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Peep: The Network Auralizer
Manuka writes "I have just returned from LISA 2000 in New Orleans (it was a blast), where Michael Gilfix of Tufts University presented a best-of-LISA paper on his creation, called Peep. This has got to be one of the coolest networking tools I've seen - it generates sound events based on network traffic. Really neat stuff like a bird chirping when mail comes in, or an owl hooting when your web server dishes up a page (you can actually use any sound for any event). Neat little way to generate background noise, and you can see (hear) what the network is up to and if it's doing anything weird - if the owl sounds like it's on speed, you're being slashdotted, or if the birds sound a little too hitchcockian, you're being spammed. " But what is the sound of one cracker scanning?
You can find it here as well (not sure if this is the most recent version though):
http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/peep/download.html
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
That would be your psychosis, and paranoid schizophrenia, not the computer.
If a router drops a packet when nobody is around, does it make a sound?
Or you could just uninstall NT.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. --Aristotle
I second that request above. Could you please post a link to the script/mp3 for the rest of us?
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Doesn't anybody remember when computers were hooked up to TVs where you could faintly hear sounds of the computer crunching away?
It works better if you have an FM radio nearby and tune it to an unused frequency range. Did that on my TI-994/A a lot.
becuase it's the most useful thing when a story goes down. How can you possibly discuss what you haven't read or seen? (See regular /. discussions for how this is possible.)
--
+&x
Am I the only one who remembers the sysadmin who hooked the output of ping(1) into a text-to-speech program, turned his speakers up to full, and started pinging a machine at the other end of the building?
"PING... PING... PING..." on each successfully returned packet.
He then started wandering the halls, tweaking cables. When he bumped a cable and the noise stopped coming from his office, he knew he had found the fault. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I managed to get apache to play a sound whever someone hits my website, I wrote a little program called Cliplay that plays a .wav speced in the command line, then used apache's exec SHTML command. The only problem is that the page stops loading untill the wave has finished playing, so you need to use something pretty short.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I doubt it. It's pretty centric to his network, meaning that it's got a lot of sensitive info in it (not just ip addresses but comments like # ok, this next line indicates someone sniffing at the db server, telling you what IP the db server is running on) and that porting it to a generic network would be a bitch.
But basically all you need is a perl script that reads from stdin, filters those lines (regexps), and has a sort of function table or callback mechanism (e.g. if /someMatch/ then somefunc() ). Redirecting the output from ipmon to the script isn't hard (direct pipe in the case of running ipmon from the shell without the -d daemonize flag, the -f flag (iirc) that specifies log file combined with a named pipe pointing at the script, that sort of thing). I don't know about linux firewalls (iptable, ipchains, ipfwadm, whatever) and logging methods, so that may require a different solution.
The callback funcs are where the action is (i.e. pass the line on to syslog(open a filehandle to syslog on LOG then "print LOG $line;"), drop it on the floor, do something else; sort of a syslog firewall ;-) ). The command to play the mp3 was something like
system("/usr/local/bin/mpg123","/path/to/thunk.mp3 "). (using the split arg form of system is more secure b/c IIRC that way you aren't subject to shell interpretation)
The mp3 itself is a pretty trivial matter. Buy a cantaloupe (I think that's what he used) and let it get more than overripe but not enough to be gross. Put mic next to cantaloupe, recording to a wav, then hit cantaloupe with board. Convert wav to mp3 using any number of tools. Viola. :-) If you didn't mind the extra disk space you could leave it a wav and use some other tool (or maybe still mpg123, I've never tried to play a wav with it so it might support that (much simpler) format). Of course if you don't want to DIY I'm sure there are plenty of funny wav files out on the internet to use (movie quotes, tv clips (beavis and butthead anyone?), random sounds, etc).
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Amoung other things he described how it emitted submarine-like acoustic "pings" for proximity sensors on his lawn and very detailed Caller ID identification of incoming phone calls. It had different sounds or music for common people (e.g., Tom Christiansen, or Randal Schwartz), the city or state of unrecognised calls where spoken.
