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Programming IT Technology

Peep: The Network Auralizer 169

Posted by CmdrTaco from the fun-ways-to-torture-your-ears dept.
Manuka writes "I have just returned from LISA 2000 in New Orleans (it was a blast), where Michael Gilfix of Tufts University presented a best-of-LISA paper on his creation, called Peep. This has got to be one of the coolest networking tools I've seen - it generates sound events based on network traffic. Really neat stuff like a bird chirping when mail comes in, or an owl hooting when your web server dishes up a page (you can actually use any sound for any event). Neat little way to generate background noise, and you can see (hear) what the network is up to and if it's doing anything weird - if the owl sounds like it's on speed, you're being slashdotted, or if the birds sound a little too hitchcockian, you're being spammed. " But what is the sound of one cracker scanning?
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Peep: The Network Auralizer More

Peep: The Network Auralizer

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  • Re:Site Slashdotted! (Score:3)

    by mcarbone ( 78119 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:51AM (#568734) Homepage
    You can find it here as well (not sure if this is the most recent version though):

    http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/peep/download.html [tufts.edu]
  • That would be your psychosis, and paranoid schizophrenia, not the computer.
  • If a router drops a packet when nobody is around, does it make a sound?
  • And if you're hearing a lot of police sirens, you'd better go to the server room and get ready to hit the Big Red Switch!

    Or you could just uninstall NT.

  • I second that request above. Could you please post a link to the script/mp3 for the rest of us?
  • Doesn't anybody remember when computers were hooked up to TVs where you could faintly hear sounds of the computer crunching away?

    It works better if you have an FM radio nearby and tune it to an unused frequency range. Did that on my TI-994/A a lot.
  • becuase it's the most useful thing when a story goes down. How can you possibly discuss what you haven't read or seen? (See regular /. discussions for how this is possible.)
    --

  • Audible pings to trace network faults (Score:3)

    by devphil ( 51341 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @12:44PM (#568741) Homepage


    Am I the only one who remembers the sysadmin who hooked the output of ping(1) into a text-to-speech program, turned his speakers up to full, and started pinging a machine at the other end of the building?

    "PING... PING... PING..." on each successfully returned packet.

    He then started wandering the halls, tweaking cables. When he bumped a cable and the noise stopped coming from his office, he knew he had found the fault. :-)

  • I managed to get apache to play a sound whever someone hits my website, I wrote a little program called Cliplay [dhs.org] that plays a .wav speced in the command line, then used apache's exec SHTML command. The only problem is that the page stops loading untill the wave has finished playing, so you need to use something pretty short.

  • I doubt it. It's pretty centric to his network, meaning that it's got a lot of sensitive info in it (not just ip addresses but comments like # ok, this next line indicates someone sniffing at the db server, telling you what IP the db server is running on) and that porting it to a generic network would be a bitch.

    But basically all you need is a perl script that reads from stdin, filters those lines (regexps), and has a sort of function table or callback mechanism (e.g. if /someMatch/ then somefunc() ). Redirecting the output from ipmon to the script isn't hard (direct pipe in the case of running ipmon from the shell without the -d daemonize flag, the -f flag (iirc) that specifies log file combined with a named pipe pointing at the script, that sort of thing). I don't know about linux firewalls (iptable, ipchains, ipfwadm, whatever) and logging methods, so that may require a different solution.

    The callback funcs are where the action is (i.e. pass the line on to syslog(open a filehandle to syslog on LOG then "print LOG $line;"), drop it on the floor, do something else; sort of a syslog firewall ;-) ). The command to play the mp3 was something like system("/usr/local/bin/mpg123","/path/to/thunk.mp3 "). (using the split arg form of system is more secure b/c IIRC that way you aren't subject to shell interpretation)

    The mp3 itself is a pretty trivial matter. Buy a cantaloupe (I think that's what he used) and let it get more than overripe but not enough to be gross. Put mic next to cantaloupe, recording to a wav, then hit cantaloupe with board. Convert wav to mp3 using any number of tools. Viola. :-) If you didn't mind the extra disk space you could leave it a wav and use some other tool (or maybe still mpg123, I've never tried to play a wav with it so it might support that (much simpler) format). Of course if you don't want to DIY I'm sure there are plenty of funny wav files out on the internet to use (movie quotes, tv clips (beavis and butthead anyone?), random sounds, etc).


