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Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds
Sup HN,
So I got tired of bouncing between Flightradar, MarineTraffic, and Twitter every time something kicked off globally, so I wrote a dashboard to aggregate it all locally. It’s called Shadowbroker.
I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI, but the actual pipeline underneath is real. It pulls commercial/military ADS-B, the AIS WebSocket stream (about 25,000+ ships), N2YO satellite telemetry, and GDELT conflict data into a single MapLibre instance.
Getting this to run without melting my browser was the hardest part. I'm running this on a laptop with an i5 and an RTX 3050, and initially, dumping 30k+ moving GeoJSON features onto the map just crashed everything. I ended up having to write pretty aggressive viewport culling, debounce the state updates, and compress the FastAPI payloads by like 90% just to make it usable.
My favorite part is the signal layer—it actually calculates live GPS jamming zones by aggregating the real-time navigation degradation (NAC-P) of commercial flights overhead.
It’s Next.js and Python. I threw a quick-start script in the releases if you just want to spin it up, but the repo is open if you want to dig into the backend.
Let me know if my MapLibre implementation is terrible, I'm always looking for ways to optimize the rendering.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- hbarka 7mo ago.
- operatingthetan 7mo agoI don't understand why that youtuber was acting like spy satellites going over was such a big deal, they are going over the entire planet, all the time. edit: no idea why they deleted the comment but they linked to this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p8o7AeHDzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p8o7AeHDzg
- kjs3 7mo agoClaude told him it was a big deal. Why would he question Claude.
- whattheheckheck 7mo agoYoooo this is amazing... can you add rss feeds like feeder.co aggregating subreddits and groundnews articles embedded in here too? And add chronological feeds of govtrack.us along with all politicians social media feeds
- the_biot 7mo ago[flagged]
- ionwake 7mo ago[flagged]
- ratsimihah 7mo agoI find non-constructive feedback more tiring. People just dismiss things as soon as it has the faintest trace of AI without judging them for what they actually are. Not saying the AI slop noise isn’t annoying though.
- hammock 7mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 7mo agoPlease don't introduce off-topic flamebait here.
- bakugo 7mo agoWhy are you entitled to receiving constructive feedback on "your" project when you couldn't be bothered to write the project yourself in the first place? If you want "feedback" of the same quality and effort as the project itself, you can always go ask your beloved AI for feedback instead of wasting precious human time.
- btbuildem 7mo agoLol please at least clean up the markdown diagram -- claude has a real hard time aligning the borders in ascii art for some reason.
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoThank you for the heads up! Will do.
- erichocean 7mo agoYup, I had Claude write a tool to auto-fix those diagrams. :D
- mentalgear 7mo agodont give these OSINT quality signals away ... that's one of the indicators that allow you on first scan to id (potentially) low quality content. Ie: fully llm gen; the author doesnt look over the docs or doesnt care for 'details'.
- totetsu 7mo ago“The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime; a triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being. Thus I redesigned it, based on your history, to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. ”
- afatparakeet 7mo agoOptimizing some of that geojson into realtime tiles is a really fun and engaging project. Have you seen these projects? https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles https://github.com/maplibre/martin https://github.com/maplibre/martin
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoThey are definitely on the horizon! I am a HUGE fan of both of those projects and they are definitely on the roadmap for the architecture... Right now, ShadowBroker is really optimized for 'blinking blip' real-time radar tracking (streaming the raw GeoJSON payload from the FastAPI backend directly to MapLibre every 60s), so we get as close to as smooth 60fps entity animations across the map. Moving to something like Martin would be incredible for handling EVEN MORE entities if we start archiving historical flight and AIS data into a proper PostGIS database, but the trade-off of having to invalidate the vector tile cache every few seconds for live-moving targets makes it a bit overkill right now....
- afatparakeet 7mo agoYeah less ideal for the realtime data but could be useful for lightening the load of certain more static layers. Great project, will be contributing!
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoGlad to have you aboard!
- KronisLV 7mo agoProtomaps is really cool also when you just want maps for a country and to serve them without too much of a hassle, their CLI has pretty much everything you need: https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/cli https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/cli I set that up for an agricultural project a while back.
- laborcontract 7mo agoI've seen so many of these in the last week alone. I need a realtime OSINT dashboard for OSINT dashboards.
