Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Sculpture to Reflect Campus Wireless Traffic

Posted by Zonk on Sat Apr 15, 2006 06:23 PM
from the six-kinds-of-cool dept.
Wireless Networking Toys Hardware
prostoalex writes "Ball State University, the top unwired school in the nation according to Intel survey, is set to unveil a sculpture that will reflect the wireless traffic on the campus network. From the article: 'Beginning Tuesday night at 8 p.m., as people log onto the Internet via Ball State's network, their online activity will appear as sound, color, patterns and images projected onto giant screens set up around the base of Shafer Tower, located in the middle of campus on McKinley Avenue.'"
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Slashback: OpenSSH, Falwell, OpenDRM 302 comments
Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including the Supreme Court declines Falwell's appeal, GP2X now shipping in the US, a new version of Systrace released, Lessig and Stallman look back at Sun's OpenDRM, NASA jumps on the anti-matter propulsion bandwagon, GoDaddy donates $10,000 to OpenSSH, Ellison explains why he would NOT acquire Novell or Red Hat, and pictures of the Ball State wireless 'sculpture' -- Read on for details.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Sculpture to Reflect Campus Wireless Traffic 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
  • I've never thought of a set of projection screens as a sculpture before..but I guess they haven't created an amorphous blob that's supersensitive to wireless transmissions yet :( One day!
  • Damn that's a cool idea, wish they'd made it open source though :(

  • I fail to see... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gobelet (892738) on Saturday April 15 2006, @09:15PM (#15136178)
    ...how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture. Still it'd be nice to see it going all noisy and red on the next worm attack.
    • I for one have no desire to see it when the goatse.cx virus hits.

    • Re:I fail to see... (Score:4, Informative)

      by robson (60067) on Saturday April 15 2006, @10:04PM (#15136473) Homepage
      I fail to see... how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture.

      This project could probably more accurately be filed under "installation", but it's not uncommon for sculpture to be a catch-all for anything that's not painting, video, photography, or craft work.

      You can find some good contemporary installation coverage here [we-make-mo...ot-art.com].
    • "...how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture."

      Depends on what the display looks like, I suppose. I mean if it's just a big screen with imagery, well then yeah I see your point. But if the screen is mounted on a sculpture then.. well you've got a sculpture.

  • Toldja! (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheTrueELf (557812) <thetrueelf@[ ]mail.com ['hot' in gap]> on Saturday April 15 2006, @09:18PM (#15136206) Homepage

    FTFA:

    "It should make everyone's surroundings more interesting because that's the purpose of public art," he said. "To exist and engage the people who are passing by."

    See, officer, I told you she's not a hooker. She's a Performance Artist!

    -ELf
    • "To exist and engage the people who are passing by."

      "But officer, we're engaged."

      "Yeah, well, you better disengage, because you're under arrest."

      KFG
  • I go to Ball State and this is the first I've heard of it.

    I'll see if I can borrow my folk's digital camera and take pictures.
  • A former "Teachers College" (Now more business and Medicine these days) Is showing that a decision made in the early 80's to make a computer available to every student is paying off big time. Kudo's to the Cards!!

    Now if you could just convince the alumni to fund a football stadium *grin*
  • If the NSA can get usable info from blinking LEDs [com.com], what are the security risks of this scultpure? Nearly everyone knows that radio communications can be freely spied upon, we've all seen scanners that let you listen in to police band radio, but other methods of intercepting communications rarely come to the mind of Joe Average. TEMPEST and NONSTOP [wikipedia.org] attacks have been well-researched for decades, but the closest they've gotten to general public knowledge is Neal Stephenson's use of the concept in Cryptonomicon [amazon.com] .
    • Anyone who considers unencrypted traffic passing over the internet as 'private' is naive. If the RIAA can look at your downloading habits, then there is little reason to expect the CIA, FBI, or your neighbor Alice isn't also looking at them. If people are worried about privacy then maybe this will help them realize they are not doing things in secret. There are things you can do to mitigate this, like using encrypted chats or proxy servers, so if it is really important there are things you can do to avoi
    • Um, yeah. And mechanical turnstyles are a privacy risk as well...
    • If you set it up so that LEDs are on in 10ms bursts, then there should be no real problem with sucking data out of them. If you leave them directly connected to the data flow, then yeah --- you're asking for trouble..

      As for the comment about "who considers unencrypted traffic public", it's one thing to whisper 'cute' things to your girlfriend at a public phone. It's another to have it broadcast over the PA system. Although both are 'public', there's a difference in the nature of the beast.