    --

  • On June 3, 1998 Larry Wall [wall.org], creator of the Perl language, spoke at the Silicon Valley Users Group [svlug.org] about how he automated his house - using perl of course. It also included audio output to his house sound system.

    Amoung other things he described how it emitted submarine-like acoustic "pings" for proximity sensors on his lawn and very detailed Caller ID identification of incoming phone calls. It had different sounds or music for common people (e.g., Tom Christiansen, or Randal Schwartz), the city or state of unrecognised calls where spoken.

  • MP3 attack! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Reminds me of my brother logging remotely onto my computer at 3 a.m. and starting to play Type O Negative's "Prelude to Agony" at full blast (or at least it sounded like that at the time).

    Needless to say, once I recovered from my heart-attack and general scare and confusion (what? where am i? whose breaking into my apartment!?), I proceeded to remove him from the group with the access to the audio device.

  • You can do that now, if your hardware is crappy enough. I get static through my earphones on my Compaq at work whenever there's CPU activity. It's bizarre.

    --
    BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL

  • Snoop [sgi.com] on IRIX has had that feature for a while .. it's invoked with "snoop -a". It's pretty funny (and not to mention a great excuse for using headphones at work =)). Listen to your QUAKE network match.

    All I want now are packets that sound like "Mein Leben" for re-sends after collisions.
    --

  • Probably more of a "RED ALERT!" "CAUTION!" "INTRUDER ALERT!". That would be the most effective... If you want to go with the theme, though, maybe a rattlesnake.
  • > This has got to be one of the coolest networking tools I've seen - it generates sound events based on network traffic. Really neat stuff like a bird chirping when mail comes in, or an owl hooting when your web server dishes up a page (you can actually use any sound for any event).

    Aren't you a bit young to be starting your second childhood, Taco?

    --
  • I see you have the machine that goes PIIIIiiiinnnngggg!

    Sorry.

  • woodpeckers

  • Computer speech == useful! (Score:3)

    by Vrallis ( 33290 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:59AM (#568752) Homepage
    I'm in the middle of doing a computer speech mini-project at my company. After many, many times of going down to the computer room and finding printers jammed and communications errors unchecked due to our operators not hearing the warning beeps over the noise of the computer room, we came up with a solution.

    We were in desperate need of re-writing our network/database/communications monitoring software, so I figured...why not add voice to it? So I added a soundcard and speakers to the new system, and used some text-to-speed software. Result? Pissed off operators!

    Printer alert! Printer 1 is jammed!
    Communications alert! Dialer 2 is hung!
    Printer alert! Printer 2 is out of paper!

    Oh well...at least the printer's don't sit around jammed for more than 1 minute now =)

  • I imagine it sounds much like the microsoft "Jungle" sound theme - Full of sound and fury, and signifying hacking.

    ObDisclaimer: I know the difference between Cracker and Hacker. Thankyouverymuch.

  • My network monitoring software [ipswitch.com] already has the option to use a voice modem to play sounds at me over the phone. Pity it doesn't work properly with Windows 2000.....
  • For instance, whenever you're scrolling, there is a "scrolling" sound. Very soft and subtle -- but continuous for as long as you're holding down the mouse button.
    So if you don't have any short-term memory, you can remember what it was you were doing?

    Okay, maybe it's slightly more useful than that -- but it's usually not necessary or even helpful. If you are scrolling, the really useful feedback is the fact the window is scrolling. Or the button is depressed, or whatever. I haven't found that sound adds anything useful to that.

