alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds
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.
Comments
Optimizing some of that geojson into realtime tiles is a really fun and engaging project.
Have you seen these projects?
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?
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.
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.
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.
You leaked `./frontend/.env.local` & `./backend/.env` inside `ShadowBroker_v0.1.zip` in the first commit.
This is neat. It reminds me of this https://curves-voluntary-livecam-sandra.trycloudflare.com/
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?
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.
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.
I'd be interested in just the data layer of this being extractable - will poke around at that. (frontend is fun, though!).
I've seen so many of these in the last week alone.
I need a realtime OSINT dashboard for OSINT dashboards.
i wish someone could deploy this somewhere so we can try it out without having to build it first
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...
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?
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
> 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
Does it show locations of datacenters?
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.
Did I see this on X first?
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
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.
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?
Lol please at least clean up the markdown diagram -- claude has a real hard time aligning the borders in ascii art for some reason.
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Looks similar to https://monitor-the-situation.com/