. It really works in this world where it seems that every application and web site adds quick-click buttons to access such sites, not to mention blocking some of the "junk" that is dumped into the browser session by links embedded in Javascript attached to the web pages.
Perhaps employers should consider out-right blocking of social media and video sites in their corporate firewalls. I know my employer severely frowns upon such uses of time at work, to the point they actually monitor bandwidth used to access such sites. At some point the executives might say, "Enough", because nobody in my company has a need for such sites unless they are in Marketing, Legal, or Public Relations.
I'll take 10!
Great keyboard
Like!
Said nobody ever.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20071228
A good first step, but it ought to shock them any time the firewall detects any contact with Facebook at all. The problem with Facebook isn't users consciously choosing to go there, it's with people browsing other sites and loading iframes or scripts from Facebook, thereby informing Facebook about what they're into. I remember when people used to freak out over loading a mysterious 1x1 image from some unrelated site, but nowdays it's relatively "normal" to load all kinds of shit (analytics scripts from google or quantcast, "like buttons" from Facebook, Comscore's demographic questionaire, etc).
Is there an echo in here?
Coming from someone who is a Facebook addict and who KNOWS she's a Facebook addict, and who gets seriously peeved with herself every time she stops work on her manuscript to hop over to FB to needlessly check the red message number at the top when she KNOWS it's most likely some random person posting a new picture or a pointless post, but does it anyway...
I would seriously buy this if they posted it on Amazon.
Please? ;)
We need to talk about your flair.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.