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Tapping the Alpha Geek Noosphere with EtherPeg
tadghin writes "Rob Flickenger has an amazing take on what's happening in the wireless noosphere at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. Rob used EtherPeg, a great Mac OS X hack that lets you see the GIFs and JPEGs flying around on the local network, to key off on an amazing visual commentary on what people were doing during Steven Johnson's keynote."
Now everyone will really know what I'm looking at. hehehe
This is impossible.... First post?! no, not likely... In any event, this seems interesting, though not particularly productive. Maybe it could be used for quick searching, because the human mind can recognize patterns faster than any computer...
Im realy suprised that this isnt :)
:)
installed in all those companys
with the no personal web serfing/porn
rules
if you knew your bosses desktop would
say refelct what you where surfing would
you change?
I sertanly would, it woudl be dilbert comics
all the way
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
You'd think that Slashdot, with its pro-privacy stance, would realize that something like this IS an invasion of privacy.
I don't like the idea of people spying on me: I don't care if it's essentially harmless.
I'm not going to believe that that half-covered image in the first screenshot was the only piece of Pr0n to come up!
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
no comment here
porn. lots of porn.
what else would they be looking at? I know that's what I'd be doing.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
science is a religion
Have a look at the GPLed GNU/Linux equal -- Driftnet
Run it on your LAN @ work for some scary results! (i shut it off after 10 minutes, after the pics of cross-dressing-victorian-era-constume-fan pics popped up *shudder*)
drifnet does about the same. It really is a nifty background for your desktop as well ;-)
I wonder what you would see with this in the average office, as the day starts I'm sure you'd get alot of /. , MSN , Yahoo , New York Times, then at lunch MapQuest maps , the occasional general interest website, then as the day closes down movie sites, more news, and of course later in the evening you can see what the cleaning crews are doing, looking at porn of course!
Not for your manager, but already implemented on Linux:
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/
This is not what I call an amazing visual commentary, unless you're talking about the /. effect...
Internal Server Error
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Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@oreillynet.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
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Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Amadala would love Anakin's golden arm; it could double as a vibrator.
It certainly was. Come on, this is the internet, and those were geeks.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Pity there's no Windows version - it also suffers if you're behind a switch - can't see any traffic on network segments the other side of the switch. Bummer.
Wow, 30-or-so comments and slashdotted already. And who submitted the article? Tim O'Reilly himself. Right now, someone's crying at PR.
Does anyone know if there's a windows port/equivalent of this software? Definitely sounds interesting to have a play with.
:-)
I live in a Uni hall so this could effectively be what I've always been looking for - a free, dynamic, porn screensaver. Bonus
Well, not quite, but it was inspired by it. See DriftNet.
Needs GTK, libpcap.
...more or less the content is the same, except that in the gnutella traffic there's no ads forced to appear. so basically reading the gnutella traffic flow is like watching a "live" statistic of what human beings are doing online.
on the other hand, if you remove any porn- related keyword, probably you could reduce the traffic by a great 80%. but that's another issue (I thought of that because the 'sex' pic in the first jpeg of the article)...
interesting though
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
EtherPeg has classic and Mac OS X releases.
Are there any windows programs that do this? if i weren't such a n00b i'd attempt to mess with the source but alas i wouldn't get very far. this looks cool, i need to try it on my linux box when i get home... unless someone finds a win ver :)
That none of those screengrabs had:
1) Porn
2) Ads, ads, ads, and more ads
I thought I saw an obscured nipple on the first grab, but that was about it...
Did *anyone* listen to the speech?
to Goth, darkness and MSDN... I told you those blogging guys were really evil. The downward spiral obviously shows that the thin fascade of a "blogging" conference was really just a cover for the subliminal brainwashing techniques of Oreilly and his Kindom Hall lackeys.
Down with Oreilley and their subversive book spam campaign!
(Now go ahead and mod me into oblivion as a troll even though that was intended to be funny.)
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Erik
+= E
If someone hacks my *private* network or illegally obtains my private encryption keys, then *that's* an invasion of my privacy.
Sending or receiving unencrypted packets is like sending a postcard: it's not sealed, and it's not illegal for the letter carrier to read it. Sending an encrypted packet is like sending a letter. It's illegal for the letter carrier to open it.
Note: the server is apparently still able to serve the images. Click on the links!
Tapping the alpha geek noosphere with EtherPEG
by Rob Flickenger
May. 15, 2002
So there I was at ETech, sitting in the back of the Emergence discussion, listening to Rael Dornfest, Cory Doctorow, Clay Shirky, and other extraordinary blogging minds thought about the blogging world.
I was thoroughly enjoying the discussion, but I had to wonder, how were the other 200 people in the room reacting to the proceedings? Response seemed very favorable, but I did see quite a few faces staring down, with accompanying tell-tale key clicks buzzing about the room.
