Slashdot Mirror
Using Sound To Test Internet Connections
sifi writes "An article in the New Scientist claims that by converting the frequencies of a 'ping' to sound it is possible to hear the reliability and strength of an internet connection.
They then go on to claim that all this is going to make telesurgery safe.
I quite frankly think that this is a case of the media printing something becuase it sounds (pun intended) cool. I'm convinced that there's nothing here that couldn't be done with a suitably clever piece of software - unless I'm missing something."
The Machine that goes "Ping!"
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
... Ping timeout ...
Sorry, your dead !
That's always a good way to hear how good your connection is.
Doesn't that sound like Slashdot?
The difference, in this case is, that sound will relate a linear interpretation, end-to-end, where software will simply return a snap shot of any given element.
OBSTETRICIAN: Yes. More apparatus, please, nurse: the E.E.G., the B.P. monitor, and the A.V.V.
NURSE #1: Yes. Certainly, Doctor.
DOCTOR SPENSER: And, uh, get the machine that goes 'ping'.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Anything over TCP/IP is Digital... there is no frequency beside on and off.
The article says "Chafe wondered if variations in jitter [they defined as the deviations in the ping] could be converted into a musical form."
Fine convert the jitter to music... but how is that going to help you beyond what a numeric display would tell you?
I have a feeling none of these people have a clue about what they are babbling about.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
Well... Technically if you take the lag between the different bits of the reception of the ping, you could get the "sound" of your modem/broadband.
... and it's hoping the usage of the different nodes are constant and have enough bandwidth to support the steam in the first place.
Other way, if you send 3000 1-byte pings and convert the lag of the pings to a sample, you should have a pretty good approximation of the discrepencies of your connection.
Now as to say where does these discrepencies come from, it's another matter altogether. To have a totally reliable solution, you should receive samples from every part of the traceroute and make sure that traceroute is kept for your "telesurgery".
I don't see it as baloney, it's certainly a novel approach. But as for an useful application, I'm less than sure. In a few years, maybe.
Mike
The last three main stories:
"I'm convinced that there's nothing here that couldn't be done with a suitably clever piece of software"
"Interesting story, no real information though"
"It's not a very substantive piece, but a good discussion starter"
I would hate to see the submitted storys that are rejected!
"wa#$tson, co@(me h@#ere! I nee#(d y@($u!!" Ping done. Reliability: 1
Rather than a novel approach, isn't that just 'interface' thingy ?
The most important point is the connection itself. The surgeon should know when it goes down, or when latency changes, whatever the means used (light, sound, hell, why not electric shock !).
I see that as a maybe fun way to see the trouble, but it won't solve it.
I'll of course assume the surgeon buys special bandwidth with certified low- or fixed- latency before doing the surgical act...
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
What it sounds like when you connect to AOL and play the "sound" of the connection.
I'm guessing it's just going to sound like people laughing at you.
The article mentions that you could use this technique to monitor if the line is OK just before a critical operation. But will testing the quality of the line now give enough assurance that this quality will still be met in the middle of the operation, when there is no turning back?
I think that for these critical applications any simple test like this will never suffice, and you will need some way of guaranteeing that a minimal level of signal quality will be there, regardless of changing circumstances.
But with an audible ping, they could make sure they have a good connection for the delicate procedures.
Sure, there could be a doctor holding two fingers on the jugular of a patient, but that requires another person, and sure they could have a machine that did it for them without sound, but that would require people to be watching it.
Having an audible signal for when something goes wrong makes multitasking easier, and therefore, this could be beneficial.
The human ear (and the corresponding piece of driver code in the brain) is very sensitive to regularities and irregularities in sounds. If you convert something to sound and get used to it, you can very easily spot how it "sounds wrong" when something changes.
Seismographists used to convert earthquake vibration patterns to human-audible sounds; this way it became very easy for a trained ear to distinguish between natural quakes and Soviet nuclear tests. On a screen, both looked like a jumble of lines.
Of course, a clever piece of software can do this too - but you already have this clever piece of software installed for free in your brain.
(Unfortunately it is free-beer, as the source is not available. Hmmmm, I guess rms should target God as the largest producer of closed-source software in the Universe?)
If you don't want to figure out how to insert a literal ^G, you can try this simple example:
ever wondered whar "ping" means
Semper ubi sub ubi
testing a network in this way is near enough to useless to make no difference.