Needless to say, once I recovered from my heart-attack and general scare and confusion (what? where am i? whose breaking into my apartment!?), I proceeded to remove him from the group with the access to the audio device.
All I want now are packets that sound like "Mein Leben" for re-sends after collisions.
--
Jon - TheSpork
Probably more of a "RED ALERT!" "CAUTION!" "INTRUDER ALERT!". That would be the most effective... If you want to go with the theme, though, maybe a rattlesnake.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
> This has got to be one of the coolest networking tools I've seen - it generates sound events based on network traffic. Really neat stuff like a bird chirping when mail comes in, or an owl hooting when your web server dishes up a page (you can actually use any sound for any event).
Aren't you a bit young to be starting your second childhood, Taco?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Sorry.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
woodpeckers
I'm in the middle of doing a computer speech mini-project at my company. After many, many times of going down to the computer room and finding printers jammed and communications errors unchecked due to our operators not hearing the warning beeps over the noise of the computer room, we came up with a solution.
We were in desperate need of re-writing our network/database/communications monitoring software, so I figured...why not add voice to it? So I added a soundcard and speakers to the new system, and used some text-to-speed software. Result? Pissed off operators!
Printer alert! Printer 1 is jammed!
Communications alert! Dialer 2 is hung!
Printer alert! Printer 2 is out of paper!
Oh well...at least the printer's don't sit around jammed for more than 1 minute now =)
I imagine it sounds much like the microsoft "Jungle" sound theme - Full of sound and fury, and signifying hacking.
ObDisclaimer: I know the difference between Cracker and Hacker. Thankyouverymuch.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My network monitoring software already has the option to use a voice modem to play sounds at me over the phone. Pity it doesn't work properly with Windows 2000.....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Okay, maybe it's slightly more useful than that -- but it's usually not necessary or even helpful. If you are scrolling, the really useful feedback is the fact the window is scrolling. Or the button is depressed, or whatever. I haven't found that sound adds anything useful to that.
The nice thing about a sense that's entirely seperated from vision, is that it can be used for something entirely unrelated to what you are looking at. The sound I hear when walking down the street doesn't effect my understanding of what I see very much -- I can see the street and the other people just fine. But I can hear things going on outside my field of vision and my field of attention, and that can be very useful (for instance, if I hear someone walking up behind me).
Sound seems to be particularly appropriate for background events. People are very good at filtering it out -- I can be on a train and listen to one person over the sound of the train and other people's conversation. But if someone else says my name -- even though I'm actively listening to something else -- I will notice that. That's really pretty damned impressive when you think about it, and yet a nearly universal skill.
This reminds me of a few yeasr ago, when I was sitting in my London office at 2 in the morning all alone. I had my back to Binky's desk, where his home-written webcam was set up. Unbeknownst to me, he had added a feature that day so that someone viewing the page could send back text comments and the computer would speak them.
In the middle of stepping through a fiddly subroutine, the computer behind me said 'Hi, I'm in Masschusetts'. I hope whover it was enjoyed the sight of me levitating 2 feet in shock.
The Tangible Media group at the MIT Media Lab have been working on this sort of thing for quite a while, and deserve a mention. http://tangible.www.media.mit.edu/groups/tangible/ projects.html
--
What is the sound of shit happening ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
This reminds me of a story told me by friends working at a network card company. The MIS chap decided that he was going to enforce tight security, and added lots of layers of passwords and authentication to make sure he was in control of the network. However, the card driver engineers weren't impressed with this disruption to their work, so they hooked up a machine to scan packets for passwords and record them for later use. Every time it found a password it played a fanfare. The MIS chap couldn't work out why the engneers kept smiling at he sound of trumpets.
If you've used a recent Mac OS, you'll notice it has the options to make sounds that reinforce what you're doing.
For instance, whenever you're scrolling, there is a "scrolling" sound. Very soft and subtle -- but continuous for as long as you're holding down the mouse button. There is a "window dragging" sound. Again, soft and subtle. But it strongly reinforces what you're doing. Grab the scroll-thumb and drag it rapidly, and the sound changes to match.
