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vancecookcobxin: Sup HN,So I got tired of bouncing between Flightradar, MarineTraffic, and Twitter every time something kicked off globally, so I wrote a dashboard to aggregate it all locally. It’s called Shadowbroker.I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI, but the actual pipeline underneath is real. It pulls commercial/military ADS-B, the AIS WebSocket stream (about 25,000+ ships), N2YO satellite telemetry, and GDELT conflict data into a single MapLibre instance.Getting this to run without melting my browser was the hardest part. I'm running this on a laptop with an i5 and an RTX 3050, and initially, dumping 30k+ moving GeoJSON features onto the map just crashed everything. I ended up having to write pretty aggressive viewport culling, debounce the state updates, and compress the FastAPI payloads by like 90% just to make it usable.My favorite part is the signal layer—it actually calculates live GPS jamming zones by aggregating the real-time navigation degradation (NAC-P) of commercial flights overhead.It’s Next.js and Python. I threw a quick-start script in the releases if you just want to spin it up, but the repo is open if you want to dig into the backend.Let me know if my MapLibre implementation is terrible, I'm always looking for ways to optimize the rendering.
whattheheckheck: 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
hbarka: Are you this guy: https://youtu.be/0p8o7AeHDzg“Full WorldView: A week ago I built WorldView, my geospatial command center that kind of broke the internet. Then the Iran strikes happened, and I realized I was sitting on the perfect infrastructure to actually monitor it.So I set an AI agent swarm loose to capture every open-source signal I could find. Satellite surveillance passes, GPS jamming, commercial and military flights, maritime tracking at the Strait of Hormuz, airspace closures across nine countries, all of it.What I got back is a full 4D reconstruction of Operation Epic Fury. Every strike, every rerouted flight, every ship going dark, replayable on a 3D globe, minute by minute.This is the breakdown you're not going to see anywhere else. WorldView opens to the public in April. Stay tuned.” -@bilawalsidhu
the_biot: So, so sick of all the AI slop.
ionwake: 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?
ratsimihah: I find non-constructive feedback more tiring. People just dismiss things as soon as it has the faintest trace of AI without judging them for what they actually are.Not saying the AI slop noise isn’t annoying though.
ionwake: like to see you do better mate.Edit> Thanks for the downvote you pansy. I was actually also trying to encourage you.
rustyhancock: 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.
btbuildem: Lol please at least clean up the markdown diagram -- claude has a real hard time aligning the borders in ascii art for some reason.
erichocean: Yup, I had Claude write a tool to auto-fix those diagrams. :D
beoberha: Sounds like OP did some pretty cool engineering to make this run performantly. Definitely not your run of the mill AI slop.
serf: eh.performance is easy. you can craft a test suite that will allow a ralph loop to iterate until it hits the metrics.the hard part of style/feel/usability. LLMs still suck at that stuff, and crafting tests to produce those metrics is nigh impossible.
hammock: It’s probably what trumpers feel like. You wear a red hat one time and all of a sudden no one will even talk to you, they just talk more about you behind your back.
DetroitThrow: Yeah this doesn't work on Mac either. This is just broken and nonfunctioning.
bakugo: Why are you entitled to receiving constructive feedback on "your" project when you couldn't be bothered to write the project yourself in the first place?If you want "feedback" of the same quality and effort as the project itself, you can always go ask your beloved AI for feedback instead of wasting precious human time.
ratsimihah: Would you dismiss solutions to mathematical problems solved by AI?If I’m driving an AI towards finding a solution, would it be any different for a software project?
vavkamil: You leaked `./frontend/.env.local` & `./backend/.env` inside `ShadowBroker_v0.1.zip` in the first commit.
vancecookcobxin: Apparently, I had a bunch of front end developmental scripts that were calling the Windows version of python. Working on it now.
vancecookcobxin: 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!
efromvt: I'd be interested in just the data layer of this being extractable - will poke around at that. (frontend is fun, though!).
CountGeek: This is neat. It reminds me of this https://curves-voluntary-livecam-sandra.trycloudflare.com/
coolius: i wish someone could deploy this somewhere so we can try it out without having to build it first
spzb: Mathematical proof vs a web app that doesn't actually run? Not much of a contest.Never mind the fact that AIs of the LLM-variety haven't and aren't going to find solutions to mathematical problems.
ratsimihah: You got really specific to help prove your point. We were generalising to projects built by AI, not web apps that don’t run, which isn’t relevant since LLMs can clearly build fully working projects.Also how does getting into the specifics of which type of AI can solve mathematical problems helps the comparison here?
sdoering: > Never mind the fact that AIs of the LLM-variety haven't and aren't going to find solutions to mathematical problems.This is empirically wrong as of early 2026.Since Christmas 2025, 15 Erdos problems have been moved from "open" to "solved" on erdosproblems.com, 11 of them crediting AI models. Problems #397, #728, and #729 were solved by GPT-5.2 Pro generating original arguments (not literature lookups), formalized in Lean, and verified by Terence Tao himself. Problem #1026 was solved more or less autonomously by Harmonic's Aristotle model in Lean.At IMO 2025, three separate systems (Gemini Deep Think, an OpenAI system, and Aristotle) independently achieved gold-medal performance, solving 5 of 6 problems.DeepSeek-Prover-V2 hits 88.9% on MiniF2F-test. Top models solve 40% of postdoc-level problems on FrontierMath, up from 2%.Tao's own assessment as of March 2026: AI is "ready for primetime" in math and theoretical physics because it "saves more time than it wastes."You can disagree about where this is heading, but "haven't and aren't going to" doesn't survive contact with the data.