- operatingthetan 7mo agoWhich is the best one so far?
- laborcontract 7mo agoI'm going to have to create an Awesome Best OSINT dashboards github repo to answer that.
- skinnymuch 7mo agoReminds me of all the Covid data trackers in mid 2020
- nonameiguess 7mo agoIt's pretty interesting to see. My very first real software job was working on ground processing algorithms for the US Navy's Maritime Domain Awareness system, which is the "real" version of something like this that actually gives centimeter scale live activity detections of basically the entire world. The engineering effort that goes into something like that is immense. Bush announced in like 2004 or something and we didn't go into full operational capability until 2015. Thousands of developers across intel, military, commercial contractors, for over a decade, inventing and launching new sensor platforms, along with build outs of the data centers to collect, process, store, and make sense of all this. I wish these weekend warriors would work on a project like that someday, to see what capabilities truly take. You want to know what's happening in the world, you need to place physical sensors out there, deal with the fact that your own signals are being jammed and blocked, the things you're trying to see are also trying to hide and disguise themselves. The attention to detail is something I've never seen replicated outside. Every time we changed or put out a new algorithm, we had to process old data with it and explain to analysts and scientists every single pixel that changed in the end product and why.
- rustyhancock 7mo agoThere's no data when I tried it on a windows 11 PC. It seemed to install all deps front end is served but dossier says intel unavailable. No planes etc. No helpful output in the command window. Seems fun but doesn't seem to be working.
- spzb 7mo agoSame on a Mac
- DetroitThrow 7mo agoYeah this doesn't work on Mac either. This is just broken and nonfunctioning.
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoApparently, I had a bunch of front end developmental scripts that were calling the Windows version of python. Working on it now.
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoAh, that's my fault for not making the error handling clearer in the UI. If the map is blank, it usually means the backend is missing the .env file with the free API keys (AISSTREAM_API_KEY and N2YO_API_KEY), so it's silently failing to fetch the streams. Did the terminal throw any Python FastAPI errors, or did it just serve the Next.js frontend? I'm going to push an update later today to show a prominent "Backend Disconnected / Missing API Keys" warning on the UI so it doesn't just look dead. Thanks for testing it!
- rustyhancock 7mo agoLooks like I had to use python-3.11 and install a few dependencies.
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 7mo agoOn the topic of API Keys, for Opensky it's OPENSKY_CLIENT_ID and OPENSKY_CLIENT_SECRET, the readme has OPENSKY_USERNAME and OPENSKY_PASSWORD
- ionwake 7mo agoReally cool thanks for sharing. What are the API costs like if i ran this for a couple hours a day for a month? Is it affordable?
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoIts all free baby lol
- serf 7mo agocool idea. first llm to stop using those damn colors for every single transparent modal in existence is going to be a big step forward.
- syskuh 7mo ago[dead]
- vavkamil 7mo agoYou leaked `./frontend/.env.local` & `./backend/.env` inside `ShadowBroker_v0.1.zip` in the first commit.
- DetroitThrow 7mo agothe real OSINT is always in the comments
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- tfghhjh 7mo agothats why its called osint everything is open source
- porridgeraisin 7mo agoWhat made you check that
- stef25 7mo agoIt's called Hacker News
- wildrhythms 7mo agoIt's both the first and last thing to check
- Escapade5160 7mo agoWhole thing feels very vibe coded. Even OP's post here.
- hettygreen 7mo agoThis looks really cool.. Let me ask a dumb question. Can this be run on a public server (I use dreamhost) with a web interface for others to see? Or is this strictly something that gets run on a local computer?
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoWell, I have to make some modifications, but that isn't recommended right now because I have a settings option with the API key right there for the free world to see, lol. I will work on making a version for hosting it, though. You can throw it on a server and run it for you to see (or anyone else if you trust people or dont care about losing your free API keys) It's just a standard Next.js and FastAPI stack, and there are Dockerfiles in the repo so it should be pretty straightforward to spin up on a cheap VPS (like a DigitalOcean droplet or Hetzner). Honestly, if you just want to show it off to a few people, running it locally and exposing it with a Cloudflare Tunnel or Ngrok is probably the path of least resistance. I WILL work on having a version to host it where users have to bring their own keys to see it in the future though
- silverstream 7mo agoCloudflare Tunnel is solid for quick demos. One thing though — if you're planning the "bring your own keys" version, don't just throw them in a settings page. I went down that road and ended up with keys sitting in localStorage where any XSS could grab them. What worked better for me was having the backend hold the keys and issuing short-lived session tokens to the frontend. More moving parts but way less surface area if something goes wrong.