Using sounds to notify you of very frequent, non-user initiated, events, such as web server hits (or on some systems, frequent events, such as blue screens), seems to be potentially annoying.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
It WAS ugly, but damn you could see it. :-)
Oldies might remember that AM radios used to get placed next to mini-computers to serve as monitoring devices. The hiss, crackle and pop emanating from radio would be a good indication of the activity on the machine. After a while you would be able to listen to the sound and say, for instance, that the backup job was running, etc. Current machines being much faster and better shielded are probably not amenable to such monitoring.
What a wonderful way to customize the office. You can have a jungle theme, or an ocean theme. That would be just amazing -- and not to mention quite in tune with our evolution. In a server room for example, it could sound like a bunch of birds in a jungle (for web pages serving up) and for "bizarre" operations like connections to arbitrary ports (ie. portscan) have a tiger roar. It's amazing how well the human ear can pinpoint the location of our natural (ancient) predators. (I can speak for this through experience!)
Great, Now I can apply themes to my network
Wait a minute... I'm recording a sound for PPoE as we speak!
forth ?love if honk then
When the network was being lightly used, the string would twitch lazily in the corner of the office. Typically, it would whirl in a nice spiral. When the network was being hit hard, it would sing so loudly you could hear it across the hall.
I've wanted a "dangling string ethernet monitor" ever since.
---glv
If a Cracker makes a whoot, and there is no sysadmin around, do you still get rooted?
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
The emphasis is on 'non-critical'. I recall that an investigation into the Chernobly nuclear disaster pointed to audible alarms as one of the contributing factors. Basically, when the reactor started malfunctioning, so many alarms were going off that the techs were unable to identify which was the most important alarm and hence they didn't respond appropriately to the situation.
how come i'm always hearing birds chirping at work and i don't have this thing installed?
I did this, albeit much more crudely, with my home FreeBSD server, a few shell scripts monitoring log files, and a sound player.
It's fun if you have sounds for a small set of events that happen infrequently enough to be worthwhile. It's noise otherwise.
Personally, I disable all the noises on my computer. How many times can you stand to hear the same noise again and again?
Somebody in our office has it set up where it says "You have email, Master". Across the room it sounds like "You have email, Bastard".
love is just extroverted narcissism
...'I think I can, I think I can, Ithink I can...'
'In pusuit of the greater good!
If you want to test it, what better was is there than slashdot?
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Sorry do yo have the time? I don't have a watch... five past seven? Okay thanks... awfully chilly today isn't it? That's December for you... tsk!
I agree this would be helpful. Another study (don't have the reference, sorry) dealt with the absence of sound. Kittens could be conditioned to expect food when sounds (in this case a clicking noise) stopped.
(Of course that doesn't mean it's going to be aesthetically pleasing to humans. NASA also researched the high-visibility color scheme for VDTs that was later adopted by Amiga -- black, white, dull blue, garish orange. Ugh!)
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
error lpt: the printer is on fire
Put that one in text to speech and tell us what the reaction is!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Hey long time reader first time poster! I like your article and I think it was really informative and I learned a lot from it. I really wish Slashdot would have less articles about computers and more articles and discussion about politics and football though. Keep up the good work hombres!
"Now, I hope and pray that I will, but, today I am still just a bill"
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
Audible, and visual warnings are remarkably effective when they are well implemented. The problem is that bad things rarely happen individually, and a queue is often used to store multiple alarms. So if you have a ding-ding-bong-ding-bong-ding sequence, where dings are not as severe as bongs, you tend to get confused. It's a lot like playing Simon, where eventually the sequence overwhelms you.
What needs to be done is some kind of prioritization of the alarms, so the more critical ones could be accessed more simply - but the powers that be tend not to trust automated systems, and prefer to have a confused human making decisions.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
The PHB (technically clueless) decided it would be a good idea for us to remotely manage customer sites via Managewise (over a single ISDN line - natch!). He got hold of some 3rd party speech software for Managewise, and installed it on the managewise console which incidentally was next to my desk. Why me - I had nothing to do with the Netware side of things. Both the soundcard (an el-cheapo 8-bit jobbie from 1990) and speakers (very low quality - bundled with another card) were mine - I had brought them in for some other project and they were still hanging around.
