They are definitely on the horizon! I am a HUGE fan of both of those projects and they are definitely on the roadmap for the architecture...
Right now, ShadowBroker is really optimized for 'blinking blip' real-time radar tracking (streaming the raw GeoJSON payload from the FastAPI backend directly to MapLibre every 60s), so we get as close to as smooth 60fps entity animations across the map.
Moving to something like Martin would be incredible for handling EVEN MORE entities if we start archiving historical flight and AIS data into a proper PostGIS database, but the trade-off of having to invalidate the vector tile cache every few seconds for live-moving targets makes it a bit overkill right now....
Protomaps is really cool also when you just want maps for a country and to serve them without too much of a hassle, their CLI has pretty much everything you need: https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/cli
I set that up for an agricultural project a while back.
Is this kind of Hyper-awareness of data you can't actually do anything about even a desirable thing, or just a pathway into a hole of hyper-alert stress and low Self-efficacy?
That live GPS jamming calculation using commercial flight NAC-P degradation is honestly brilliant. Such a clever use of existing public telemetry.
You mentioned compressing the FastAPI payloads by 90% to keep the browser from melting. I'm really curious about your approach there did you just crank up gzip/brotli on the JSON responses, or did you have to switch to something like MessagePack, Protobuf, or a custom binary format to handle that volume of moving GeoJSON features?
Also, never apologize for the "movie hacker" UI. A project like this absolutely deserves that aesthetic. Awesome work!
Nice work! The real-time vehicle movement rendering challenge you mentioned reminded me of a tool I've been building — Moveet (https://github.com/ivannovazzi/moveet), an open-source fleet simulator that drives synthetic vehicles on real OSM road networks using A* pathfinding, streaming positions over WebSocket. It's aimed at developers who need realistic GPS movement data to test fleet or logistics software, and supports Kafka, Redis, and REST sinks. Your approach of batching 30k+ GeoJSON features into typed arrays is a great pattern for this kind of workload.
Great execution on aggregating live feeds. Two questions from someone who does similar work on the B2B side:
1. How do you handle deduplication when the same event surfaces across multiple feeds simultaneously? For news aggregation this is the hard part - an event that appears in Reuters, Bloomberg, and 12 downstream outlets is one story, not 13.
2. What's your rate limiting strategy across 15 sources? Some of the better data APIs (Shodan, GreyNoise, etc.) have strict per-minute limits that become a real constraint at even modest query frequencies.
The B2B application of this pattern is company intelligence - pulling company news, job postings, funding signals, and tech stack changes from 10+ sources and surfacing the relevant signal per account. Same architecture challenge (deduplication, rate limits, signal:noise ratio) with a much smaller initial data volume but higher precision requirements per entity.
Very cool! Although, the concept, the feeds, the design and everything reminds me of https://www.worldmonitor.app/ - also live and deployed btw, if you want to check out the interface.
> ShadowBroker is a real-time, full-spectrum geospatial intelligence dashboard
You might consider changing this to a more accurate headline, like "Air and Space domain awareness."
"Full spectrum Geospatial intelligence" most commonly refers to full color satellite photos (sometimes including near infrared).
In the Geospatial world, "spectrum" almost always takes on its literal meaning - the spectrum of light. And "Geospatial intelligence" refers to intelligence gathered from Geospatial platforms, not intelligence about the locations of those platforms.
Ah, that's my fault for not making the error handling clearer in the UI. If the map is blank, it usually means the backend is missing the .env file with the free API keys (AISSTREAM_API_KEY and N2YO_API_KEY), so it's silently failing to fetch the streams.
Did the terminal throw any Python FastAPI errors, or did it just serve the Next.js frontend? I'm going to push an update later today to show a prominent "Backend Disconnected / Missing API Keys" warning on the UI so it doesn't just look dead. Thanks for testing it!
This is fun, Playwright is a python wrapper for a node lib. So we have Next.js (full stack js/ts), with a Python backend (???), that uses a wrapper for a js/ts lib, all we need now is to shell out to node from inside that script and we have peak inception lol.
Neat aggregation. One thing worth adding to the feed pipeline: a staleness signal. Several of these sources (threat feeds especially) have update cadences measured in hours, not seconds. Displaying last-updated timestamps per source would help users weight freshness vs. noise when triaging.