    The nice thing about a sense that's entirely seperated from vision, is that it can be used for something entirely unrelated to what you are looking at. The sound I hear when walking down the street doesn't effect my understanding of what I see very much -- I can see the street and the other people just fine. But I can hear things going on outside my field of vision and my field of attention, and that can be very useful (for instance, if I hear someone walking up behind me).

    Sound seems to be particularly appropriate for background events. People are very good at filtering it out -- I can be on a train and listen to one person over the sound of the train and other people's conversation. But if someone else says my name -- even though I'm actively listening to something else -- I will notice that. That's really pretty damned impressive when you think about it, and yet a nearly universal skill.

  • This reminds me of a few yeasr ago, when I was sitting in my London office at 2 in the morning all alone. I had my back to Binky's desk, where his home-written webcam was set up. Unbeknownst to me, he had added a feature that day so that someone viewing the page could send back text comments and the computer would speak them.
    In the middle of stepping through a fiddly subroutine, the computer behind me said 'Hi, I'm in Masschusetts'. I hope whover it was enjoyed the sight of me levitating 2 feet in shock.
  • The Tangible Media group at the MIT Media Lab have been working on this sort of thing for quite a while, and deserve a mention. http://tangible.www.media.mit.edu/groups/tangible/ projects.html [mit.edu]

    --
  • What is the sound of shit happening ?
  • This reminds me of a story told me by friends working at a network card company. The MIS chap decided that he was going to enforce tight security, and added lots of layers of passwords and authentication to make sure he was in control of the network. However, the card driver engineers weren't impressed with this disruption to their work, so they hooked up a machine to scan packets for passwords and record them for later use. Every time it found a password it played a fanfare. The MIS chap couldn't work out why the engneers kept smiling at he sound of trumpets.

  • How about using sounds as FEEDBACK instead (Score:5)

    by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @01:39PM (#568760) Homepage
    If you've used a recent Mac OS, you'll notice it has the options to make sounds that reinforce what you're doing.

    For instance, whenever you're scrolling, there is a "scrolling" sound. Very soft and subtle -- but continuous for as long as you're holding down the mouse button. There is a "window dragging" sound. Again, soft and subtle. But it strongly reinforces what you're doing. Grab the scroll-thumb and drag it rapidly, and the sound changes to match.

    Using sounds to notify you of very frequent, non-user initiated, events, such as web server hits (or on some systems, frequent events, such as blue screens), seems to be potentially annoying.
  • It WAS ugly, but damn you could see it. :-)

  • Oldies might remember that AM radios used to get placed next to mini-computers to serve as monitoring devices. The hiss, crackle and pop emanating from radio would be a good indication of the activity on the machine. After a while you would be able to listen to the sound and say, for instance, that the backup job was running, etc. Current machines being much faster and better shielded are probably not amenable to such monitoring.
  • What a wonderful way to customize the office. You can have a jungle theme, or an ocean theme. That would be just amazing -- and not to mention quite in tune with our evolution. In a server room for example, it could sound like a bunch of birds in a jungle (for web pages serving up) and for "bizarre" operations like connections to arbitrary ports (ie. portscan) have a tiger roar. It's amazing how well the human ear can pinpoint the location of our natural (ancient) predators. (I can speak for this through experience!)
  • Actually, no, it doesn't, because when no one is around, my speakers are turned off



    Katzu!



    (whacks Nater over the head with a large clue-stick)

  • Great (Score:3)

    by defaultXIX ( 106977 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:33AM (#568765)
    Great, Now I can apply themes to my network
  • Wait a minute... I'm recording a sound for PPoE as we speak!
  • This story reminds me of something the late Mark Weiser [ubicomp.com] spoke about during his keynote at the Winter 1995 Usenix. Apparently someone at PARC had built a little box that they mounted on the ceiling in the corner of the office. It was attached to the LAN, and it had a little servomotor that would rotate one quarter turn every time a packet went by on the LAN. Attached to the motor, a little off-center, was a string about three feet long.