hackerbeat: Forget about the drama and have a laugh instead: https://gagzap.com/
laborcontract: I've seen so many of these in the last week alone.I need a realtime OSINT dashboard for OSINT dashboards.
skinnymuch: Reminds me of all the Covid data trackers in mid 2020
tfghhjh: thats why its called osinteverything is open source
rcbdev: The first one I got was about how apparently for U.S.-Americans, health insurance does not cover dental and ocular health. Reading that actually made me feel really bad for U.S.-Americans.
top_sigrid: Is this related in any way to the post or just spam?
afatparakeet: Optimizing some of that geojson into realtime tiles is a really fun and engaging project.Have you seen these projects?https://github.com/protomaps/PMTileshttps://github.com/maplibre/martin
vancecookcobxin: 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....
fredoliveira: Indeed. And adding on to this, in a slightly different realm, Donald Knuth's conjecture that he solved with Claude: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/papers/claude-c...
amelius: Does it show locations of datacenters?
enraged_camel: Man, the overwhelming majority of your comments over the past several months are you whining about AI or being extremely salty about anything remotely AI related. You bash AI content, people who use AI to make cool stuff, AI companies, people who say anything positive about said companies... I really wonder what exactly you think your negative attitude contributes to these discussions.
spzb: You were the one who made the comparison
razodactyl: @dang - HN tearing itself apart over use of AI isn't conducive to a strong cohesive community.Nobody here is at fault, we're in very trying times - we need to adjust with patience and consideration.Use of AI to launch rapid prototypes is like breadboarding a new product. It has a place but it's moving so fast that it's hard to lock down at the moment.No point everyone throwing excess cortisol in this direction. <3
the_biot: Very true, I see people increasingly polarized on this topic. I also see it in the rollercoaster of votes on my post.If it wasn't clear, I think we're (as a society) destroying ourselves by believing in all this generative AI crap, even contrary to the evidence of how wrong it often is, the hallucinations, the awful quality etc.I think we're witnessing the death of intellect: when you discard the evidence in favor of something that only looks right but is nonsense, there's no telling where it will end. If your profession requires you to think and produce output accordingly, but suddenly nobody thinks wrong answers matter, then your profession no longer exists.Standing up against it and refusing to accept any form of AI anywhere is the only reasonable thing to do. And I don't know if it will make a difference.
hettygreen: 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?
Karrot_Kream: 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.
chid: Did I see this on X first?
driverdan: 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?
alephnerd: 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.
driverdan: I never said AI slop.
tomhow: We are sympathetic, but it's still not OK to fulminate on HN, no matter what it's about. It just makes the place miserable. Please flag it or email us (hn@ycombinator.com) if you think a post is unfit for HN.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
AH4oFVbPT4f8: Change the requirements.txt in the backend to the followingfastapi==0.103.1uvicorn==0.23.2yfinance>=0.2.40feedparser==6.0.10legacy-cgi==2.6.1requests==2.31.0apscheduler==3.10.3pydantic==2.11.0pydantic-settings==2.8.0playwright>=1.58.0beautifulsoup4>=4.12.0sgp4>=2.22cachetools>=5.3.0cloudscraper>=1.2.71reverse_geocoder>=1.5.1lxml>=5.0python-dotenv>=1.0and be on python 3.13 and it should get you up and running
garyfirestorm: > 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
vancecookcobxin: I REALLY, REALLY dont want it used for that type of stuff.
AH4oFVbPT4f8: 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
vancecookcobxin: 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
silverstream: 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.
spzb: > solved more or less autonomouslySo, not autonomously.
sdoering: q.e.d.
beepbooptheory: 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.
polynomial: Plastic cutlery is a dead-on perfect analogy.
rationalist: Risky click. (It's okay.)
pugworthy: 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...
nonameiguess: 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.
gregjw: Plastic cutlery, thats great.
vancecookcobxin: 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.
the_real_cher: One guy vs the DoDapples and oranges
born-jre: i was building sth like thishttps://github.com/blue-monads/potato-apps/tree/master/cimpl...i should finish but have not have time
afatparakeet: 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!
vancecookcobxin: Glad to have you aboard!
anigbrowl: I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UINothing wrong with that. Beats a boring corporate dashboard any day. Video game and similar interfaces work for a reason.
david_shi: 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
totetsu: “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. ”
raised_hand: Is this hosted anywhere?
4mitkumar: Try this https://www.worldmonitor.app/ for a hosted version of this...from a different dev but very, very close.
4mitkumar: 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.
totetsu: 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?
KronisLV: 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/cliI set that up for an agricultural project a while back.
poemxo: 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.
lloeki: > they were named after a video game character(spoiler alert if you ever intend to play ME)https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_Broker
ahannigan: Looks similar to https://monitor-the-situation.com/
cloudez: 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.
trick-or-treat: 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.
blitzar: 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?
blitzar: aggregating API data sources + visual display of data - honestly seems a good fit for a demo project.
tylervigen: > ShadowBroker is a real-time, full-spectrum geospatial intelligence dashboardYou 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.
rakag: 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... Lol.
ryanholtdev: 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.
touchchoice: Here's my thorough analysis after reviewing the entire project:---## Verdict: Not maliciousThis 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` does1. 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 doesIt 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.
