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Crazy Firewall Log Activity — What Does It Mean?
arkowitz writes "I happened to have access to five days worth of firewall logs from a US state government agency. I wrote a parser to grab unique IPs out, and sent several million of them to a company called Quova, who gave me back full location info on every 40th one. I then used Green Phosphor's Glasshouse visualization tool to have a look at the count of inbound packets, grouped by country of origin and hour. And it's freaking crazy looking. So I made the video of it and I'm asking the Slashdot community: What the heck is going on?"
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Anyone else tempted to hum the theme tune to 2001 when they looked at that?
And also... "oh my god... it's full of stars"
Is this post an advertisement for Quova or Green Phosphor's Glasshouse?
"I happened to have access to five days worth of firewall logs from a US state government agency..."
"While skimming through my grandmother's cookbook, I stumbled upon a recipe for processing yellowcake uranium..."
"In passing, a close personal friend mentioned to me that he would deploy ~30k troops to a Mideastern country, but he's worried that the local restaurantuers won't serve fresh babaganoush ..."
"While I was talking to a famous adult film star about my successful experiment with cold fusion..."
"I was fighting against an alien invasion of the Soviet Union the other day. Natalie Portman and I prepared a platoon of sharks with frickin' hotgrits cannons on their heads, but the unwelcome overlords kept jumping the sharks..."
Maybe you could do a visualization of this guy's astroturfing. And for some reason it seems highly appropriate to use his own visualization tools for it. The ad demonstrating the product would be based on everywhere the ad itself had been spammed. I love it.
Ahah. So you are why my costs for bandwidth are so high.
Not sure what it means, but I'm tempted to plug-in Guitar Hero and jam along to your firewall logs.
Just let me finish my Klax game first.
"Hi! I've created this awesome freaky-looking visualisation tool! It's so fucking useless that even I, the author, can't actually determine any useful information from the output it shows me, so I have to go ask some random commenters on a website if they've got a single sodding clue what's going on.
Wanna buy it?"