    When the network was being lightly used, the string would twitch lazily in the corner of the office. Typically, it would whirl in a nice spiral. When the network was being hit hard, it would sing so loudly you could hear it across the hall.

    I've wanted a "dangling string ethernet monitor" ever since.

  • If a Cracker makes a whoot, and there is no sysadmin around, do you still get rooted?

  • Chernobyl found that audible alarms are bad (Score:4)

    by dustpuppy ( 5260 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @02:00PM (#568769)
    ... showed that using tones for status information was a very effective method for important (but non-critical) information.

    The emphasis is on 'non-critical'. I recall that an investigation into the Chernobly nuclear disaster pointed to audible alarms as one of the contributing factors. Basically, when the reactor started malfunctioning, so many alarms were going off that the techs were unable to identify which was the most important alarm and hence they didn't respond appropriately to the situation.

  • why? (Score:2)

    by flynt ( 248848 )
    how come i'm always hearing birds chirping at work and i don't have this thing installed?
  • I did this, albeit much more crudely, with my home FreeBSD server, a few shell scripts monitoring log files, and a sound player.

    It's fun if you have sounds for a small set of events that happen infrequently enough to be worthwhile. It's noise otherwise.

  • Reminds me of when I first used Go!zilla to download something. Since it was a large file and I was using a 56K, I got ready for bed and turned off the light. The default roar (an unannounced "feature" installed as default) on download completion at 2 AM in the morning nearly scared the shit out of me. Needless to say, I uninstalled Gozilla in the morning and now only use the nice and quiet GetRight.

  • Personally, I disable all the noises on my computer. How many times can you stand to hear the same noise again and again?
    Somebody in our office has it set up where it says "You have email, Master". Across the room it sounds like "You have email, Bastard".
  • ...'I think I can, I think I can, Ithink I can...'
  • If you want to test it, what better was is there than slashdot?

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • Sorry do yo have the time? I don't have a watch... five past seven? Okay thanks... awfully chilly today isn't it? That's December for you... tsk!

  • I agree this would be helpful. Another study (don't have the reference, sorry) dealt with the absence of sound. Kittens could be conditioned to expect food when sounds (in this case a clicking noise) stopped.

    (Of course that doesn't mean it's going to be aesthetically pleasing to humans. NASA also researched the high-visibility color scheme for VDTs that was later adopted by Amiga -- black, white, dull blue, garish orange. Ugh!)

  • error lpt: the printer is on fire

    Put that one in text to speech and tell us what the reaction is!

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • Hey long time reader first time poster! I like your article and I think it was really informative and I learned a lot from it. I really wish Slashdot would have less articles about computers and more articles and discussion about politics and football though. Keep up the good work hombres!
  • I dunno, Hearing a million+ owl chirps and a couple hundred thousand birds each day would get pretty annoying. I would like to replace this with lights in the NOC. Green light for mail, Blue for web, Red for port scan.

    "Now, I hope and pray that I will, but, today I am still just a bill"

  • I've worked on non-critical informational systems for US-made nuclear plants. (Critical systems are so automated that you are informed as an "Oh, BTW!" not "Do something now!" message)

    Audible, and visual warnings are remarkably effective when they are well implemented. The problem is that bad things rarely happen individually, and a queue is often used to store multiple alarms. So if you have a ding-ding-bong-ding-bong-ding sequence, where dings are not as severe as bongs, you tend to get confused. It's a lot like playing Simon, where eventually the sequence overwhelms you.

    What needs to be done is some kind of prioritization of the alarms, so the more critical ones could be accessed more simply - but the powers that be tend not to trust automated systems, and prefer to have a confused human making decisions.

    The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196

  • If someone from Microsoft hears you say that, they will make sure that the 1.5Gh P-IV runs just as slow as my P-I 150Mh... Imagine all the bloated overhead code responsible for that feature on Windows 2002...

    The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196

  • No! (Score:2)

    by shippo ( 166521 )
    I had a bad experience with something like this in the past.