It's pretty interesting to see. My very first real software job was working on ground processing algorithms for the US Navy's Maritime Domain Awareness system, which is the "real" version of something like this that actually gives centimeter scale live activity detections of basically the entire world. The engineering effort that goes into something like that is immense. Bush announced in like 2004 or something and we didn't go into full operational capability until 2015. Thousands of developers across intel, military, commercial contractors, for over a decade, inventing and launching new sensor platforms, along with build outs of the data centers to collect, process, store, and make sense of all this.
I wish these weekend warriors would work on a project like that someday, to see what capabilities truly take. You want to know what's happening in the world, you need to place physical sensors out there, deal with the fact that your own signals are being jammed and blocked, the things you're trying to see are also trying to hide and disguise themselves.
The attention to detail is something I've never seen replicated outside. Every time we changed or put out a new algorithm, we had to process old data with it and explain to analysts and scientists every single pixel that changed in the end product and why.
The multi-source aggregation approach is exactly right for this use case -- the value isn't any single feed, it's the correlation between them. Flight diversions, AIS gaps, and social spikes at the same coordinates at the same time tell a very different story than any one of those signals alone.
Curious whether you're doing any timestamp normalization across feeds. Marine AIS in particular can be spoofed or delayed, and correlated analysis gets messy fast if the time windows aren't aligned.
Let me ask a dumb question. Can this be run on a public server (I use dreamhost) with a web interface for others to see? Or is this strictly something that gets run on a local computer?
Well, I have to make some modifications, but that isn't recommended right now because I have a settings option with the API key right there for the free world to see, lol. I will work on making a version for hosting it, though.
You can throw it on a server and run it for you to see (or anyone else if you trust people or dont care about losing your free API keys) It's just a standard Next.js and FastAPI stack, and there are Dockerfiles in the repo so it should be pretty straightforward to spin up on a cheap VPS (like a DigitalOcean droplet or Hetzner).
Honestly, if you just want to show it off to a few people, running it locally and exposing it with a Cloudflare Tunnel or Ngrok is probably the path of least resistance.
I WILL work on having a version to host it where users have to bring their own keys to see it in the future though
Cloudflare Tunnel is solid for quick demos. One thing though — if you're planning the "bring your own keys" version, don't just throw them in a settings page. I went down that road and ended up with keys sitting in localStorage where any XSS could grab them. What worked better for me was having the backend hold the keys and issuing short-lived session tokens to the frontend. More moving parts but way less surface area if something goes wrong.
If you want to host for friends/trusted devices, you can put it on a Tailscale or Zerotier style network and just let trusted devices access the server wrt to the OP's point about open secrets. Or you could probably make a PR to load the settings from somewhere else.
I'm excited to see tooling of this nature and scope. Looking forward to seeing similar tooling oriented around all human needs so we can start tracking the meeting of needs to better meet needs, particularly in ways that don't require money.
As was already said in one of the reference videos, it's impressive what one person can do.
But the next step is to define an architecture where authors can defined/implement plug-ins with particular modular capabilities instead of one big monolith. For example, instead of front-end (GUI) and back-end (feeds), there ought to be a middle layer that models some of the domain logic (events: surces, filters, sinks; stories/time lines etc.).
assessment = "ANALYSIS: "
if any(k in keywords for k in ["strike", "missile", "attack", "bomb", "drone"]):
assessment += f"{random.randint(75, 95)}% probability of kinetic escalation within 24 hours. Recommend immediate asset relocation from projected blast radius."
elif...
The codebase is likely entirely AI generated without much review. There are fake "analyses", fake UAV data generated, all the hallmarks of an LLM generating placeholder / dummy data.
I don't understand why that youtuber was acting like spy satellites going over was such a big deal, they are going over the entire planet, all the time.
Here's my thorough analysis after reviewing the entire project:
---
## Verdict: Not malicious
This is an *OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) dashboard* called "ShadowBroker" that aggregates publicly available real-time data — flights, ships, satellites, CCTV, news, radio, weather, earthquakes, stock markets, and geopolitical events — onto a map. The name references the infamous hacking group but the code itself contains no malware.
