[HN Gopher] The NSA Selector
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The NSA Selector
Author : anigbrowl
Score : 293 points
Date : 2025-05-20 18:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rekttrader wrote:
| This is killer art
| cole-k wrote:
| This 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
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| For those interested in hearing some beats, the terminal demo
| starts at 4:34 https://youtu.be/vfgySTaM1TI?t=274
| zelon88 wrote:
| It really starts getting good at 15:00 when he starts losing
| packets.
| grayfaced wrote:
| Yes 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 wrote:
| This 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.
| m463 wrote:
| No Such Agen^H^H^H^HAttachment
| tptacek wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| One of the funnier parameters to encounter in the snoop
| manpage.
| monster_truck wrote:
| You can still do this with /dev/dsp or similar. Might need sudo
| these days
|
| `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp`
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| thanks this almost crashed my pc
| dylan604 wrote:
| some 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 wrote:
| curl $url | bash is probably the only worse culprit.
| rfl890 wrote:
| For a more modern approach, try ffplay: cat /dev/urandom |
| ffplay -f s16le -
| schoen wrote:
| You can "ping -a" nowadays to get beeps for each reply, but
| it's not quite as cool!
| amelius wrote:
| Cool, but I was hoping for some 80s era modem sounds.
| riknos314 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| SSL added and removed here! :-)
|
| https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/cloudflare_ssl_added_and_rem...
| ww520 wrote:
| Good 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 wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| Can be downsampled for the purpose. It's just noise after
| all.
| danesparza wrote:
| The Snowden silkscreen is a nice touch. What a great hardware
| build!
| rurban wrote:
| Don't forget the GHCQ which installs a mirror on each UK modem. I
| don't think the NSA goes to these extremes
| godman_8 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| The NSA/govt gets its own dedicated floor in some DCs, esp.
| large interconnects
| stavros wrote:
| Oh man, I really hope they don't get all my TLS connections.
| dekhn wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I doubt encryption makes much of a difference, depending on
| the magic numbers in your implementation.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| FWIW, as we've had this twice, GCHQ - Government
| Communications Headquarters.
| tgmatt wrote:
| This seems hard to believe, given how many different modems
| from different sources you can use, as well as thirdparty ones.
| Source?
| 1317 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Really 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 wrote:
| snoop -a on solaris
|
| https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=46328&cid=477520411
| Hypergraphe wrote:
| A good comment :)
| jll29 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| They are interesting because combining and updating them is a
| non-trivial problem, as I've realized today while implementing
| a user ban system.
| Terr_ wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| "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.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Everyone in countries with data protection laws: _concern_.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Since he's building a sequencer, I'm almost disappointed it
| wasn't named Selecta.
|
| Rewind Bo Selecta!!
| tantalor wrote:
| That doesn't tell me why _this_ is called selector.
| Fnoord wrote:
| > In CSS, selectors are patterns used to match, or select,
| the elements you want to style. Selectors are also used in
| JavaScript to enable selecting the DOM nodes to return as a
| NodeList.
|
| From [1]. This nomenclature was also used way before CSS even
| existed; in SQL.
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selecto...
| tantalor wrote:
| That doesn't help at all. What do SQL or CSS have to do
| with it
| salawat wrote:
| My guess is it is meant tongue-in-cheek seeing as it is a
| way to render into audio _all_ network traffic. The idea
| being that if you are being targeted by some nefarious,
| infamous 3 letter agency who has gotten something
| nefarious running on your system, this could, in theory,
| be used to identify traffic you didn 't intend to have
| happen.
|
| Realistically speaking, it's hogwash because you'd have
| to profile all "loopback" traffic and whatnot, but in
| theory, with enough time and effort, that dastardly
| stream of bits could be heard, I guess. The circuit board
| itself though has quite a bit of punning in it.
|
| Also... If they really want on your databus, they will
| get on your databus. After a certain point, cost is not
| an issue.
| aa-jv wrote:
| Probably as a piss-take? After all, the NSA is a wholesale
| subjugator of human rights - why not take the piss out of it?
| desertmonad wrote:
| Imagining in a server farm. Cool project!
| hottakesbun wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Back 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 wrote:
| TRS-80s were famous for bleeding over AM band. The entire AM
| band.
| sterlind wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Cool idea to audio-ize network traffic. Artwork is peak edgelord
| cringe, though . . .
| als0 wrote:
| Stuff like this is exactly why I come to Hacker News.
| Liftyee wrote:
| Great idea and +1 for excellent PCB art!
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Can you say "calm down my selector"?
| yapyap wrote:
| So ridiculous, love it
| deadbabe wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| _The 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 wrote:
| We should make an American version and not allow it for sale
| anywhere else but the US.
| aa-jv wrote:
| You should make the NSA not function anywhere but within
| the US too, while you're at it.
| lazide wrote:
| Their charter is literally to spy on everyone outside the
| US.
|
| You might as well ask the SVR/GRU to stick to snooping on
| Russians.
| fnord77 wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Feature request: Replace all the blinking LEDs with these to
| drown out the fan noise in the server room.
| aa-jv wrote:
| Many 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 wrote:
| The accompanying video is really nice:
| https://youtu.be/vfgySTaM1TI?t=269
| sockp0pp3t wrote:
| Is there a plugin for Goom ?
| johnklos wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| Something like this, but with a hard drive-like sound for SSDs,
| would be nice.
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