    The PHB (technically clueless) decided it would be a good idea for us to remotely manage customer sites via Managewise (over a single ISDN line - natch!). He got hold of some 3rd party speech software for Managewise, and installed it on the managewise console which incidentally was next to my desk. Why me - I had nothing to do with the Netware side of things. Both the soundcard (an el-cheapo 8-bit jobbie from 1990) and speakers (very low quality - bundled with another card) were mine - I had brought them in for some other project and they were still hanging around.

    Whenever a user logged in or out I'd here some speech indicating what had happened, or some other noises. No-one was actually monitoring the machine (too much effort), and I'd get thoroughly annoyed by this thing blasting out noises and messages all day.

    Eventually I trashed the speakers by disconnecting the cables inside - peace at last!

    The PHB left shortly afterwards - Managewise was a disaster over ISDN.

  • I used to work for a newspaper where part of my job was maintaining 16 PDP-11's ... LOTS of blinkity lights which could, at a glance, give the experienced tech a good idea what the systems were up to: I miss that.

    I am one of those folks who dislikes working on MACs partly because they don't have hard disk activity lights (at least the ones I've used)... I'm a feedback junkie.

    Sound feedback (so long as the sounds are subtle) is an excellent way for one to not have to keep constant vigilence on something, but still be able to INSTANTLY know if something out-of-the-ordinary id going on. As long as I get to chose what sound plays and can tell the system which events I am interested in, I think something like this would be worth looking into.

    +++++++++++++++++++++

  • The administraters redirected this site to the SourceForge website a few hours after this was posted. Presumably, because they didn't like to get slashdotted.

    ---
  • And if you're hearing a lot of police sirens, you'd better go to the server room and get ready to hit the Big Red Switch!
    Or you could just uninstall NT.
    ROTFL! and me without mod points...
    --
    You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
  • ...is the special dog noise package!

    C: "woof woof WOOF woof WOOF WOOF WOOF!"

    SA: "What's that, Lassie?"

    C: "woof woof WOOF WOOF woof WOOF WOOF woof!"

    SA: "It's timmyh? And he's portscanning from the WELL?"
  • So let me get this straight -- a parody featuring the sound of singing birds accompanying the receipt of email is off-topic in a story about a system that plays sounds of birds chirping when email arrives??

    That's awfully harsh, considering it was entirely due to the story that I was inspired to write the parody (or even think of the song, as I rarely think of it).

    Guess /. moderation (and maybe meta-moderation) isn't working as well as everyone seems to think it is.

    ;-)

  • Medicine has known this for a long time and has very successfully used sound for status information. Most ICU's are a dreadfully loud place with Beeps, pings, whistles, etc. But everybody always comes running whenever the ventolator alarm or EKG alarm go off BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! OH Crap!!!!
    I can take care of other people and divert my attention to other things as opposed to staring at a screen. Very useful for multitasking.
  • Actually, we're working on an urban theme for this very thing. Might think of doing a cocktail theme as well.. Lots o' possibilities...
  • Also, the MacOS sounds are in stereo - on example, if you drag a window from left side of the desktop to right, the sound will get accordingly weaker in the left speaker and stronger in the right one, following your actions.

    This effect applies to all system sounds, so you can tell where your cursor is.
  • My roommate has done something similar. I'm not certain of the details (it involves a Perl script and the speechd script), but he has his firewall logs tied into the festival text-to-speech engine via a Perl script. Any time his firewall rejets a packet, the Perl script takes note, formats the firewall log entry into a nice speech friendly format, and passes it off to the speechd script. So at random we will hear his computer say

    hisservername has rejected packet from 123.456.789.123 inbound to 987.654.321.98.
    (IPs faked so that he doesn't get /.ed :-)

    It's really rather cool, and takes almost zero CPU power except when it's actually speaking.