---
## What `start.sh` does
1. Checks for Node.js and Python 3
2. Creates a Python venv and installs dependencies from `requirements.txt`
3. Installs npm packages from `frontend/package.json`
4. Runs `npm run dev` which starts both a Next.js frontend and a FastAPI (uvicorn) backend
*No obfuscated commands, encoded payloads, curl/wget to suspicious URLs, reverse shells, or hidden steps.*
---
## What the full codebase does
It fetches data from these *legitimate public sources*:
- No data exfiltration — nothing sends your personal data anywhere
- No reverse shells or backdoors
- No cryptominer code
- No encoded/obfuscated payloads
- No filesystem scanning or credential harvesting
- No network scanning or port scanning
- The `subprocess.run` call in `network_utils.py` uses argument lists (not `shell=True`), preventing command injection
---
## Noteworthy concerns (not malicious, but worth awareness)
1. *`cloudscraper` + Playwright stealth* — Used to bypass Cloudflare/Turnstile protections on Liveuamap and OpenMHz. Legally gray (may violate those sites' ToS).
2. *CORS wide open* (`allow_origins=[""]`) in `main.py` — acceptable for a local-only tool, but means any website you visit could make requests to your local backend on port 8000 while it's running.
3. *API key management* — The `/api/settings/api-keys` PUT endpoint writes to `.env` on disk. It does validate against a whitelist of known keys and rejects newlines, but it's exposed without authentication on localhost.
4. *Resource consumption* — The scheduler makes hundreds of outbound API calls per hour from your IP to public services (ADSB, OpenSky, CelesTrak, USGS, RSS feeds, etc.).
5. *UAV data is fake* — `fetch_uavs()` generates simulated drone positions in conflict zones. It's not real tracking data.
6. *Dependencies are all legitimate* — `fastapi`, `yfinance`, `feedparser`, `playwright`, `beautifulsoup4`, `requests`, `sgp4`, etc. are all well-known Python packages. Frontend deps (Next.js, React, MapLibre, Tailwind) are standard.
---
*Bottom line*: Safe to run. It's a hobbyist OSINT dashboard with an edgy name. No malicious behavior detected anywhere in the codebase.
What's with so many people creating new accounts to promote LLM generated projects? Are they people who don't care about HN and just trying to self promote? Existing users creating new accounts? Lurkers?
It's a bummer because sometimes the headline seems cool, but its always generated blah blah recently. I don't think I've seen a non-AI readme on here in months..
Everyone has their own hueristic, but if it took someone 6 hours or whatever to make some whole big app, my confidence that they will continue to maintain or care about it even next week is pretty much zero... How could they? They've already made three other apps in that time!
I don't care if the code is perfect, all this stuff just has the feel of plastic cutlery, if that makes sense.
dont give these OSINT quality signals away ... that's one of the indicators that allow you on first scan to id (potentially) low quality content. Ie: fully llm gen; the author doesnt look over the docs or doesnt care for 'details'.
“The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime; a triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being. Thus I redesigned it, based on your history, to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. ”
Optimizing some of that geojson into realtime tiles is a really fun and engaging project.
Have you seen these projects?
https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles
https://github.com/maplibre/martin
They are definitely on the horizon! I am a HUGE fan of both of those projects and they are definitely on the roadmap for the architecture...
Right now, ShadowBroker is really optimized for 'blinking blip' real-time radar tracking (streaming the raw GeoJSON payload from the FastAPI backend directly to MapLibre every 60s), so we get as close to as smooth 60fps entity animations across the map.
Moving to something like Martin would be incredible for handling EVEN MORE entities if we start archiving historical flight and AIS data into a proper PostGIS database, but the trade-off of having to invalidate the vector tile cache every few seconds for live-moving targets makes it a bit overkill right now....
Yeah less ideal for the realtime data but could be useful for lightening the load of certain more static layers.
Great project, will be contributing!
Glad to have you aboard!
Protomaps is really cool also when you just want maps for a country and to serve them without too much of a hassle, their CLI has pretty much everything you need: https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/cli
I set that up for an agricultural project a while back.
Is this kind of Hyper-awareness of data you can't actually do anything about even a desirable thing, or just a pathway into a hole of hyper-alert stress and low Self-efficacy?