Whenever a user logged in or out I'd here some speech indicating what had happened, or some other noises. No-one was actually monitoring the machine (too much effort), and I'd get thoroughly annoyed by this thing blasting out noises and messages all day.
Eventually I trashed the speakers by disconnecting the cables inside - peace at last!
The PHB left shortly afterwards - Managewise was a disaster over ISDN.
I used to work for a newspaper where part of my job was maintaining 16 PDP-11's ... LOTS of blinkity lights which could, at a glance, give the experienced tech a good idea what the systems were up to: I miss that.
I am one of those folks who dislikes working on MACs partly because they don't have hard disk activity lights (at least the ones I've used)... I'm a feedback junkie.
Sound feedback (so long as the sounds are subtle) is an excellent way for one to not have to keep constant vigilence on something, but still be able to INSTANTLY know if something out-of-the-ordinary id going on. As long as I get to chose what sound plays and can tell the system which events I am interested in, I think something like this would be worth looking into.
+++++++++++++++++++++
The Digital Sorceress
The administraters redirected this site to the SourceForge website a few hours after this was posted. Presumably, because they didn't like to get slashdotted.
---
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
...is the special dog noise package!
C: "woof woof WOOF woof WOOF WOOF WOOF!"
SA: "What's that, Lassie?"
C: "woof woof WOOF WOOF woof WOOF WOOF woof!"
SA: "It's timmyh? And he's portscanning from the WELL?"
That's awfully harsh, considering it was entirely due to the story that I was inspired to write the parody (or even think of the song, as I rarely think of it).
Guess /. moderation (and maybe meta-moderation) isn't working as well as everyone seems to think it is.
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Medicine has known this for a long time and has very successfully used sound for status information. Most ICU's are a dreadfully loud place with Beeps, pings, whistles, etc. But everybody always comes running whenever the ventolator alarm or EKG alarm go off BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! OH Crap!!!!
I can take care of other people and divert my attention to other things as opposed to staring at a screen. Very useful for multitasking.
..........FULL STOP.
Actually, we're working on an urban theme for this very thing. Might think of doing a cocktail theme as well.. Lots o' possibilities...
hisservername has rejected packet from 123.456.789.123 inbound to 987.654.321.98. /.ed :-)
(IPs faked so that he doesn't get
It's really rather cool, and takes almost zero CPU power except when it's actually speaking.
--GrouchoMarx
My other account is CmdrTaco
--GrouchoMarx
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Now all I have to do is go out and buy SB live cards for all of my servers....Then that will justify when people say "It's a jungle in there".
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
One cracker scanning...is a partridge in a pear tree.
Your spelling and punctuation are shockingly bad, perhaps you should go to www.ul.ie and find out how to enroll in the BEST UNIVERSITY IN THE WORLD
This is actually what happens...
The definition of "pleasing to listen to" is pretty subjective. In the case of most sysadmins, I'd imagine Peep would be more effective with samples taken from Quake than the local park.
When I am ruler of the world, everyone will have to end every sentence with "moron", except when talking to me.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Your boss is using ICQ - that's the sound it makes per default on receiving a message ;)
-- K
Here:
Wednesday, 12 October 1994, midnight -- at the base of the entire web document.
Except I have it read my firewall logs in real time. My roommate is also posting a comment about it right now. Anyway, here's the info:
/dev/speech, which works like this:
/dev/speech
/dev/speech and passes it through to festival, a speech synthesizer.
/var/log/messages read only and watches line by line for firewall packet logs. When it sees one, it formats it to be spoken, and appends it to /dev/speech (by the way, /dev/speech is a fifo).
Required software:
festival (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/)
speechd (http://www.speechio.org)
firewall-reader.pl (http://movealong.dhs.org/firewall-reader.pl
On startup, my loghost (the one with the soundcard and speakers) starts up speechd and firewall-reader.pl. speechd implements
$ echo "look who's talking now" >
The computer now says "look who's talking now"
speechd grabs the text from
firewall-reader.pl is the glue code (written in the ultimate glue language). It opens
It works very well. The only ongoing resource consumption is memory, because festival can get quite weighty. It's usually taking up about 10% on my loghost, which has 128MB RAM.