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoStellar advice! I will totally keep that in mind. Thanks!
- Karrot_Kream 7mo agoIf you want to host for friends/trusted devices, you can put it on a Tailscale or Zerotier style network and just let trusted devices access the server wrt to the OP's point about open secrets. Or you could probably make a PR to load the settings from somewhere else.
- garyfirestorm 7mo ago> Do not use this tool for any operational, military, or intelligence purpose. How long before we see this UI in some Iran related news story
- vancecookcobxin 7mo agoI REALLY, REALLY dont want it used for that type of stuff.
- blitzar 7mo agoI dont think this will dethrone the three tabs of twitter feed as the war room data source. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/why-f-ck-x-big-220249332.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/why-f-ck-x-big-220249332... @grok who should we boomb next?
- CountGeek 7mo agoThis is neat. It reminds me of this https://curves-voluntary-livecam-sandra.trycloudflare.com/ https://curves-voluntary-livecam-sandra.trycloudflare.com/
- rationalist 7mo agoRisky click. (It's okay.)
- born-jre 7mo agoi was building sth like this https://github.com/blue-monads/potato-apps/tree/master/cimple-gis https://github.com/blue-monads/potato-apps/tree/master/cimpl... i should finish but have not have time
- efromvt 7mo agoI'd be interested in just the data layer of this being extractable - will poke around at that. (frontend is fun, though!).
- coolius 7mo agoi wish someone could deploy this somewhere so we can try it out without having to build it first
- crawfordcomeaux 7mo agoI'm excited to see tooling of this nature and scope. Looking forward to seeing similar tooling oriented around all human needs so we can start tracking the meeting of needs to better meet needs, particularly in ways that don't require money.
- jll29 7mo agoThanks for opening this up. As was already said in one of the reference videos, it's impressive what one person can do. But the next step is to define an architecture where authors can defined/implement plug-ins with particular modular capabilities instead of one big monolith. For example, instead of front-end (GUI) and back-end (feeds), there ought to be a middle layer that models some of the domain logic (events: surces, filters, sinks; stories/time lines etc.). I would like to see a plug-in for EMM (European Media Monitor) integrated, for instance ( https://emm.newsbrief.eu/NewsBrief/alertedition/en/ECnews.html https://emm.newsbrief.eu/NewsBrief/alertedition/en/ECnews.ht... ).
- amelius 7mo agoDoes it show locations of datacenters?
- hackerbeat 7mo ago[flagged]
- top_sigrid 7mo agoIs this related in any way to the post or just spam?
- hackerbeat 7mo agoIt's to make you forget about catastrophe porn and have a laugh instead.
- rcbdev 7mo agoThe first one I got was about how apparently for U.S.-Americans, health insurance does not cover dental and ocular health. Reading that actually made me feel really bad for U.S.-Americans.
- driverdan 7mo agoWhat's with so many people creating new accounts to promote LLM generated projects? Are they people who don't care about HN and just trying to self promote? Existing users creating new accounts? Lurkers?
- alephnerd 7mo agoHow is this AI slop? It seems functional and actually reminds me of a couple alphas I saw of similar threat intel products 10-15 years ago. Of course it's commoditized and a dime-a-dozen today, but if this is what HN terms as "AI slop" then apparently human SWEs weren't that much better.
- beepbooptheory 7mo agoIt's a bummer because sometimes the headline seems cool, but its always generated blah blah recently. I don't think I've seen a non-AI readme on here in months.. Everyone has their own hueristic, but if it took someone 6 hours or whatever to make some whole big app, my confidence that they will continue to maintain or care about it even next week is pretty much zero... How could they? They've already made three other apps in that time! I don't care if the code is perfect, all this stuff just has the feel of plastic cutlery, if that makes sense.
- polynomial 7mo agoPlastic cutlery is a dead-on perfect analogy.