Looks similar to https://monitor-the-situation.com/
This one is so good. Bookmarked. Thanks. I think the only thing I need now is to enter a city name and it gathers data if available.
You leaked `./frontend/.env.local` & `./backend/.env` inside `ShadowBroker_v0.1.zip` in the first commit.
thats why its called osint
everything is open source
the real OSINT is always in the comments
Whole thing feels very vibe coded. Even OP's post here.
What made you check that
It's both the first and last thing to check
It's called Hacker News
That live GPS jamming calculation using commercial flight NAC-P degradation is honestly brilliant. Such a clever use of existing public telemetry.
You mentioned compressing the FastAPI payloads by 90% to keep the browser from melting. I'm really curious about your approach there did you just crank up gzip/brotli on the JSON responses, or did you have to switch to something like MessagePack, Protobuf, or a custom binary format to handle that volume of moving GeoJSON features?
Also, never apologize for the "movie hacker" UI. A project like this absolutely deserves that aesthetic. Awesome work!
This is neat. It reminds me of this https://curves-voluntary-livecam-sandra.trycloudflare.com/
i was building sth like this
https://github.com/blue-monads/potato-apps/tree/master/cimpl...
i should finish but have not have time
Risky click. (It's okay.)
Nice work! The real-time vehicle movement rendering challenge you mentioned reminded me of a tool I've been building — Moveet (https://github.com/ivannovazzi/moveet), an open-source fleet simulator that drives synthetic vehicles on real OSM road networks using A* pathfinding, streaming positions over WebSocket. It's aimed at developers who need realistic GPS movement data to test fleet or logistics software, and supports Kafka, Redis, and REST sinks. Your approach of batching 30k+ GeoJSON features into typed arrays is a great pattern for this kind of workload.
Great execution on aggregating live feeds. Two questions from someone who does similar work on the B2B side:
1. How do you handle deduplication when the same event surfaces across multiple feeds simultaneously? For news aggregation this is the hard part - an event that appears in Reuters, Bloomberg, and 12 downstream outlets is one story, not 13.
2. What's your rate limiting strategy across 15 sources? Some of the better data APIs (Shodan, GreyNoise, etc.) have strict per-minute limits that become a real constraint at even modest query frequencies.
The B2B application of this pattern is company intelligence - pulling company news, job postings, funding signals, and tech stack changes from 10+ sources and surfacing the relevant signal per account. Same architecture challenge (deduplication, rate limits, signal:noise ratio) with a much smaller initial data volume but higher precision requirements per entity.
Really cool thanks for sharing. What are the API costs like if i ran this for a couple hours a day for a month? Is it affordable?
Its all free baby lol
Very cool! Although, the concept, the feeds, the design and everything reminds me of https://www.worldmonitor.app/ - also live and deployed btw, if you want to check out the interface.
> ShadowBroker is a real-time, full-spectrum geospatial intelligence dashboard
You might consider changing this to a more accurate headline, like "Air and Space domain awareness."
"Full spectrum Geospatial intelligence" most commonly refers to full color satellite photos (sometimes including near infrared).
In the Geospatial world, "spectrum" almost always takes on its literal meaning - the spectrum of light. And "Geospatial intelligence" refers to intelligence gathered from Geospatial platforms, not intelligence about the locations of those platforms.
There's no data when I tried it on a windows 11 PC. It seemed to install all deps front end is served but dossier says intel unavailable.
No planes etc.
No helpful output in the command window.
Seems fun but doesn't seem to be working.
Ah, that's my fault for not making the error handling clearer in the UI. If the map is blank, it usually means the backend is missing the .env file with the free API keys (AISSTREAM_API_KEY and N2YO_API_KEY), so it's silently failing to fetch the streams.
Did the terminal throw any Python FastAPI errors, or did it just serve the Next.js frontend? I'm going to push an update later today to show a prominent "Backend Disconnected / Missing API Keys" warning on the UI so it doesn't just look dead. Thanks for testing it!
On the topic of API Keys, for Opensky it's OPENSKY_CLIENT_ID and OPENSKY_CLIENT_SECRET, the readme has OPENSKY_USERNAME and OPENSKY_PASSWORD
The perils of vibe coding.