      It's silly t

  • Wow... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bepe86 (945139)
    If they make it so that it shows what exactly people are downloading, they can probably relabel it as a XXX cinema...

  • Shows Images, eh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by whitehatlurker (867714) on Saturday April 15 2006, @09:19PM (#15136221) Journal
    I hope that they're not sampling images from the wireless data streams, though it might be interesting to watch the Pr0n on their "sculpture".
    • Does anybody else remember a little Mac utility that came out of one of the hacking conventions, probably about 6 or 7 years ago (not that long after Apple brought out the first Air Port Base Stations -- so maybe more than that) that would grab and display JPEG and GIF images that were being transmitted over an unencrypted WLAN?

      I think I recall reading about it in Mac World or MacUser, although it was a pretty quick-and-dirty app, it won some sort of award at whatever conference it was presented at. I've ne

  • packetbomb (Score:4, Interesting)

    by apostrophesemicolon (816454) on Saturday April 15 2006, @09:19PM (#15136223)
    how does a port scan or packet flood show on the sculpture?
  • It would be interesting if they made it a wall of sheep (like at Defcon), but I imagine the backlash from said sheep (administration, professors, etc) would be significant.
    • For those not in the loop, the Wall of Sheep at DefCon (a hackers convention) is a projection showing all the unencrypted logins (username and password) going over their network during the convention.
  • Wow. What a stupid article. Art 'met the digital age' a REALLY long time ago.

    Wireless technology, often known as WiFi, allows users to access the Internet with a wireless card -- often built into the computer -- that eliminates the need for cables or wires to connect online.

    Almost Ric Romero quality there.
  • their online activity will appear as sound, color, patterns and images projected onto giant screens
    They actually mean images of beautiful naked women and bank account balances ;-)).
  • Taking goatse to whole new level!
  • Welcome to Crystal Corp. Starting from what once started on giant screens in Ball State University, we have made our technology assume the form of 3-dimensional Crystal balls, where you can gaze into to see sights you would never see otherwise. Some of our latest Crystal Balls: The Mind Ball: Tiny transmitters carried around by people in your office/university detect and transmit the most dominant thoughts they are having. See this collectively on our Mind Ball! The World Ball: Events in the world, tra
  • Now you just need a really good micrphone and a camera array along with some software to analyze the sound and images and revert that data back into packet data (or what ever they are representing) and you have a network sniffer.
    • Well I guess that wouldn't work so well if the designers run the data they capture against some randomizer. It wouldn't be 1:1 representation of the data but who cares, this is all eye candy anyway. I guess I kind of defeated my own idea.
  • It sounds like this will be best viewed at night, and if people are going to be bringing lots of laptops out to play, I think the theifs might be out as well...

    On the other hand, will we see spikes in the images when a device is forcibly removed from its owner?

  • ... what would streaming pr0n look like?
  • I don't know about anyone else, but this is just cool. How long before we can have something like this attached to our own at home networks?
  • Sorry, I just had to take a chisel at this one.
  • Is this supposed to be modern art? It just looks like naked chicks to me.
  • I guess we wont be seeing a cure for cancer out of this campus anytime soon.

    2 questions though:

    1) what does this have to do with wireless network trafic? Are they implying that this increasing traffic? Or are they simply boasting about their use of wireless networking? The former would be an interesting claim (but doubtful), the latter certainly isn't interesting.

    2) what is preventing the "artist" from just randomly displaying colors and such? Where's the artistic and technical oversight? This could be
  • I can see it now...

    The United States Supreme Court today refused to hear a case brought by students of Ball State University against the National Security Agency for recording their network activity on the university's active art installation depicting the activity of the network. The refusal leaves in place a lower court ruling that the National Security Agency has the right to record and decode network traffic that is displayed in public locations, no matter how the information is encoded.
  • I was recently involved in a similar installation at the Slade Centre for Electronic Media [scemfa.org] in London. The technical side was pretty simple: kismet [kismetwireless.net] to intercept packets, tcpdump to parse the output and a bit of Perl to trigger FluidSynth [fluidsynth.org] sounds based on the source, destination and packet type. We also detected Bluetooth devices using a USB dongle and GSM activity using a wideband AM receiver designed for paranoid hippies [emfields.org].

    The hardest part was choosing the right sounds to represent each type of packet. It's

    • You've clearly never interacted with our University bureaucracy...
    • This is the "publish or perish" project for art professor John Fillwalk and the university considers it a part of providing better education.

      It all comes from teaching art instead of "useful" things.

      KFG

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.