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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."
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*)
Not for your manager, but already implemented on Linux:
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/
EtherPeg has classic and Mac OS X releases.
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
Where did you get that from? In most parts of the world, anything you send through the mail is private and it's illegal to read someone else's postcard. The same rule applies to the internet.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Um. You must be trolling. The internet has no "rules".
most switches will only send broadcasts and unknown MACs down ports that haven't learned a MAC yet. however, most decent switches will let you turn one or more ports into monitoring ports that will recieve all packets for sniffing purposes.
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.....