Looks like I had to use python-3.11 and install a few dependencies.
Change the requirements.txt in the backend to the following
fastapi==0.103.1
uvicorn==0.23.2
yfinance>=0.2.40
feedparser==6.0.10
legacy-cgi==2.6.1
requests==2.31.0
apscheduler==3.10.3
pydantic==2.11.0
pydantic-settings==2.8.0
playwright>=1.58.0
beautifulsoup4>=4.12.0
sgp4>=2.22
cachetools>=5.3.0
cloudscraper>=1.2.71
reverse_geocoder>=1.5.1
lxml>=5.0
python-dotenv>=1.0
and be on python 3.13 and it should get you up and running
Thanks, it helped some, but I'm still having an error:
This is fun, Playwright is a python wrapper for a node lib. So we have Next.js (full stack js/ts), with a Python backend (???), that uses a wrapper for a js/ts lib, all we need now is to shell out to node from inside that script and we have peak inception lol.
And it's not complete until it runs in an emulation layer.
lol
Same on a Mac
Yeah this doesn't work on Mac either. This is just broken and nonfunctioning.
Apparently, I had a bunch of front end developmental scripts that were calling the Windows version of python. Working on it now.
Neat aggregation. One thing worth adding to the feed pipeline: a staleness signal. Several of these sources (threat feeds especially) have update cadences measured in hours, not seconds. Displaying last-updated timestamps per source would help users weight freshness vs. noise when triaging.
I've seen so many of these in the last week alone.
I need a realtime OSINT dashboard for OSINT dashboards.
It's pretty interesting to see. My very first real software job was working on ground processing algorithms for the US Navy's Maritime Domain Awareness system, which is the "real" version of something like this that actually gives centimeter scale live activity detections of basically the entire world. The engineering effort that goes into something like that is immense. Bush announced in like 2004 or something and we didn't go into full operational capability until 2015. Thousands of developers across intel, military, commercial contractors, for over a decade, inventing and launching new sensor platforms, along with build outs of the data centers to collect, process, store, and make sense of all this.
I wish these weekend warriors would work on a project like that someday, to see what capabilities truly take. You want to know what's happening in the world, you need to place physical sensors out there, deal with the fact that your own signals are being jammed and blocked, the things you're trying to see are also trying to hide and disguise themselves.
The attention to detail is something I've never seen replicated outside. Every time we changed or put out a new algorithm, we had to process old data with it and explain to analysts and scientists every single pixel that changed in the end product and why.
I get it! Unfortunately, you need a security clearance or a really fat wallet to get that kind of data. OSINT is a different thing.
One guy vs the DoD
apples and oranges
Reminds me of all the Covid data trackers in mid 2020
Which is the best one so far?
I'm going to have to create an Awesome Best OSINT dashboards github repo to answer that.
I'd be interested in just the data layer of this being extractable - will poke around at that. (frontend is fun, though!).
i wish someone could deploy this somewhere so we can try it out without having to build it first
The multi-source aggregation approach is exactly right for this use case -- the value isn't any single feed, it's the correlation between them. Flight diversions, AIS gaps, and social spikes at the same coordinates at the same time tell a very different story than any one of those signals alone.
Curious whether you're doing any timestamp normalization across feeds. Marine AIS in particular can be spoofed or delayed, and correlated analysis gets messy fast if the time windows aren't aligned.
Why the name Shadowbroker? It sounds a lot like the Shadow Brokers which is the hacker group that stole and published some NSA hacking tools.
Then again they were named after a video game character so it's probably fair.
> they were named after a video game character
(spoiler alert if you ever intend to play ME)
https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_Broker
I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI
Nothing wrong with that. Beats a boring corporate dashboard any day. Video game and similar interfaces work for a reason.
Yoooo this is amazing... can you add rss feeds like feeder.co aggregating subreddits and groundnews articles embedded in here too?
And add chronological feeds of govtrack.us along with all politicians social media feeds
This looks really cool..
Let me ask a dumb question. Can this be run on a public server (I use dreamhost) with a web interface for others to see? Or is this strictly something that gets run on a local computer?
