Links for Me: Carnivore/Fuel and Guernica Clients

CarnivorePE

Carnivore is a visually based packet-sniffer. It takes all the information that your computer sends and receives and interprets it into animations or just plain data. It seems to be just limited to what your computer is connecting to - other computers, servers, and modems, which I assume is an more general way of saying "the internet." It animates every connection with a line and a pulse in graphics to show you when the connection is occurring.

Visually, the program is quite interesting. I like the idea of showing connections when they happen, and where they go, and I think it would make for a great capstone if we could incorporate something like that into our project. Unfortunately, all that data that would tell us when connections are occurring and where is just not available, especially for the whole internet. The amount of server permissions and company permissions we'd have to get would be beyond comprehension. But, the pulsing graphics and lines forming is still a good concept to use in our project, it just would not have the meaning that it would in Carnivore.

However, if we wanted to scale our project down to fit servers and connections just within the University, then it might be possible to get data like that, and perhaps build a new sort of interface for network diagnostics. However, that would be severely deviating from our original idea, and it's a bit late in the semester to do that.

Since the next couple of links are just an add-ons to Carnivore, I'll include them in this post.

Fuel

This is the Carnivore concept, except with stars that grow and collapse instead of pulsing circles. The only way I could think of this animation concept applying to our project would be if we had the user go to a solar system, and the solar system would be constantly updating - that is, the program would be constantly scanning the web pages in the domain, looking for the minute changes and displaying them accordingly.

If we would want something like that to work, however, we'd have to put the burden of the webpage scanning on the user side rather than the server, which I don't think would be a very popular idea.

Guernica

Another client which views your traffic and connections as a sort of post-apocalyptic world where planes fly around crazily and buildings are formed and destroyed. It might be fun to consider doing the art style of this project into a particular genre, like cyberpunk or steampunk... definitely something to consider.