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."

Comments

DriftNet

[SubtleNuance]

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*)

amazing. like reading the gnutella traffic

[kipple]

...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

Pardon my cynicism

[Innominate Recreant]

You'd think that Slashdot, with its pro-privacy stance, would realize that something like this IS an invasion of privacy.

An invasion of privacy on unencrypted data on a public network? And you're surprised? If you think that packets everywhere aren't being logged, sniffed, freeze-dried and reconstituted then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet actually works.

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.

Re:Pardon my cynicism

[alacqua]

If someone hacks my *private* network or illegally obtains my private encryption keys, then *that's* an invasion of my privacy.

I must be missing something, because it seems to me that its an invasion of privacy either way. Just because it happens all the time and many people haven't protected themselves against, and many don't even know that they need to protect themselves against it, doesn't make it OK. Somebody straighten me out about how this is different.

Re:Pardon my cynicism

[billnapier]

You have to expect privacy to have it invaded. If you send packets across an unencrypted link, you should have no expectations of privacy, therefor there is no privacy to invade!

Re:Pardon my cynicism

[Omnifarious]

An invasion of privacy on unencrypted data on a public network? And you're surprised? If you think that packets everywhere aren't being logged, sniffed, freeze-dried and reconstituted then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet actually works.

If someone hacks my *private* network or illegally obtains my private encryption keys, then *that's* an invasion of my privacy.

Ahh, so a rule that isn't enforced by an architectural constraint isn't a rule at all. That means that when my fist connects with your face, it must be perfectly OK because there was nothing preventing me from doing so. That's really how your argument reads.

Now, on the Internet, it's very hard to enforce certain kinds of laws unless you build in architectural constraints. We can have a debate as to whether or not the law should exist, given the costs of enforcing it within a certain set of architectural constraints. But, you can't argue that a law doesn't exist, or shouldn't be followed because there is no architectural constraint (actual code preventing you from doing it).

That kind of thinking will lead to laws declaring certain architectures legal, or illegal, so it will be impossible not to follow the law because the architecture makes it impossible. The CBDTPA act and the DMCA are perfect examples. You're kind of thinking implicitly endorses the method by which they attempt to enforce the law.

Re:Pardon my cynicism

[duffbeer703]

So when the FBI uses carnivore to monitor email, that is not an invasion of privacy?

If someone rifles through your garbage looking for information, that's not an invasion of privacy either, right?

Slashdotted, here's a copy

[stere0]

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

Re:Ohhh the possibilities

[Grape Shasta]

So, let me get this straight... you're running an OS advanced enough to allow you to log in remotely, to see what someone else is doing, and to mess with their desktop... but you haven't figured out how to keep the janitors out yet?

Just because it's unencrypted doesn't mean ...

[jackDuhRipper]

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.

not entirely convinced

[sbuckhopper]

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.