    --GrouchoMarx
    My other account is CmdrTaco

    --GrouchoMarx

  • Re:Audible pings to trace network faults (Score:3)

    by gimbo ( 91234 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @03:07PM (#568793) Homepage
    The story is told here, in The Jargon File: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/ping. html [tuxedo.org]

    -Andy


  • Now all I have to do is go out and buy SB live cards for all of my servers....Then that will justify when people say "It's a jungle in there".
  • One cracker scanning...is a partridge in a pear tree.
  • Your spelling and punctuation are shockingly bad, perhaps you should go to www.ul.ie and find out how to enroll in the BEST UNIVERSITY IN THE WORLD
  • This is actually what happens...
  • [Netscape] set it up such that an explosion would sound every time someone downloaded a copy [of version] 0.9 ...

    Here:

    Wednesday, 12 October 1994, midnight [jwz.org] -- at the base of the entire web document.

  • Yep, Wes, it sure does! Go to the thing you shit in, and press the lever that's on it. The sound you'll then hear is the very same sound made whenever anything goes to /dev/null. Unfortunately, stdout and stderr are redirected to /dev/null as well (it's hardcoded in stdio.h), so you can't hear it.

    --
  • Does it make a Penis Bird noise every time a troll posts?
  • Yes! snoop was the SVr4 replacement for etherfind.
    You can tell it to concentrate on one or two machines etc. But the coolest feature is activated
    using the -a option. This causes snoop to output a
    click on the speaker for each packet.Different
    packet lengths are given different modulation.
    It's been said that you can get used to the different sounds and actually tune the network
    "by ear".

  • Cookies (Score:3)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @10:37AM (#568819)
    I would prefer a utility that created a crying advertiser sound every time my proxy server nailed an incoming cookie.

  • I posted about this (or at least it was a tangent in a post about something else) a few days ago. A friend of mine wrote a perl script to moniter the ipmon-generated output of his OpenBSD firewall. When teh script recognized common script kiddie scans, it would play an mp3 of a ripe melon hitting a board (or a board hitting a ripe melon, either way a rather satisfying, moist thunk), represent a kiddie fruitlessly hitting his/her head against the firewall.

    (Common scans like the port 135-140 range of MSFT shit, that sort of thing.)


    --

  • See the original idea for mapping network traffic to the physical world [ubiq.com], done 4 years ago at Xerox PARC. It's called the Dangling String, and it's a wire that shakes around. The more network traffic, the more it moves.

  • Re:About time (Score:3)

    by mrdert ( 21599 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @11:26AM (#568824)
    This is precisely the reasoning behind the project. I encourage everyone to read the paper; it's a far more complicated piece of software than is being suggested here with the usual 'snoop -a' and 'cat foo.au > /dev/audio' responses.

    ObPlug: Tufts University is looking to fill positions for sysadmins with developer tendencies to work on this and similar bleeding-edge projects. We presented two papers at LISA this year. Please email me for details.
  • That was originally an add-on for the 1990 version of the Mac OS called "Sonic Finder" [mackido.com]. It was cool at first, but got old real fast. It didn't help usability much, and in multi-machine office situations was really annoying.
  • it must be your colleges... either check their bags, check them ;)
  • This idea has been around for a long time.
    Particularly, Sensorium [sensorium.org] highlighted this back in '96: NetSound [sensorium.org]
  • I was actually going to implement this using midi. Sigh.... :(
  • Is to make a program that generates netowkr traffic to play a song. :)

  • A pleasure to diagnose... (Score:5)

    by nakaduct ( 43954 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @11:58AM (#568846)
    Since I'm on call, I'm looking forward to my first conversation with a monitoring guy after this is in place...

    MG: "Yeah, there's a problem with system XYZ..."

    Me: "How so?"

    MG: "Well, usually is goes 'ree-ree-tinktinktinktink', you know? But right now it's going 'ree-ree-tinktink-bong-bong-tink'!"

    Me: "Is that 'bong' like a doorbell chime, or more like a big chinese gong?"

    MG: "In between but more like a gong, I think."

