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The NSA Selector
- rekttrader 1y agoThis is killer art
- cole-k 1y agoThis went over my head at first, but I really like it. So for those like me: it converts network traffic into audio output. YouTube explainer: https://youtu.be/vfgySTaM1TI https://youtu.be/vfgySTaM1TI
- tobyjsullivan 1y agoFor those interested in hearing some beats, the terminal demo starts at 4:34 https://youtu.be/vfgySTaM1TI?t=274 https://youtu.be/vfgySTaM1TI?t=274
- zelon88 1y agoIt really starts getting good at 15:00 when he starts losing packets.
- grayfaced 1y agoYes kinda, I would say network activity rather then traffic. Audio signal is going to be in scale of 48Khz while measuring ethernet signal at scale of 100Mhz. At that rate it wouldn't even get more then 1 sample from a full size packet. So really it's polling 48Khz whether or not there was activity during that period. The gimmick is that it uses some analog components. Fully digital you could craft a meaningful audio signal that represents traffic.
- echelon 1y agoThis is a fun demonstration of the principle. "every website sounds different" - that's super cool. The bitmap images sent at the end of the video also sound really cool.
- jojohohanon 1y agoThose who recall cars with fm radios and gsm phones will have heard something similar if their car had a random compartment right below the stereo. When a call came in, before the phone would ring, the radio would emit this very clear tri di di dit dah dah. But only when the phone was very near the radio.
- m463 1y agoNo Such Agen^H^H^H^HAttachment
- tptacek 1y agoThere used to be a thing on SunOS (I think) where you'd get `ping` to write to /dev/audio so you could diagnose network stuff by sound.
- fuddy 1y agoOne of the funnier parameters to encounter in the snoop manpage.
- monster_truck 1y agoYou can still do this with /dev/dsp or similar. Might need sudo these days `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp`
- jdthedisciple 1y agothanks this almost crashed my pc
- dylan604 1y agosome people learn the hard way that blindly copying and pasting things from the interweb directly to a terminal is not always the best of ideas. some times, they're bloody brilliant
- dgfitz 1y agocurl $url | bash is probably the only worse culprit.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago[flagged]
- nicce 1y agoSome people are just evil.
- amelius 1y agoCool, but I was hoping for some 80s era modem sounds.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- riknos314 1y ago> if possible disable encryption, then you can profit from not only timing pattern (of white noise), but also listen in on the plaintext payload. the NSA loves plaintext. Haha, incredible. On a more serious note this is a really cool idea. Would be interesting to listen to the same origin traffic in different network conditions to hear things like TCP rate control.
- neuralkoi 1y agoSSL added and removed here! :-) https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/cloudflare_ssl_added_and_removed_here https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/cloudflare_ssl_added_and_rem...
- ww520 1y agoGood for network wiring diagnostic. It would be great if it can pipe the noise to Bluetooth audio. I can pair a headphone to it, plug this into the network in another room and still can hear it while checking the line connections on the switch/router.
- hnuser123456 1y agoThat audio port is blasting out a total bandwidth of 100 Mbps (4 bits at 25 MHz) versus 768 Kbps for BT audio, assuming a high quality codec (16 bits at 48 KHz), so not without loss.
- ww520 1y agoCan be downsampled for the purpose. It's just noise after all.
- danesparza 1y agoThe Snowden silkscreen is a nice touch. What a great hardware build!
- TiredOfLife 1y ago[flagged]
- sterlind 1y agoI don't see any traces of Putler on the silkscreen.
- danesparza 1y agoWow! You taught me something new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putler
- rurban 1y agoDon't forget the GHCQ which installs a mirror on each UK modem. I don't think the NSA goes to these extremes
- godman_8 1y agoI've worked with quite a few ISPs and exchanges. I haven't set up port mirrors for the NSA but I have setup temporary mirrors for the FBI upon request.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoThe NSA/govt gets its own dedicated floor in some DCs, esp. large interconnects
- stavros 1y agoOh man, I really hope they don't get all my TLS connections.
- dekhn 1y agoThe NSA worked with GHCQ to tap Google's fiber between data centers, which at the time, was not encrypted. You can see several presentations including "SSL added and removed here" (reference to the SSL connection being terminated at the Google front end and then transmitted unencrypted to the backend in another data center), as well as an actual BigTable packet from tcpdump that included a user identifier. If you read The Idea Factory, it shows that AT&T leadership worked closely with NSA and other governmental agencies (on a "secret schedule" so nobody would know who the execs were meeting with) to help them access US phone data. I'd love to know the extent of what NSA has done between its founding and today; I'm sure they've pulled off some astounding things, and bolluxed up other stuff badly.
- neuroelectron 1y agoI doubt encryption makes much of a difference, depending on the magic numbers in your implementation.
- 1y ago
- 1317 1y agoYou can also achieve something like this with a powerline networking adapter + a shortwave radio bit evil really, they shit up almost the entire 0-30mhz but they do work...
- simpaticoder 1y agoReally cool, but has anyone built software to do this locally on a PC? For example: sudo tcpdump -i "eth0" -w - -U | aplay -f S16_LE -r 44100
- mzs 1y agosnoop -a on solaris https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=46328&cid=477520411 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=46328&cid=477520411
- Hypergraphe 1y agoA good comment :)
- jll29 1y agoIn NSA parlance, a "selector" primarily is a string that semi-uniquely identifies and addresses a persons intercepted data, such as - an IP address, - an email address, - a phone number, - a SIM card's MSIN - a person's social security number, - a national ID card number, - a passport number, - a social media handle etc. (elsewhere also known as "accessor", "key", "handle" or "index")
- jonathanstrange 1y agoThey are interesting because combining and updating them is a non-trivial problem, as I've realized today while implementing a user ban system.