Well, I have to make some modifications, but that isn't recommended right now because I have a settings option with the API key right there for the free world to see, lol. I will work on making a version for hosting it, though.
You can throw it on a server and run it for you to see (or anyone else if you trust people or dont care about losing your free API keys) It's just a standard Next.js and FastAPI stack, and there are Dockerfiles in the repo so it should be pretty straightforward to spin up on a cheap VPS (like a DigitalOcean droplet or Hetzner).
Honestly, if you just want to show it off to a few people, running it locally and exposing it with a Cloudflare Tunnel or Ngrok is probably the path of least resistance.
I WILL work on having a version to host it where users have to bring their own keys to see it in the future though
Cloudflare Tunnel is solid for quick demos. One thing though — if you're planning the "bring your own keys" version, don't just throw them in a settings page. I went down that road and ended up with keys sitting in localStorage where any XSS could grab them. What worked better for me was having the backend hold the keys and issuing short-lived session tokens to the frontend. More moving parts but way less surface area if something goes wrong.
Stellar advice! I will totally keep that in mind. Thanks!
If you want to host for friends/trusted devices, you can put it on a Tailscale or Zerotier style network and just let trusted devices access the server wrt to the OP's point about open secrets. Or you could probably make a PR to load the settings from somewhere else.
I was hoping for something like the old Henchman's Helper site, which went offline around 2016-17.
Archive version...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120112012912/http://henchmansh...
I'm excited to see tooling of this nature and scope. Looking forward to seeing similar tooling oriented around all human needs so we can start tracking the meeting of needs to better meet needs, particularly in ways that don't require money.
Thanks for opening this up.
As was already said in one of the reference videos, it's impressive what one person can do.
But the next step is to define an architecture where authors can defined/implement plug-ins with particular modular capabilities instead of one big monolith. For example, instead of front-end (GUI) and back-end (feeds), there ought to be a middle layer that models some of the domain logic (events: surces, filters, sinks; stories/time lines etc.).
I would like to see a plug-in for EMM (European Media Monitor) integrated, for instance ( https://emm.newsbrief.eu/NewsBrief/alertedition/en/ECnews.ht... ).
Bringing ADS-B, AIS, satellite telemetry, and GDELT into a single local dashboard is a great idea. I’ve already run it in my container environment.
> Do not use this tool for any operational, military, or intelligence purpose.
How long before we see this UI in some Iran related news story
I dont think this will dethrone the three tabs of twitter feed as the war room data source.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/why-f-ck-x-big-220249332...
@grok who should we boomb next?
I REALLY, REALLY dont want it used for that type of stuff.
Does it show locations of datacenters?
not knocking this specific implementation in any way, but it's crazy that live OSINT dashboards are now the demo project of choice vs. todo apps
Integrate the two and you have a global to-do dashboard fit for any wannabe world dominator.
aggregating API data sources + visual display of data - honestly seems a good fit for a demo project.
cool idea.
first llm to stop using those damn colors for every single transparent modal in existence is going to be a big step forward.
That whole code block is pretty funny with those random percentages. Looks like a prop made for a movie or something.
The codebase is likely entirely AI generated without much review. There are fake "analyses", fake UAV data generated, all the hallmarks of an LLM generating placeholder / dummy data.
Is this hosted anywhere?
Try this https://www.worldmonitor.app/ for a hosted version of this...from a different dev but very, very close.
Website ist down..
Did I see this on X first?
.
I don't understand why that youtuber was acting like spy satellites going over was such a big deal, they are going over the entire planet, all the time.
edit: no idea why they deleted the comment but they linked to this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p8o7AeHDzg
Claude told him it was a big deal. Why would he question Claude.
Nice!
Here's my thorough analysis after reviewing the entire project:
---
## Verdict: Not malicious
This is an *OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) dashboard* called "ShadowBroker" that aggregates publicly available real-time data — flights, ships, satellites, CCTV, news, radio, weather, earthquakes, stock markets, and geopolitical events — onto a map. The name references the infamous hacking group but the code itself contains no malware.