The concept is that of "continuity". We are surrounded by it, we are so used to it that we don't perceive it as such anymore: objects do not simply appear out of thin air, or disappear with/without a puff of smoke. Objects do have edges, but they are well-defined and predictable. For example: my table stops *there* [stares at table], right at the edge, and will continue to do so until further notice. If at some point it no longer stops *there*, e.g. because someone moved it, or it broke, then I probably will be able to tell why. In addition, I can judge the permenance of objects in the physical word with a good degree of certainty: I can tell the difference between a good, solid table, and a wonky one.
Networks are different: they go down for no apparent reason, suddenly, and without warning. They can be more or less robust, but I will not be able to tell how robust a network is with a couple a pings.
The physical-world analogy of that which is being proposed in this article is the following:
A surgeon knows from experience that her hands occasionally just disappear, and then reappear again a while later. She personally doesn't know why this is, but has gotten used to it. During surgery, it is bad for her hands to disappear. So, before performing surgery, she waves her hands about, shakes them, wrings them, and it they're still there, it'll probably be okay.
Great. The point is that what the surgeon needs to know about the network (or in the analogy, her hands), is *why* it disappears, and under what circumstances. Only then will surgery be able to be performed with a calculable degree of risk. So: build a dedicated network, with guaranteed ping times, zero jitter, et cetera. Then, once you have gained some faith that your network is reliable, by all means test it before using it, but do not rely on some arcane hand-waving to judge if it's good enough or not. If there is any reason that any parameters of a network may change during tele-surgery - like some PFY firing up Kazaa - then it's simply not good enough for the task.
yes, we have no bananas
When I first read the headlines I imagined that weenie from the teleco ads using VoIP to ask "Can you hear me now?"
Trolling is a art,
"It's pretty simple, really," says Straub. "We just set up a couple standard gaming stations: one in the operating theatre with the patient, and one by the chief surgeon. They play against each other and report whenever they've been fragged. By tracking the frag rate, we can get a surprisingly accurate picture of the quality of the connection."
Because the gaming and surgical computers use entirely different protocols, there is no way for the two signals to get confused.
Straub admits that there is one thing that needs to be overcome before his method sees widespread use. "We've had a couple complaints from the surgeons about distractions from the gamer. And I can see their point. When you're chest-deep in someone half a continent away, you don't really want someone yelling '34t h0t l34d, suxx0rZ!' in your ear."
"But we're thinking of maybe removing the larynx of gamers for this. It's probably the simplest solution."
Open-source figurehead and programming guru Richard Stallman was unavailable for comment at press time. "He's having a gall-bladder operation right now," said a source close to the FSF founder. "He's going to be a few weeks recovering from the plasma burns."
Carousel is a lie!
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/jargon.html#ping
This was done years ago according to the jargon file.
Cynicism is the natural defence of the romantic.
I don't think the poster quite got the article. Regardless of whether this can be implemented in software or would require new hardware (don't know myself) this is a novel idea.
When you ping a machine from the command line, you get a list of ping times, which scroll by at a rate of about 2 per second or so. This doesn't show you the truly short-term behaviour of the connection. If I have understood correctly (and with the science writer "guitar string" crap removed), the idea here is to ping continually whilst playing a sound whose period (1/frequency) is the same as the ping time.
This has two advantages I can think of. The first and most important is that the ear is much better at picking up on a change in frequency than the eye is at picking out a couple of unusually high or low numbers in a scrolling list. This means that you can carry out a much larger number of "useful" pings (ie. ones whose results can be understood and used by an operator) per second. The second is that most networking applications (including telesurgery) don't make any use of sound, so the output of the pings is made continuously available to the user in a way that doesn't interfere with the task he/she is carrying out.
I don't know a thing about telesurgery, but if the very short term behaviour of the connection is important, this sounds like an ingenious way of keeping the user continuously updated.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
The ears are by far our most sensitive sensory system. The eyes can easily be fooled (if they couldn't there'd be no movies or TV). Sense of touch can be compromised by callouses. Taste...well no two people taste quite the same. Same is true for smell. Then we have our ears....Most people can hear over at least a 100 db dynamic range. sense of pitch - the ability to hear minute changes in the frequency of sounds is quite acute. So it the ability to hear the variance in time between sounds. Yes, there are quirks about our hearing such as the ability to mask sounds, and the fact that we only hear the louder of two frequencies close together (otherwise MP3 and Ogg encoding wouldn't work) but these anomolies have been extensively studied and are faily well known. Another thing...our hearing can be trained too! We can learn to hear things better/differently...just ask any audiophile. All in all, nature has given us a great test instrument in our hearing.....
How about transforming each http request to the webserver to sound? It would be something like this:
g .i ngp ingi ii [blue smoke from webserver] piiiiiiiiiHONK... HONK[fire alarm going off]
ping........ping........ping....[slashdot story posted]....ping..ping...ping.ping..ping..ping.pin
ping.pingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingp
pipipipipipipipiipiipipipipipiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
Oh, it's not a guage, oh, why don't they print out a number... Sounds like a bunch of frustrated programmers who haven't had an idea of their own.