- Terr_ 1y agoThere's a certain system I work with where random unauthenticated visitors on the internet end up supplying data like name/phone/email, with no validation... And of course, the business wants to somehow convert that into a list of "real people" and start correlating it to other records. I've been trying to stop anything too terrible from happening by asking them to clarify their business requirements, e.g. what should happen when there is malicious impersonation, or the expected result should be when inconsistencies and overlaps exist. It's not like there's no value to the data... but I'm afraid they don't really understand the problem are are hoping the magic computer can somehow *poof* garbage into fine cuisine.
- transcriptase 1y ago“Enrichment” is what they actually want. People think it’s Google, Amazon, Facebook etc selling their data when in reality they are simply letting people target based on it. On the other hand there are hundreds of companies nobody has ever heard of that do buy, collate, clean, and sell access to the data that apps, browser extensions, windows apps, loyalty card programs, branded credit cards, retailers, and companies that scrape LinkedIn etc will happily sell. You provide what you have and for a price these “enrichment” services will provide what is essentially a dossier of everything that can be even remotely inferred from the thousands of datapoints they have based on your email/name/phone. What most people think big tech is doing is actually being done in ways that are far more unsettling by companies with cutesy names and vague services that major companies sign contracts with to improve their signal to noise ratio.
- desertmonad 1y agoImagining in a server farm. Cool project!
- hottakesbun 1y agoThe joke is on him - I used to get this functionality for free way back in the day when (what I presume was) RF noise generated during the processing of ethernet traffic would get picked up by my cheap ISA sound card and sent to the speakers. I never built a sequencer out of it though.
- sevensor 1y agoBack in college, I would listen to AM radio while I worked on my computer. The radio would pick up electrical noise from the keyboard and the mechanical mouse. I wonder if this sounds anything like it.
- anjel 1y agoTRS-80s were famous for bleeding over AM band. The entire AM band.
- sterlind 1y agoI read that the FCC really started cracking down on EM interference because early microcomputers were serious offenders. I'm guessing that's why there's a humongous RF shield inside my Amiga 1200.
- psunavy03 1y agoCool idea to audio-ize network traffic. Artwork is peak edgelord cringe, though . . .
- als0 1y agoStuff like this is exactly why I come to Hacker News.
- Liftyee 1y agoGreat idea and +1 for excellent PCB art!
- phendrenad2 1y agoCan you say "calm down my selector"?
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- yapyap 1y agoSo ridiculous, love it
- gitroom 1y ago[dead]
- fasdfdsa 1y ago[flagged]
- fefawfefafds 1y ago[dead]
- fdaffeafe 1y ago[dead]
- deadbabe 1y agoThe seller does not ship to the United States at all.. :( How are you going to name this product after the NSA, and not ship to the US???
- reaperducer 1y agoThe seller does not ship to the United States at all.. :( How are you going to name this product after the NSA, and not ship to the US??? Click through, and you'll find a more expensive version that is shipped to the US. It's called TariffBox.
- deadbabe 1y agoWe should make an American version and not allow it for sale anywhere else but the US.
- fnord77 1y agoSo could you stream an MP4 movie, record the sound, then decode the sound back into a (probably lossy) reconstruction of the movie?
- Xx_crazy420_xX 1y agoIt would be nice to compare all packets dumped by system and check if there are any unmatching packets running from your computer that were not sent by OS but a closed source hardware inside like Intel ME
- ChuckMcM 1y agoThis is pretty cool. I believe it was Bob Metcalf at PARC who had a device in his office that was hooked up to the 3Mbs Ethernet cable and would essentially do the same thing. He built and installed it to get a feel for how much of an issue "collisions" would really be on the network. At the time, the idea that you could just back off when you detected a collision and re-transmit was considered heresy of the highest order and the "experts" all believed that once you got to a certain small number of clients the wire would be overwhelmed with collisions and the network would be unusable. His gizmo proved that wasn't the case.
- herewulf 1y agoFeature request: Replace all the blinking LEDs with these to drown out the fan noise in the server room.
- aa-jv 1y agoMany times over the decades I have constructed a MIDI->Audio cable so that I can record MIDI signals as audio, which as a technique is very useful for measuring and fixing MIDI->Synthesizer engine latency. Its nice to know that if I ever get around to shipping a product with RTP-Midi (MIDI over Ethernet), I can just get a ready-made Eurorack module to do that testing! :P
- cranium 1y agoThe accompanying video is really nice: https://youtu.be/vfgySTaM1TI?t=269 https://youtu.be/vfgySTaM1TI?t=269
- sockp0pp3t 1y agoIs there a plugin for Goom ?
- johnklos 1y agoWhen I was young, I'd use an AM radio right next to my Sinclair ZX81 to hear what it was doing when it was running in FAST mode. By making loops of different speeds, one could even make basic tones and crude music. The video really brought back memories of those sounds :)
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoSomething like this, but with a hard drive-like sound for SSDs, would be nice.
- blendo 1y agoThis seems viscerally “correct”, in some crazy sense.