"Paul" wrote

| You can always turn the volume down, but I never
| do that on the speakers themselves. I leave my speakers
| at one setting

I don't even turn the speakers on unless I'm
playing an mp3 or mp4. There's no other case where
sound is relevant, but it can be distracting or
even jarring.

Yesterday morning I woke up to find my ladyfriend
on the phone with "Microsoft tech support". She'd
let them onto her system, they showed her the
system error log and she paid them almost $500!
It all started with a malware warning popup window
when she was visiting a political news website. Part
of what fooled her was that there was also audio.
A voice told her that she needed to "call now!".

I find it hard to believe that people put up
with all this nonsense. It's bad enough to tolerate
dancing ads on a website, but prattling robots
on your computer?!

(I didn't figure out where the popup came from,
but the webpage was typical, with at least a half
dozen ad/track/datamine javascript sources. There
was also auction code connected with
amazon-adsystem.com. I'm guessing the attackers
are working by buying Amazon ads.)