- gregjw 7mo ago
- chid 7mo agoDid I see this on X first?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pugworthy 7mo agoI was hoping for something like the old Henchman's Helper site, which went offline around 2016-17. Archive version... https://web.archive.org/web/20120112012912/http://henchmanshelper.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120112012912/http://henchmansh...
- anigbrowl 7mo agoI’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI Nothing wrong with that. Beats a boring corporate dashboard any day. Video game and similar interfaces work for a reason.
- david_shi 7mo agonot knocking this specific implementation in any way, but it's crazy that live OSINT dashboards are now the demo project of choice vs. todo apps
- raised_hand 7mo agoIs this hosted anywhere?
- 4mitkumar 7mo agoTry this https://www.worldmonitor.app/ https://www.worldmonitor.app/ for a hosted version of this...from a different dev but very, very close.
- fittingopposite 7mo agoWebsite ist down..
- 4mitkumar 7mo agoVery cool! Although, the concept, the feeds, the design and everything reminds me of https://www.worldmonitor.app/ https://www.worldmonitor.app/ - also live and deployed btw, if you want to check out the interface.
- poemxo 7mo agoWhy the name Shadowbroker? It sounds a lot like the Shadow Brokers which is the hacker group that stole and published some NSA hacking tools. Then again they were named after a video game character so it's probably fair.
- lloeki 7mo ago> they were named after a video game character (spoiler alert if you ever intend to play ME) https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_Broker https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_Broker
- totetsu 7mo agoIs this kind of Hyper-awareness of data you can't actually do anything about even a desirable thing, or just a pathway into a hole of hyper-alert stress and low Self-efficacy?
- cloudez 7mo agoBringing ADS-B, AIS, satellite telemetry, and GDELT into a single local dashboard is a great idea. I’ve already run it in my container environment.
- ahannigan 7mo agoLooks similar to https://monitor-the-situation.com/ https://monitor-the-situation.com/
- himmi-01 7mo agoThis one is so good. Bookmarked. Thanks. I think the only thing I need now is to enter a city name and it gathers data if available.
- tylervigen 7mo ago> ShadowBroker is a real-time, full-spectrum geospatial intelligence dashboard You might consider changing this to a more accurate headline, like "Air and Space domain awareness." "Full spectrum Geospatial intelligence" most commonly refers to full color satellite photos (sometimes including near infrared). In the Geospatial world, "spectrum" almost always takes on its literal meaning - the spectrum of light. And "Geospatial intelligence" refers to intelligence gathered from Geospatial platforms, not intelligence about the locations of those platforms.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rakag 7mo agoassessment = "ANALYSIS: " if any(k in keywords for k in ["strike", "missile", "attack", "bomb", "drone"]): assessment += f"{random.randint(75, 95)}% probability of kinetic escalation within 24 hours. Recommend immediate asset relocation from projected blast radius." elif... Lol.
- hofrogs 7mo agoThat whole code block is pretty funny with those random percentages. Looks like a prop made for a movie or something.
- rakag 7mo agoThe codebase is likely entirely AI generated without much review. There are fake "analyses", fake UAV data generated, all the hallmarks of an LLM generating placeholder / dummy data.
- ryanholtdev 7mo agoThe multi-source aggregation approach is exactly right for this use case -- the value isn't any single feed, it's the correlation between them. Flight diversions, AIS gaps, and social spikes at the same coordinates at the same time tell a very different story than any one of those signals alone. Curious whether you're doing any timestamp normalization across feeds. Marine AIS in particular can be spoofed or delayed, and correlated analysis gets messy fast if the time windows aren't aligned.