    Me: "Well, shit."

    cheers,
    mike

  • In fact, MIT has a whole lab devoted to this kind of thing--i.e. using other senses to deliver mildly relevant information to the user without diverting all of his/her attention.

    Here's a cool link to the Tangible Media Lab [mit.edu].

    This stuff is really interesting in this age of info overload. Being able to convey more information to the user immediately and effectively will become even more useful.

    --

  • The sound of a sonar ping for a ping packet.
    For port scans, I'd use basic tones, the pitch corresponding to the port being scanned -- your ear might detect something better than your firewall. Of course, the obvious thing that would follow, once it's known that someone uses tones to listen for port scans, would be to scan the ports in such a fashion as to generate music.
    cb

  • Yes, but.. (Score:4)

    by multipartmixed ( 163409 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:35AM (#568849) Homepage
    ..if some spam-mail gets routed to /dev/null, and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?

    --

  • cool (Score:2)

    by flynt ( 248848 )
    my boss must have something like this set up. i think it makes a high pitched "uh oh" noise. it must do this whenever he gets something done. man, he must be busy because that's all i hear from his office.

  • The Sound... (Score:3)

    by ectizen ( 128686 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:38AM (#568851)
    But what is the sound of one cracker scanning?
    Ping!

    --

  • Site Slashdotted! (Score:5)

    by Dannon ( 142147 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:42AM (#568855) Journal
    Mr. Gilfix musta just heard a whole mega-flock of owls....

    ---
  • Different sound for every hit on the server?
    Makes me wish I was a Sytems Administrator
    at one of them "adult" web-hosting companies.
    My server room never sounded so good!

    Would you like to pet my Penguin? The Linux Pimp [thelinuxpimp.com]

  • Actually, try Cookie Pal [kburra.com] (Windows). Its not a proxy, but a utility that watches for the dialog boxes that browsers pop up and will accept or reject the cookies based on criteria that you set. I have found it to be better than many of the proxies.

    The neat part is that it can play sounds when it sets or rejects cookies. It has these wonderful farting sounds for rejected cookies....

  • Why not go all the way and use the sounds of vehicular traffic to represent the various kinds of net traffic? Imagine mapping these vehicles to common web traffic:

    • Incoming mail: small motorcycle, or whatever vehicle postal workers use where you live
    • Web page being served: car
    • Large file download: freight truck
    • Port scan or similar: harley motorcycle
    • Intrusion attempt: police car with siren
    • Network congestion: car horns
    • Packet collision: car crash

    If your network is quiet, it will sound like a country road. If your network is busy, it will sound like a major highway in a major city. If you're getting a lot of script kiddies doing port scans, it will sound a bit like a Hell's Angels convention. And if you're hearing a lot of police sirens, you'd better go to the server room and get ready to hit the Big Red Switch!


    --
  • Mirror of the source and sounds: http://while1.org/~xm/peep/ [while1.org]
  • Time to get out my sfx cd from ST:TOS. Guess there was a reason the bridge sounded like that!

  • Re:About time (Score:3)

    by mgilfix ( 262553 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @12:12PM (#568874)
    This post hit it on the money. Peep is based on this very idea. Something to note for all of you: Peep doesn't use beeps or tones, but mixes together sounds that occur in natural environments to create sound "ambiances". The point behind Peep was to create an audio interface that was pleasing to listen to, as well as informative. Hence the reason why we avoided beeps =) Peep also does some other stuff that's non-trivial such as using auto-discovery and leasing to manage distributed clients. I encourage people to read the paper because there's a lot of thought behind the psychology of how it works and how we can provide a large amount of information in a compact and easy to digest way. Just my heads up =)

  • About time (Score:5)

    by TheAncientHacker ( 222131 ) <TheAncientHackerNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:45AM (#568877)
    NASA did a study back in the '60s that showed that using tones for status information was a very effective method for important (but non-critical) information. This technique was used on the Apollo program. After a while the normal sounds become part of the background noise but when something changes, the brain picks up on it very quickly. It has the advantage that the human does it as a background task.