Oh, and by the way, firewall-reader.pl does need improving. Unfortunately my perl skills suck.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Emergency notifications use female voice because studies showed that low-tone female voice makes people panic the least.
-1 flamebait? come on...this is 1 funny at the least. the sticks up you slashdotters' asses have sticks up their asses. some guy posts the word 'ping' as a response to the question and gets 3 funny, while this gets a negative flamebait? give me a break
Anyway, the point of my original posting was to say that the idea isn't new and that Peep is just copying an idea that has been around for a long time. Yes, NetMeter it is more than 4 years old (more like 6)...
Yep, Wes, it sure does! Go to the thing you shit in, and press the lever that's on it. The sound you'll then hear is the very same sound made whenever anything goes to /dev/null. Unfortunately, stdout and stderr are redirected to /dev/null as well (it's hardcoded in stdio.h), so you can't hear it.
--
Events that trigger sounds!
COOL it is Soooo 1980....
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just wait 'till the next time you log in... =)
Wow... for all the people who think that beeping noises are the same thing as Peep!... try the software. I just installed it.. and it actually sounds like rainforest creatures rummaging about in the background. quite impressive. An office mate came over to because he thought i had setup one of those "relaxation" devices... you know the kind with the "gentle rain", "rainforest sounds", and "whales humping" settings. Oh, if you're having trouble with segfaults when you're rnning the program, try going to /server/Server.C, line 66. Where it says char *Identifier=NULL, change that to char *Identifier="";
that prevents some wierd segfaults with strcpy and strstr. (I've already notified Michael Gilfix).
I can already hear the traffic coming along on my ethernet network just by tuning my radio right. It sounds like a bunch of weird beeps. Of course this doesn't tell me what kind of traffic it is but I can tell when there is traffic.
Please, I will have a talking clip that aids me with that!
It seems your site is slashdotted, can I aid you?
Fh
Does it make a Penis Bird noise every time a troll posts?
Pax Digitalia
So, from what I gather, it's netstat + snoop -a Great. just what I need... hear the guy 5 cubes down yelling at me to ping flood him, mail bomb him, and hit his apache server all at one. What a way to spend the day at the office!
--Chemguru
Yes! snoop was the SVr4 replacement for etherfind.
You can tell it to concentrate on one or two machines etc. But the coolest feature is activated
using the -a option. This causes snoop to output a
click on the speaker for each packet.Different
packet lengths are given different modulation.
It's been said that you can get used to the different sounds and actually tune the network
"by ear".
there once was a troll that did post
of his university he did boast
he said there they spell
much better as well
but the moderators made his karma burnt toast
he who cant spell a word three different ways lacks imagination.
I would prefer a utility that created a crying advertiser sound every time my proxy server nailed an incoming cookie.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I posted about this (or at least it was a tangent in a post about something else) a few days ago. A friend of mine wrote a perl script to moniter the ipmon-generated output of his OpenBSD firewall. When teh script recognized common script kiddie scans, it would play an mp3 of a ripe melon hitting a board (or a board hitting a ripe melon, either way a rather satisfying, moist thunk), represent a kiddie fruitlessly hitting his/her head against the firewall.
(Common scans like the port 135-140 range of MSFT shit, that sort of thing.)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
See the original idea for mapping network traffic to the physical world, done 4 years ago at Xerox PARC. It's called the Dangling String, and it's a wire that shakes around. The more network traffic, the more it moves.
if sourceforge.net is slashdotted, then try sourcefourge.net. It took me 2 weeks figuring out that i typed it wrong ;)
Visit my website xpenguin.com -- A linux penguin website
This is precisely the reasoning behind the project. I encourage everyone to read the paper; it's a far more complicated piece of software than is being suggested here with the usual 'snoop -a' and 'cat foo.au > /dev/audio' responses.