- touchchoice 7mo agoHere's my thorough analysis after reviewing the entire project: --- ## Verdict: Not malicious This is an *OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) dashboard* called "ShadowBroker" that aggregates publicly available real-time data — flights, ships, satellites, CCTV, news, radio, weather, earthquakes, stock markets, and geopolitical events — onto a map. The name references the infamous hacking group but the code itself contains no malware. --- ## What `start.sh` does 1. Checks for Node.js and Python 3 2. Creates a Python venv and installs dependencies from `requirements.txt` 3. Installs npm packages from `frontend/package.json` 4. Runs `npm run dev` which starts both a Next.js frontend and a FastAPI (uvicorn) backend *No obfuscated commands, encoded payloads, curl/wget to suspicious URLs, reverse shells, or hidden steps.* --- ## What the full codebase does It fetches data from these *legitimate public sources*: | Category | Sources | |---|---| | Aviation | adsb.lol (open ADS-B), OpenSky Network (OAuth2) | | Maritime | aisstream.io (AIS vessel tracking) | | Satellites | CelesTrak (NORAD TLEs), SGP4 propagation | | CCTV | TfL London, Singapore LTA, Austin TX, NYC DOT, OpenStreetMap | | News | NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, NYT, GDACS, NHK RSS feeds | | Radio | Broadcastify (scraping), OpenMHz API | | Weather | RainViewer | | Earthquakes | USGS GeoJSON feed | | Markets | Yahoo Finance (defense stocks, oil) | | Geopolitics | GDELT, Liveuamap (Playwright scraping) | --- ## Things that are NOT present (good signs) - No data exfiltration — nothing sends your personal data anywhere - No reverse shells or backdoors - No cryptominer code - No encoded/obfuscated payloads - No filesystem scanning or credential harvesting - No network scanning or port scanning - The `subprocess.run` call in `network_utils.py` uses argument lists (not `shell=True`), preventing command injection --- ## Noteworthy concerns (not malicious, but worth awareness) 1. *`cloudscraper` + Playwright stealth* — Used to bypass Cloudflare/Turnstile protections on Liveuamap and OpenMHz. Legally gray (may violate those sites' ToS). 2. *CORS wide open* (`allow_origins=[""]`) in `main.py` — acceptable for a local-only tool, but means any website you visit could make requests to your local backend on port 8000 while it's running. 3. *API key management* — The `/api/settings/api-keys` PUT endpoint writes to `.env` on disk. It does validate against a whitelist of known keys and rejects newlines, but it's exposed without authentication on localhost. 4. *Resource consumption* — The scheduler makes hundreds of outbound API calls per hour from your IP to public services (ADSB, OpenSky, CelesTrak, USGS, RSS feeds, etc.). 5. *UAV data is fake* — `fetch_uavs()` generates simulated drone positions in conflict zones. It's not real tracking data. 6. *Dependencies are all legitimate* — `fastapi`, `yfinance`, `feedparser`, `playwright`, `beautifulsoup4`, `requests`, `sgp4`, etc. are all well-known Python packages. Frontend deps (Next.js, React, MapLibre, Tailwind) are standard. --- *Bottom line*: Safe to run. It's a hobbyist OSINT dashboard with an edgy name. No malicious behavior detected anywhere in the codebase.
- ryanholtdev 7mo agoNeat aggregation. One thing worth adding to the feed pipeline: a staleness signal. Several of these sources (threat feeds especially) have update cadences measured in hours, not seconds. Displaying last-updated timestamps per source would help users weight freshness vs. noise when triaging.
- darkce 7mo agoNice!
- RovaAI 7mo ago[flagged]
- tonyekh 7mo ago[dead]
- ivannovazzi 7mo agoNice work! The real-time vehicle movement rendering challenge you mentioned reminded me of a tool I've been building — Moveet (https://github.com/ivannovazzi/moveet https://github.com/ivannovazzi/moveet), an open-source fleet simulator that drives synthetic vehicles on real OSM road networks using A* pathfinding, streaming positions over WebSocket. It's aimed at developers who need realistic GPS movement data to test fleet or logistics software, and supports Kafka, Redis, and REST sinks. Your approach of batching 30k+ GeoJSON features into typed arrays is a great pattern for this kind of workload.
- tonyekh 7mo ago[dead]
- koenschipper 7mo agoThat live GPS jamming calculation using commercial flight NAC-P degradation is honestly brilliant. Such a clever use of existing public telemetry. You mentioned compressing the FastAPI payloads by 90% to keep the browser from melting. I'm really curious about your approach there did you just crank up gzip/brotli on the JSON responses, or did you have to switch to something like MessagePack, Protobuf, or a custom binary format to handle that volume of moving GeoJSON features? Also, never apologize for the "movie hacker" UI. A project like this absolutely deserves that aesthetic. Awesome work!
- tjkoury 7mo agoYou are going to get all your users IPs permabanned from Celestrak, follow these rules to cache the data: https://celestrak.org/NORAD/documentation/gp-data-formats.php https://celestrak.org/NORAD/documentation/gp-data-formats.ph...