If only there were some way of getting into the collective stream-of-consciousness of the crowd, to gauge their actual reactions to what was really going on up on stage...
If you've never heard of EtherPEG, its a Mac hack that's been around for a while that combines all of the modern conveniences of a packet sniffer with the good old-fashioned friendliness of a graphics rendering library, to show you whatever GIFs and JPEGs are flying around on your network. It's sort of a real-time meta browser that dynamically builds a view of other people's browsers, built up as other people look around online.
The effect was staggering. As I expected, traffic was very light at the beginning (a couple of big news and blog sites were obvious, and strangely enough, the Microsoft Developer's Network.) But as the talk continued, some people were obviously letting their minds (and their fingers) wander...
Early traffic showed a very wandering bent.
I was impressed that when Tim O'Reilly stood up to ask about whether bloggers were building a city or living in their own ghetto, virtually all traffic stopped. Evidently, this was something that almost everybody in the room was interested in listening to. And once Tim sat down again, the pixels began to flow once more.
After a little while, the atmosphere took on a bit of a dark turn. Lots of images of law enforcement agency websites, some american flags with an angry eagle bursting through, and possibly darkest of all, a Britney Spears fan site. The theme continued as Clay Shirky was discussing "maps and non-player characters" and the downward gothic spiral expanded...
Further down the spiral
It became obvious that the crowd could be viewed as a living organism, with its own cycles of activity and rest. The chaotic effect of random images plastering themselves on my screen gave me a unique point of view-- it was a sort of mental feedback (much like audio feedback, even with the accompanying headache, only this headache was in some bizarre fourth dimension.)
The End
By the end, the dark forces had definitely descended. I was treading on some very dark back waters of the collective geek subconscious... Think Evil Dead and PDAs in Washington DC. I had definitely descended into a sort of techno hell, the sixth circle of hades, where the damned are only given t-shirts after they listen to a short marketing presentation.
EtherPEG isn't for the faint of heart, especially at a technical conference. The gentleman sitting next to me leaned over and inquired about how he could prevent me from watching his traffic... The technical answer is easy: run application layer encryption (ssh tunneling, vtun, ipsec, pptp) to a point outside of the wireless, and then your traffic will at least be protected from neighboring wireless eavesdroppers. But the philosophical answer is much simpler: I have stared at the sun, and for the sake of my sanity, will never again look directly at the consciousness of the online ueber-geek collective.
Unless I really want to...
Rob Flickenger is the O'Reilly Network's Systems Administrator
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
I know this is completely off-topic, but thought this would probably interest some people.
Rob uses Grab for screenshots. On Mac OS, you can use apple-shift-3 to take a screenshot, apple-shift-4 if you just need a part. There are more shortcuts here, put that page in your bookmarks!
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Well, I had to ask. It's an awesome graphics format.
Why the hell aren't people using it, yet? It's smaller than gif and doesn't have those messy patent issue... AND 24-bit png transparency rules!
Um, switched networks anyone? Great, now I can see all the images that my system is pulling in off the web.
Whee!
Hecubas
It's easy : when at a conference, be polite, listen, don't surf.
What makes you think it isn't?
it's not private.
...
The EtherPeg stuff is all in good fun, especially where the people knew they were being sniffed, BUT
Would you also say that it's OK for me to walk around with my 900MHz radio receiver and listen to peoples cordless phonecalls? They're not encrypted; are they private in your estimation?
Can I intercept cell calls?
How about screen RF from folks' ATM transactions (the bank kind)?
None of these are encrypted, but all of them are private by most reasonable standards.
I'm not entirely convinced by this article.
Okay, I guess we kind of have to take the guy's word for it, but he may also be trying to get a rise. When I look at the three collages that we've been presented with here, it seems to me that he tried to put the most shocking pictures up front of what we would be most thrown off by (except for the pr0n of course), and then hide all of the pictures of people who may have been searching on things relevant to the talk in the back of the pictures.
As a systems/security administrator, I am not convinced that a large majority of the images snarfed here didn't have at least something to do with subject at hand and could have come from people that were legitamately trying to look up more information on what was being said. After all, what I could make out of the half to three-quarter covered pictures was that they were either typical web-adds or pictures from the O'Reilly web site.
I would want to see all of the pictures to be totally convinced that everyone was doing time-killing browsing.
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese," Wallace.
If you're on your garage listening in to me in my backyard, the problem is not my unreasonable / ignorant expectation of privacy, it's THAT YOU'RE LISTENING TO ME AND INVADING MY PRIVACY.
The slipperiness of the slope comes in where you say "I can listen in, easily, to you, so you therefore cannot expect what you're doing to be private."
