What a Hacker Stole from Me

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).

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.

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.

Lovely, but naive.

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.

Why would someone try to hurt this guy? This site is great.

Oh I downloaded and use the app but I didn't realise they had a whole site! This is great.

This website is amazing. In love ambient sounds. It is a shame something like this happened. Glad he continues.

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.

Sorry to hear about the annoying hack…

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 am so sorry to hear this story, and I am so glad to have found this website!

It's traumatic to be victim of malevolence. There's the injury, but it is the lack of a motivation which is disturbing - it's a loss of innocence.

This site is fantastic. Sending a donation. Keep up the good work!

…people downloading a bunch of stuff from your website, even maliciously, is not a tenth of the tragedy this webpage seems to make it out to be.

this is incredibly upsetting.

mynoise is one of the best things on the net.

[flagged]

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.