... It's so simple, it's perfect. Like treemaps. Have you ever seen hiarchial data represented in such a useful manner?
It's called human computer interaction. The doctor has his hands and eyes full. A small auditory queue of whether it's safe to try to move that robotic arm (via an APPROPRIATE interface, not the keypad on your keyboard) is of great benefit.
It's simple, effective, and doesn't require an understanding of networking or what the numbers mean. Low pitch bad, high pitch good (or whatever the mapping is)
This has been out for years. Just run an MP3 or OGG streaming server like Icecast, Shoutcast or SimpleServe Shout. You can hear the stream degrade or improve as through-put changes. Plus most streaming server have a status window that will show you how your connection is doing. If you have good sound quality you know you have a good connection.
Why do they make simple things complicated?
Icecast: http://www.icecast.org
ShoutCast: http://www.shoutcast.com
SimpleServer Shout: http://www.analogx.com
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Hey, there's no 'ping' button on ie's taskbar, how can the average user know that command exists ?
'Ping' is a duck. I learned this in first grade.
(But check out This Amazon review (scroll down) by : John E. Fracisco. (No, the link doesn't give me referer bonuses or whatever.))
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
When I was younger, I had a vacation job in an iron foundry (please don't ask why, the pay was shitty too) and I worked for a while in quality control. There was this old man there who used a hammer to test the newly casted pieces: he just hit them, and based on the sound he could tell if the casting had air pockets in it, or if the iron quality was sub-standard. The electronics which were purchased also for quality control were gathering dust in a corner. ... the old man was always right, even if the electronics weren't.
This idea of using sound to check connections may be less absurd than it sounds
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
snoop (the packet sniffer in Solaris) has had an option to "listen" to packets since at least SunOS 5.6: ... snipped from man snoop ...
/dev/audio (warning: can
OPTIONS
-a Listen to packets on
be noisy).
Tim Brown
Actually there is a sourceforge project that you can hear the network traffic as the sound of rain or a forest, the more traffic generated the busier the forest sounds or the harder the rain falls
i have run this and i have to say it beats listening to the sound of a server rooms fans
you can see/download the project here
Of course, a clever piece of software can do this too - but you already have this clever piece of software installed for free in your brain.
Given that the latency of a ping is no guarantee of the connection speed in 5 minutes time, regardless of whether you use your screen or your ears, isn't this the other way around? Taking a method as good as any other and writing a clever bit of software to use the clever bit of software in your brain to get much the same results as a simple ping?
And what about a quick glance at a latency graph on the pc's monitor? If I was undergoing remote surgery, I'd much rather rely on a nice smooth graph of low ping latency over the past 2 hours than the questionable skills of a tech listening to the pings for a few minutes...
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
You're missing the obvious, which is that the net is a huge network: the fact that you've got a nice low ping *now* doesn't make the slightest difference if a major router goes down in 30 seconds time. It's big enough to be more or less random from the point of view of one user.
I'd be bloody terrified if the surgeon started to cut into a vital organ, a DOS attack slowed the network down suddenly, and he had to hold his scalpel in precisely the same position for 5 mins while the connection stabilised. A gimmicky audio program wouldn't help with that, because by the time you could hear the problem, it'd be too late!
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
1am: ping blip blip blip ping
3am: Story posted on slashdot.. many slashdotters just gone to bead: ping blip blip pant pant blip pant
7am: Story extremely popular : Ping pant pant huff *scream* *ouch* *fry* *sizzle* *fzzzzzt*.......... ping timeout
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
but this really isn't new. Here where I live there are networking companies that to test new networking cable send sound through them. After all, CAT5 is really just a funky version of speaker wire, so it works. I see this as just another kind of test, ok, but not all that important. And I agree that it is probably nothing more than the media jumping on something cool.
Is that the measurement is qualitative. Two people could hear the same "ping sound" and come to different conclusions about the network quality.
"Network sounds a bit slow today."
"Nah, sounds OK to me. Hey Joe, what d'you think?"
"Dunno, sounds bubbly."
New Scientist is NOT a good source for scientific news. They slant their writing such that many minor advancements look like the discovery of the century and major discoveries that don't agree with their politics are made to look routine.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
You've all seen a similar use. Listen to the approach of the lunar shuttle to the TMA-1 base in "2001: A Space Odyssey".
