August 28th, 2008
WhoisZips
I have been meaning to post this for awhile. Among other things, I recently wrote a Processing sketch that uses Carnivore to sniff the packets on a local network, then does a whois search on the IP address to look up the physical address attached to them. The sketch then displays the address, and plots it on a map. The more packets that come from a location, the brighter the dot.
In this iteration, I just used the Arin server, so it’s just for US addresses. This also limited me to a US map (which I stole borrowed from one of the examples in Ben Fry’s Visualizing Data book).
Since this is a Processing sketch, I could have done an embedded applet for this entry, but Carnivore requires some changing of permissions on the local machine to do the packet sniffing. And well, you can’t do that from a web page.
The code for this is here, but I will warn you now that it is undocumented. And it comes with no warranty, use at your own risk, etc. Enjoy!
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:11 am
i have no idea what you just said.
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:11 am
nerd.
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:14 am
I’ll make it simple for you. So, this program that I wrote gathers all of the data that is flying around your local network (like when you are at home, all of the data that is being sent to and from all of the computers at home) and looks up where the data is coming from on the outside and finds the physical address. It then prints that out on the screen and puts a dot on the map. Got it?
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 am
Oh, and PS:
“The notion of creating art works through the medium of machines may seem a little strange. Most people who have heard about the experimental use of digital computers in creative endeavors have probably shrugged them off as being of no consequence. On the one hand, creativity has universally been regarded as the personal and somewhat mysterious domain of man; and, on the one hand, as every engineer knows, the computer can only do what it has been programmed to do - which hardly anyone would be generous enough to call creative. Nonetheless, artists have usually been responsive to experimenting with and even adopting certain concepts and devices resulting from new scientific and technological developments. Computers are no exception.”
-A. Michael Noll -The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium (1967)
September 8th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
nerd x 2
BOOSH!!