ObPlug: Tufts University is looking to fill positions for sysadmins with developer tendencies to work on this and similar bleeding-edge projects. We presented two papers at LISA this year. Please email me for details.
tail -f /var/log/apache/access.log | perl -e '$!=1; while() { print "\007$_"; }'
of course, there's probably a better way, but you get the idea.
--Tom
MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
Peep has moved to Sourceforge! You are being redirected to peep.soureforge.net.
If you are not automatically redirected, please click here. Moron.
Visit my website xpenguin.com -- A linux penguin website
Bruce Sterling wrote about something similar in one of the Schismatrix stories. The systems monitoring on a space ship was all done by sound, with the same idea being that you get used to the routine and don't notice it. When something goes wrong it becomes apparent very soon.
That's about as silly as a Dinosaur Moonpark.
This idea has been around for a long time.
Particularly, Sensorium highlighted this back in '96: NetSound
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
I remember seeing something like this a year ago or so, while browsing through something in .jp (Sorry, I have no URL nor the effort to go searching for it again). It would generate beeps based on the different kind of packets going over the network. WWW traffic would emit a certain beep, while FTP would emit a different kind of beep, AFAIK. It's been a while since I've seen it, although it was neat. They even had a realaudio stream so you could listen to traffic.
I was actually going to implement this using midi. Sigh.... :(
Following up, here's some more related info.
Although not what I was originally talking about, the "Net Sound" paragraph described in it is much like it. http://www.aec.at/prix/1997/E97gnW-sensorium.html
Sorry. 'moron' is not part of the quote.. hehe
Visit my website xpenguin.com -- A linux penguin website
there once was a troll on slashdot
who thought his fingers were real hot
of his rapidity he did boast
the moderators said "you're toast"
and someone said "l33t you're not".
That's what I'd been thinking of doing. e.g. collision LED = loud click. Normal activity LED= soft click.
That way you can walk into the network room and know which hub was overloaded or if something unusual was happening. Spatially locate it too.
Cheerio,
Link.
Sorry. I get it now. Ignore those other comments.
Visit my website xpenguin.com -- A linux penguin website
Is to make a program that generates netowkr traffic to play a song. :)
grasshopper
Stop saying Bandyopadhyay!
It would be neat to have it output the sounds to a radio broadcaster, the network admins could walk around wearing headsets and hear the network traffic, if they start hearing weird noises in their headsets, they can go and find out what it is.
I've had a 386 linux box beep various noises at me for a couple of years now whenever someone tries to connect to a port I'm not using (and I don't use many standard ones) and if they keep doing it, my little program firewalls their subnet.
Its really handy to know when you're being scanned and interesting to turn off the firewall and watch what happens when you scan them back!
MG: "Yeah, there's a problem with system XYZ..."
Me: "How so?"
MG: "Well, usually is goes 'ree-ree-tinktinktinktink', you know? But right now it's going 'ree-ree-tinktink-bong-bong-tink'!"
Me: "Is that 'bong' like a doorbell chime, or more like a big chinese gong?"
MG: "In between but more like a gong, I think."
Me: "Well, shit."
cheers,
mike
Here's a cool link to the Tangible Media Lab.
This stuff is really interesting in this age of info overload. Being able to convey more information to the user immediately and effectively will become even more useful.
--
The sound of a sonar ping for a ping packet.
For port scans, I'd use basic tones, the pitch corresponding to the port being scanned -- your ear might detect something better than your firewall. Of course, the obvious thing that would follow, once it's known that someone uses tones to listen for port scans, would be to scan the ports in such a fashion as to generate music.
cb
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
..if some spam-mail gets routed to /dev/null, and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
my boss must have something like this set up. i think it makes a high pitched "uh oh" noise. it must do this whenever he gets something done. man, he must be busy because that's all i hear from his office.
--
I haven't read the post or the article, and I'm on a very slow connection, so could someone please explain to me what this is all about, and then I'll comment on it. Thanks.
How can a post of just an alternate URL for a /.'ed site get +5 informative? Jesus Tapdancing Christ.
-
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
Mr. Gilfix musta just heard a whole mega-flock of owls....
