Sound of WiFi

Tutkain

Hi,

I did some bad things and sniffed the packets on a public wlan, and then transformed them into (a kind of) music.

Sound of Wifi @ youtube

The video was made by Processing, which visualized and soundalized the packet stream captured by Wireshark. As a realtime experience it was really hypnotic to actually hear the sound of the network you interact with.

Cheers, Vesa

blyk

I have asked the creater of sound of wifi and he replied me with this comments Video . He had not actually given me any details but provieded me a hint

Hi blykgod. I used Wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org/) for monitoring the network traffic (packet protocol) and then streamed its dumpfile in realtime to Processing. The library Carnivore (http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/) does the same thing from within Processing, but I was not able to get it to work on OS X. I will not share the code nor give more detailed instructions, since they might encourage one to do illegal things.

KevinWorkman

Pretty cool. I'd be interested in seeing bigger visualizations like this.

cgiles

Pretty work

blyk

Here is the link of other similar project

Tutkain

Thanks for the compliments, and thanks blyk for the link to the other project!

Visualizing structured network traffic is a bit of an unexplored field as of yet, probably because it is in most countries illegal to actually sniff the content of foreign wifi packets. You can visualize the frequency of the raw broadcasted 802.11 packets and be safe, but if you want some more structure for visualizations (e.g. protocol type or other more specific info from inside the network), you might be pursuing something illegal. So please don't do it if you don't know any better.

Of course, your own computer and traffic you are free to monitor anyway you want.

Cheers, Vesa