And fifteen years ago I was listening to network behavior: the RF leakage from a computer or network device can produces recognizable patterns on a radio. I identified excessive directory searches in an application from the background chatter. The higher speeds of current technology makes this more difficult with simple broadcast AM/FM radios.
I also believe that Slashdot discussed Peep, the Network Auralizer which plays sounds based on network activity. But Peep is oriented toward behavior of an entire network, not of specific connections.
Footing the bill might not be an option. If you're in Cleveland and in a hurry and the surgeon you want is in Hamburg, then time becomes the issue, not money.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
When I listen to shoutcasts if it buffers too frequently then I know the connection is not good.
[alk]
Jeff
stty erase ^H
Good.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
After reading that article, I have a picture in my head of a doctor in surgery garb holding a pair of defibrillator paddles on a Cisco router and yelling "Clear!"
In a recent eweek article ( http://www.eweek.com/search_results/0%2C3685%2C%2C 00.asp?qry=jaalam&site=eWEEK - sorry about the lack of html I am still mainly a paper oriented person) a company called Jaalam was mentioned that has a product called AppareNet that uses the ICMP packets to find out the health of networks and provide trouble shooting and status of networks. I actually saw an early demo of their product and it was impressive how it found latency issues, duplex issues, and bottlenecks across our company WAN just by doing an analysis of the data contained in the standard ICMP packet. It was also impressive that it did not trigger any of the firewalls along the way that look for scanners and such.
This doesn't require new hardware. You could do it simply by sending a regularly timed sequence of packets to port 7, then linearly interpolating between the packet return times to get a smooth waveform at a frequency having some relation to the round-trip time. By each side adding its own timestamp to the packet (and using a slightly more sophisticate server than "echo"), each side could also find out the one-way trip time each way.
While "neat", this doesn't seem particularly radical, or even hard to implement. I could probably come up with a crude working version within an hour.
I don't, however, put much stock in the claims about making telesurgery safer. The information obtained by this only gives a more fine-grained, modally-unusual form of information about the link's *current* state. It has no long-term predictive power whatsoever.
I didn't quite get the comments about modelling the network as a drum rather than a guitar string - I understand the need for a multidimensional representation, but to monitor even a small subnet you get into numbers of dimensions humans have no familiar analaog to (and thus, cannot extract meaningful information from). Unless they meant that one could plot the "to" times on one axis and the "from" times on the other, and model *that* as a 2D surface such as a drum. That would work, I guess, but would make it harder to understand the output.
When waiting for Gentoo to compile (zzzzzz) my mate and I were messing around with pipes, listening to the linux kernel source code, and other such exciting things ;-)
:-)
Anyway, we piped a ping through to the speakers and noticed a big difference between local pings and Internet pings, as well as Internet pings to UK sites and US sites. Probably the best use though was just to see if the machine was connected, and also to figure out which patch cable was the one belonging to the particular computer (start it pinging, then unplug until you hear no more pings!).
God bless UNIX
The poster missed the point that you are making. The surgeon does not have to LOOK at the meter to know his connection quality. He can listen to it.
If I had this is RTCW maybe I could adjust my aim better. Thats whats holding me back!
I can remember it that clearly for two reasons:
That's right, whatever wise man said "Never whistle while you're pissing" (I remember it first in connection with Robert Anton Wilson, but I could be wrong) had no idea this day was coming. (And if you ever hear the Star Spangled Banner playing in the washroom, try not to salute!)
Numbers on a terminal window don't have much meaning unless put in perspective, or the perspective is known very well to begin with. Music is a "given" perspective that most people know already. They may not be able to play a note, but they know what sounds right and what doesn't. This method is a good way to convert numeric data into something more immediately recognizeable.
Now, the bad news: The connection between doctor and patient in a telesurgery operation must be both low latency and low jitter. When either one isn't there, the participants have good reason to panic. And all that auditory monitoring of ping times and jitter will do is enable that panic to set in that much more quickly. Can you say "liability," boys and girls?
I just don't consider the modern Internet to be sufficiently reliable for any application, and I expect its quality will continue to degrade as time goes by, more people get on, ISPs save money by not upgrading their equipment to handle the new press of people, and certain forces work to pollute the net with carnality, banality, and commercialism.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Is the last thing you hear the ping of death?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
iputils-20020124-8 from Red Hat 8.0 has an "-a" switch, that makes the ping audible.
It makes a "bell" sound for every packet. Combining -a and -f (flood ping) doesn't work though.
I wouldn't rely on ping too much, though, audible or not; recently one of our servers suddenly lost its root-device. Amazingly the kernel limped on and replyed to pings. Our network monitoring program (www.nagios.org) therefore claimed the host was up, but all services had stopped answering.