---
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Makes me wish I was a Sytems Administrator
at one of them "adult" web-hosting companies.
My server room never sounded so good!
Would you like to pet my Penguin? The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
It's already been done. Check out http://www.hyperreal.com/tech/raveLAN/index.html
Why not go all the way and use the sounds of vehicular traffic to represent the various kinds of net traffic? Imagine mapping these vehicles to common web traffic:
If your network is quiet, it will sound like a country road. If your network is busy, it will sound like a major highway in a major city. If you're getting a lot of script kiddies doing port scans, it will sound a bit like a Hell's Angels convention. And if you're hearing a lot of police sirens, you'd better go to the server room and get ready to hit the Big Red Switch!
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
it seems to me (And many other posters as well) that this isn't really that great of a product. of course, if you're like me, and too cheap to afford a second monitor for your server (sits in my closet,humming away silently to itself), this would be a quick way of estimating the traffic on your server. also reminds me of way back when i was on win/95, and would assign sounds to anything and everything i could find, which reminds me of how quickly i tired of having sounds altogether.
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
I just use snoop -a.
.:.
:tedd
www.ul.ie
to you we will all say gooddbye
some students are trolls
some are assholes
and some shoudn't even give it a try
with apologies to the better students at that institution, but i couldn't resist.
Mirror of the source and sounds: http://while1.org/~xm/peep/
Time to get out my sfx cd from ST:TOS. Guess there was a reason the bridge sounded like that!
This is really nothing now. From what I could tell from the video of Doug Englebart's Famous 1969 Interface Demo, His system had a similar sound generation to tell the status of the system.
It had sounds for clicking the mouse, and also had a constant tone that would tell if the system was actively processing a system task or not. I believe that it also had a sound if an error occured, but It's been awile since i saw the video.
Actually I have been thinking of making a program to do a similar task through the PC speaker but never actually sat down to see if it could be done.
It's nice that sound is starting to come back as a quick way to access the status of a system.
--
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Bx, fb V tbbsrq, V'q arire eha vagb gung cnegvphyne svygre orsber naq nffhzrq vg jnf arj. V'z vzcerffrq lbh npghnyyl obgurerq gb qrpbqr gung zrffntr gubhtu...
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This post has been rot13'd for your protection
So, now when someone pings a server and requests someone's copy of DeCSS, we're going to hear the sound of a lawyer screaming, "Copyright violation!" all across the server room? Scary.
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-- Geof F. Morris
Yeah, that way if you get slashdoted you can watch your coworkers have a seizure
one of these days I'm gonna patent the technology that lets Jason Vorhees catch up to cars by moving at a slow walk.
This post hit it on the money. Peep is based on this very idea. Something to note for all of you: Peep doesn't use beeps or tones, but mixes together sounds that occur in natural environments to create sound "ambiances". The point behind Peep was to create an audio interface that was pleasing to listen to, as well as informative. Hence the reason why we avoided beeps =) Peep also does some other stuff that's non-trivial such as using auto-discovery and leasing to manage distributed clients. I encourage people to read the paper because there's a lot of thought behind the psychology of how it works and how we can provide a large amount of information in a compact and easy to digest way. Just my heads up =)
On a high traffic network, an admin is more likely to go nuts and crash the network to stop the noises than to enjoy them. And god help you if he likes the game "duck hunt".
I am !amused.
I would like to hear the massive jungle noise that the Napster server would generate. Or even Slashdot. Actually, the more nerdier you are (with the most web page serves and the most email), the more you feel like you're outside in nature rather than inside in front of a computer. Sounds like the perfect solution for the geek blues.
By the way, Gilfix is in my Crypto class - it's cool to see someone who you sit next to in class get slashdotted. Congrats, Mike.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
NASA did a study back in the '60s that showed that using tones for status information was a very effective method for important (but non-critical) information. This technique was used on the Apollo program. After a while the normal sounds become part of the background noise but when something changes, the brain picks up on it very quickly. It has the advantage that the human does it as a background task.
Snoop (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) has the wonderful feature: /dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).
