Now that a certain Three Letter Agency has changed the name of their principle spyware from Carnivore to the much spookier-sounding DCS1000, some open-source art-haxors have appropriated the name and made whacky cyber-art out of it. The new Carnivore starts with a packet-sniffer that captures all the traffic on a target network and forwards it to an IRC channel — so far, it's your basic black-hat hacker crap. Where it gets cool, though, is in the visualizers: WinAmp-style graphics engines that make kaliedoscopic fractals out of hijacked network traffic. The thing that gets me is how useful this would be in detecting subtle anomalies in network traffic that might detect a slow-and-sneaky hack-attack, drilling straight through the optic nerve into the subconsious mind.
(Thanks, John!)
