Internet In The Box
| Arlen Thurber + + Internet In The Box Figure 1  Figure 2  "Internet In The Box" (IITB) I placed the entire Internet and it’s contents into a 3D environment resembling space, in hopes of creating an electronic universe. I had originally envisioned a spherical representation but a box just seemed so much more practical and the project ended up forming its self into its present form as illustrated in the picture. The evolution this project went through was quite radical. It began as a simple idea to visualize the individuality of each IP address. So my first version was a simple jagged line made up of 4 points connected together. The four points reference the four values of the IP address and connect together to make a line. As seen in Figure 2 each one of the jagged lines represents a unique IP address. The blue lines in Figure 2 represent the IP that received a packet and the red lines represent the IP that sent the packet, and the line between them represents the packets path. You will see the same line shape in the blue and the red columns if that IP address has sent and received packets. The interface represented in Figure 2 was awkward, and as you collected more and more IP address the columns would just get longer and longer, eventually getting so long that they would suffer from clipping and extend beyond the viewable area of the openGL environment. Thus was the reasoning behind an alternate configuration. Figure3  For the next version I had to find a different way to arrange the objects, you can see my progress in Figure 3. I wanted to be able to visualize all the unique IP address at once without them leaving the viewable area. So my idea was to arrange them in an invisible box according to the values of their IP address. The dimensions of the box correspond with the values found in the IP address of every computer that access other computers on a network. This address is then interpreted and the position of that IP address in space is then determined. An IP address consists of four sets of three digit numbers separated by decimal points. For determining the position of an IP address I used the first, second and fourth sets of numbers to determine the X, Y, and Z coordinates within the box. For example an IP address of 168.192.3.10 would then be read as X=168, Y=192, Z=10. The transferring of packets at this point was still direct, meaning you would see a straight line representing the packets path from the sender to the receiver. As a side effect of my coding and totally unintentional, I stumbled upon a way to make the lines representing the packet transfers to fade over time so multiple packets could be seen at once. I did this by creating a FOR loop in the ONDRAW function in python which gets called 40 times a second, it was totally by accident but the results were quite rewarding. This interface quickly began to form it’s self once I had achieve this milestone. I decided to then visualize the "box" which this Internet universe could be contained inside. Figure 4  In figure 1 and figure 4 you can see the end result. In addition to adding the box around the Internet I also created a central axis that the entire thing rotates around. Giving it a sense of motion like a planet orbiting around a star. Every IP collected into the system then orbits this axis, or as I interpreted it as the physical Internet "line". The line is a representation of all of the available ports linearly incremented for incoming and outgoing packets. An IP sends a packet out on port 80 for a normal web request and another IP receives that packet on port 1058. So now instead of a line just connect the two IP address the path of the packet goes from the sending IP to the Internet on a specific port, travels down the internet line to reach the incoming port for the receiving IP and to it’s final destination. The thought of this as being a tool for network activity monitoring then came into play and I added a few little visual clues so that an observer could tell what type of activity was currently going on in the Internet. I developed three status levels to describe the current activity level of the Internet, and I coded them to associate with the commonly understood notion of Green, Yellow and Red representing low, moderate, and high levels of possible dangerous activity. The port being used to send and receive packets then determines the current status. Different applications and activities utilize different ports, and I used this information to set my warning levels. Green activity is normal web surfing and poses no real threat. Yellow activity represents communication ports like instant messaging, teleconferencing, and while they are not necessarily hazardous the communication of thoughts represents a 2-way exchange of information and is a higher risk than that of normal web surfing. And finally the red warning level represents file transfer and file sharing ports. This is obviously one of the more dangerous activities on the net because it allows the altering and deleting of files on other computers and thus it received the highest warning level. Any IP address recorded transmitting on these restricted ports will be entered into an array and stored so they perpetrator could be held accountable for their actions.  The Internet in the box could be elaborated into a high level Internet traffic security monitoring system, but for now I am very proud of it for it’s aesthetic value. If you have any questions about my creation or would like to hire me for building it into the tool it could become please send me an email at agthurber@yahoo.com. Arlen Thurber [video][site][curatorial] |