;-)
-a Listen to packets on
I've heard of someone nearly strangling their officemate though after they left it running on their system while they were out of the office all day. Talk about driving you nuts. Definitely NOT birds chirping or owls hooting.. more like screeching.
They set it up such that an explosion would sound every time someone downloaded a copy of Netscape when they released 0.9 (I think that was the version). It's described somewhere on JWZ's page.
This is great, now when our site crashes, I can send out voice messages instead of alphanumeric pages...
Tech: "Man, last night I was SOOO drunk, that I (phone rings)... hold on, got a call"
Phone: "HOOOOOOOT! Hooot hoot HOOOOOOT HOOT! Hohohohoooot!"
If a webserver crashes, and no one is within cell phone range to receve the call, does it make a sound?
I wonder what getting slashdotted sounds like?
What is the sound of one hand turning off the cell phone.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Even though I personally believe that this is more of a thing for Freshmeat than here, I still want to let you all know that there's a similar Perl script called logplay That's been in development for over a year, and has been available to the public for download since June. I recomend to any of you that like the idea of Peep to check out logplay.
Bad Spellers of the world UNTIE!!
Last year a group called UBSB came out with a noise album, Traceroute, on Ash International records. The music was created by taking a dump of backbone traffic and turning it into sound. Here's a review I found:
"UBSB
-Traceroute (ash) LP SFR 21.-
Great collaboration between Ulf Bilting, Edwin van der Heide, Zbigniew Karkowski and Atau Tanaka. The concept : "Data harvested from the internet in early 1999, from a research center in Scandinavia. This data is rendered to analog to protect the original data from being reverse engineered or reconstructed. We created a Unix software agent that sat along a high bandwidth backbone pipe, essentially eavesdropping, gathering data, writing out a soundfile of everything it saw. Ethernet datapackets were consecutively written out to a file with no timestamp. Later the file header was hacked to open it in an audio editor." A succession of digital noises and loops manipulated to create a hypnotical and intense work. Really good in the field of digital noise. Recommended."
It's pretty good.
I've been doing something like this with my eBay auctions .. put a small GIF in your auction going to a script that reads the auction number from the referer field and plays a different sound for each auction (also make sure to send out headers that keep the gif from being cached). It's pretty cool to see how popular different items are and at what times of the day, and how some people hit reload OVER and OVER again as the auction ends...
If you have a nice traffic heavy server, you could set Peep up to loop a nice simple house/trance break as the background noise and then whenever any sort of traffic occured, have various techno sfx and various breakdowns occur. Network admins everywhere grab your glowstix!
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
Hi guys. I'd like to encourage you to follow the "about time" thread by TheAncientHacker. He's got the exact idea of what Peep was based on. Peep is a much more complicated piece of software than many people suggest here and I encourage people to read the paper. When I first started development on the idea, I thought it was weird too =) Please check out the paper and follow that thread. I think you guys might find it interesting
WildPackets (previously known as the AG Group) NetMeter product has been able to do this (and much much more) for years now. It is nice to see someone taking someone else's idea and getting credit for it. Not.
http://www.wildpackets.com/products/netmeter
could you ask your friend to make that script or at least the mp3 available? That does sound really funny.
Tim
Christ, I should have written that long ago. I always thought it would be an excellent way to monitor a network, if you hear a certain sound happen a little too often, you know to take a peek. . . Oh well, on to finishing my perpetual motion machine
TeamZERO -=[You can be smart as Einstein; But without passion for life, you suck toast.]=-
Well, seeing that the site is slashdotted, you can find it here for now:
http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/peep/download.html
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Jesus. Now I understand why the network terminals here at Tufts kept beeping, shrilling, and telling me I'm a loser.
I just wanted to do my project from class.
Me: (type type type)
Terminal: "Your database project sucks."
Me: "What? who said that?"
Terminal: "I can't stand this utter algorithm stupidity. I'm rebooting"
Me: AHHHHHHHHHH! Damn you Mike!
But really, congrats!
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
I'm gonna add car sounds to it.
Imagine having a truck horn for every large ftp, and car horns for every web site. Streaming? how about a jet engine zooming by.