So, if you had a machine available to you that decrypted all SSH traffic on a subnet you specified, without you or it breaking a sweat, does this mean it's unreasonable of me to think my SSH session is private?
Extreme, yes - but it's precisely the same point.
read it(the article) people accept what they get given at a conf and this guy set it up
..... detailed in MI5 docs
I would be amused if I could see what other people where doodling
regards
john jones
p.s. laptops are easy to clone all they do is put it through a Xray machine take a good look at it then ask them to unpack it then put it back through Xray machine, hold image on screen Xray off hidden compartment opens remove hddrive replaces it or clones depending on risk and then sends person on way
Managers already do this. Many companies put all their employees on web proxies for exactly this reason. I have friends that work in large companies where it is a known fact that managers review
1) Page views
2) Attempts to view blocked pages
3) Email with questionable content
4) Usage statistics on mail servers
As a result, I've helped those friends use web proxies and and SSL to add privacy to their workstations. putty port forwarding and a remotely running squid are their best worktime friends.
"The explanatory command for unix is man." Chauvinism or bitter irony? Discuss.....
"So, if you had a machine available to you that decrypted all SSH traffic on a subnet you specified, without you or it breaking a sweat, does this mean it's unreasonable of me to think my SSH session..."
Actually, it would be reasonable of you to view it as private- because you took some sort of measures to ensure it was not directly visible, you encrypted it with something. Doesn't matter if you use IDEA or a Captain Crunch decoder ring- you have some reasonable understanding that it's supposed to be private between you and those you're communicating with. Just because you can unpack it without effort means little in regards to privacy- you took some measures to obscure your communications so that they'd be private.
If you take no precautions, it becomes much more of a grey area. A telephone conversation (not mobile) could be deemed as private because under normal circumstances, only the people involved in the conversation could really be listening (normal, being not wiretapped, etc.). A typical mobile phone conversation, however, is much more analogous to a CB channel or you shouting your head off in your house with the windows open than a standard telephone conversation (No matter how much the mobile companies want you to think of it like a magic phone, it's still more of a radio than a phone in almost every sense of it's operation.). In that case, no real measures have been taken by anyone to obscure the content of the conversation going on over the airwaves.
There is no assurances of privacy involved in either of those cases, and unless you're using a digital spread spectrum phone (something making the session more resemble a wireline conversation- tougher but still not really obscuring it in a way that can't be snooped...) or encrypting it (preferably both in light of the previous aside...) you're operating under conditions not unlike the CB situation- whether you realize it or not. Ignorance of the conditions you're operating under doesn't make it any more a privacy protected situation.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Run the linux equivalent (Driftnet) in a remote x-session on your linux gateway (w/ dislplay on your local desktop of course). You'll catch all the traffic. ;)
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
I'm using driftnet though, not EtherPeg, since I don't have OSX. The machine sits out on the floor where everyone can see all the images that are being downloaded. Few people go to non-work related sites now, even though it doesn't say which computer the image came from.
Sending or receiving unencrypted packets is like sending a postcard: it's not sealed, and it's not illegal for the letter carrier to read it. Sending an encrypted packet is like sending a letter. It's illegal for the letter carrier to open it.
Pardon my cynicism, but how far do you think you'd get in a case brought against the US government if you just happened to catch them sniffing packets on your so called "private" network?
I've long believed that on the 'net, there is no law. You want privacy/security, you use the highest encryption available. It then is no longer a question of whether it is illegal or not, it becomes a question of whether or not it's possible to crack it. A "technical solution to a social problem" if you will. The law can go fuck itself at that point.
Nathan's blog
Xscreensaver has a package called webcolage, it grabs images at random off the internet, I supose hacking how it gets the images would be easy enough.
Plato seems wrong to me today
arpspoof from the dsniff package should allow you to sniff on a switched network (provided that your machine is on the same subnet). arpspoof fakes the target machine into thinking that you are the default gateway. the target machine's packets are then forwarded to you where you pass them on (via kernel level ip forwarding or fragroute) to the real default gateway. http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/
..as the "transdimensional tear" takes place in Watchmen . If memory serves, he samples dozens of TV stations to update his investment portfolio in real-time.
Interesting thing would be see how the patterns change as more and more people became aware of the sampling.
Vulgo enim dicitur, iucundi acti labores.
Snooping on your employees is a terrible policy, even putting aside the obvious point that employees have less trust for employers who don't trust them.
How much time do these managers spend on making sure the minions aren't doing anything non-work-related? Wouldn't the managers' time be better spent MANAGING?
What more frequently happens is that traffic is monitored until a complaint arises or the boss needs an excuse to get rid of the employee. Having set up such systems for companies, I know. They don't want to know what their employees are doing online unless it is affecting their work or their coworkers.