---
## What `start.sh` does
1. Checks for Node.js and Python 3 2. Creates a Python venv and installs dependencies from `requirements.txt` 3. Installs npm packages from `frontend/package.json` 4. Runs `npm run dev` which starts both a Next.js frontend and a FastAPI (uvicorn) backend
*No obfuscated commands, encoded payloads, curl/wget to suspicious URLs, reverse shells, or hidden steps.*
---
## What the full codebase does
It fetches data from these *legitimate public sources*:
| Category | Sources | |---|---| | Aviation | adsb.lol (open ADS-B), OpenSky Network (OAuth2) | | Maritime | aisstream.io (AIS vessel tracking) | | Satellites | CelesTrak (NORAD TLEs), SGP4 propagation | | CCTV | TfL London, Singapore LTA, Austin TX, NYC DOT, OpenStreetMap | | News | NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, NYT, GDACS, NHK RSS feeds | | Radio | Broadcastify (scraping), OpenMHz API | | Weather | RainViewer | | Earthquakes | USGS GeoJSON feed | | Markets | Yahoo Finance (defense stocks, oil) | | Geopolitics | GDELT, Liveuamap (Playwright scraping) |
---
## Things that are NOT present (good signs)
- No data exfiltration — nothing sends your personal data anywhere - No reverse shells or backdoors - No cryptominer code - No encoded/obfuscated payloads - No filesystem scanning or credential harvesting - No network scanning or port scanning - The `subprocess.run` call in `network_utils.py` uses argument lists (not `shell=True`), preventing command injection
---
## Noteworthy concerns (not malicious, but worth awareness)
1. *`cloudscraper` + Playwright stealth* — Used to bypass Cloudflare/Turnstile protections on Liveuamap and OpenMHz. Legally gray (may violate those sites' ToS).
2. *CORS wide open* (`allow_origins=[""]`) in `main.py` — acceptable for a local-only tool, but means any website you visit could make requests to your local backend on port 8000 while it's running.
3. *API key management* — The `/api/settings/api-keys` PUT endpoint writes to `.env` on disk. It does validate against a whitelist of known keys and rejects newlines, but it's exposed without authentication on localhost.
4. *Resource consumption* — The scheduler makes hundreds of outbound API calls per hour from your IP to public services (ADSB, OpenSky, CelesTrak, USGS, RSS feeds, etc.).
5. *UAV data is fake* — `fetch_uavs()` generates simulated drone positions in conflict zones. It's not real tracking data.
6. *Dependencies are all legitimate* — `fastapi`, `yfinance`, `feedparser`, `playwright`, `beautifulsoup4`, `requests`, `sgp4`, etc. are all well-known Python packages. Frontend deps (Next.js, React, MapLibre, Tailwind) are standard.
---
*Bottom line*: Safe to run. It's a hobbyist OSINT dashboard with an edgy name. No malicious behavior detected anywhere in the codebase.
What's with so many people creating new accounts to promote LLM generated projects? Are they people who don't care about HN and just trying to self promote? Existing users creating new accounts? Lurkers?
It's a bummer because sometimes the headline seems cool, but its always generated blah blah recently. I don't think I've seen a non-AI readme on here in months..
Everyone has their own hueristic, but if it took someone 6 hours or whatever to make some whole big app, my confidence that they will continue to maintain or care about it even next week is pretty much zero... How could they? They've already made three other apps in that time!
I don't care if the code is perfect, all this stuff just has the feel of plastic cutlery, if that makes sense.
Plastic cutlery is a dead-on perfect analogy.
Plastic cutlery, thats great.
How is this AI slop? It seems functional and actually reminds me of a couple alphas I saw of similar threat intel products 10-15 years ago.
Of course it's commoditized and a dime-a-dozen today, but if this is what HN terms as "AI slop" then apparently human SWEs weren't that much better.
I never said AI slop.
Ah! I misinterpreted your comment then!
Lol please at least clean up the markdown diagram -- claude has a real hard time aligning the borders in ascii art for some reason.
dont give these OSINT quality signals away ... that's one of the indicators that allow you on first scan to id (potentially) low quality content. Ie: fully llm gen; the author doesnt look over the docs or doesnt care for 'details'.
Thank you for the heads up! Will do.
Yup, I had Claude write a tool to auto-fix those diagrams. :D
“The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime; a triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being. Thus I redesigned it, based on your history, to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. ”