  • Snoop (Score:4)

    by drsoran ( 979 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:46AM (#568878)
    Snoop (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) has the wonderful feature:
    -a Listen to packets on /dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).

    I've heard of someone nearly strangling their officemate though after they left it running on their system while they were out of the office all day. Talk about driving you nuts. Definitely NOT birds chirping or owls hooting.. more like screeching. ;-)

  • Sounds of silence. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Current sound at the Peep [sourceforge.net] site server is probably a toilet flushing, since the server seems to have been Slashdotted already.

  • Reminds me of Netscape (Score:3)

    by jfunk ( 33224 ) <jfunk@roadrunner.nf.net> on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:47AM (#568880) Homepage
    They set it up such that an explosion would sound every time someone downloaded a copy of Netscape when they released 0.9 (I think that was the version). It's described somewhere on JWZ's page [jwz.org].
  • Last year a group called UBSB came out with a noise album, Traceroute, on Ash International records. The music was created by taking a dump of backbone traffic and turning it into sound. Here's a review I found:

    "UBSB
    -Traceroute (ash) LP SFR 21.-
    Great collaboration between Ulf Bilting, Edwin van der Heide, Zbigniew Karkowski and Atau Tanaka. The concept : "Data harvested from the internet in early 1999, from a research center in Scandinavia. This data is rendered to analog to protect the original data from being reverse engineered or reconstructed. We created a Unix software agent that sat along a high bandwidth backbone pipe, essentially eavesdropping, gathering data, writing out a soundfile of everything it saw. Ethernet datapackets were consecutively written out to a file with no timestamp. Later the file header was hacked to open it in an audio editor." A succession of digital noises and loops manipulated to create a hypnotical and intense work. Really good in the field of digital noise. Recommended."

    It's pretty good.
  • You don't know much about the Chernobyl disaster, do you.

    What actually happened was that the engineers were given orders to turn off all cooling on the reactor for a small period of time to check how quickly the reactor heated up. It turned out that the reactor heated up so quickly that they didn't have time to react and turn the cooling back on. For more info, see this site [chernobyl.co.uk]; Click on Causes Of The Chernobyl Accident.

    Methinks you've seen Red October one too many times.

    -- DigDug, who was within a 100km radius when it happened.

    --

  • This isn't anthing new.

    WildPackets (previously known as the AG Group) NetMeter product has been able to do this (and much much more) for years now. It is nice to see someone taking someone else's idea and getting credit for it. Not.

    http://www.wildpackets.com/products/netmeter

  • Done well, audible alerts for critical information is very useful. The US Military has a system lovingly referred to as "Bitchin' Betty", and other militaries (notably Russian) have similar systems. Besides simple audibles (the "tone" of missile lock-on most of us learned from Top Gun), the military has found that a verbal warning system helps in emergency situations. For example, the Betty system calmly reports "altitude...altitude" when you fly below a certain altitude. My guess is that this is especially useful when dealing with groggy pilots just coming out of G-LOC. You wake up, hear someone saying "altitude...altitude..." and you pull up before your eyes and frontal lobes start working again.

    The following is funny, but I am not making this up. The military had some think tanks working on the Betty system, and determined that (predominantly male) pilots react quickest to a female voice. Not a sultry female voice, just a female voice. Thus, it's not "Bitchin' Billy". It also happens that they determined that, the stronger the language, the faster the response.

    They chose not to use that last bit of information in the Betty system. This was mostly because said think tankers didn't want to explain to Congress why they were spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to have the plane shout "Pull up, you $(&*@#!"

  • though that would really help with tech support, you could literally diagnose what the problem was over the phone "sir, just hold your phone up to the computer, i need to have a consultation with it"
    --------------------------------------------- ------------------

  • Backup peep site (Score:5)

    by mcarbone ( 78119 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:48AM (#568897) Homepage
    Well, seeing that the site is slashdotted, you can find it here for now:

    http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/peep/download.html [tufts.edu]

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