hacking visualization

Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.

Christopher Domas's REcon 2013 talk on dynamic binary visualization for reverse engineering. He shows how rendering binary data as interactive visual maps and trigraphs reveals structure that hex dumps hide, leading to his Cantor.dust tool.

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

A short demo of the Deep Visualization Toolbox, which shows the activations inside a convolutional neural network as it processes live camera input. Viewers see individual units responding to edges, faces and text.

A 33c3 talk by marcan on reverse engineering the PS4 hardware to run Linux with 3D acceleration. It covers how the console differs from a PC and includes a story about tunneling PCIe over RS-232.

The fail0verflow team (bushing, marcan, sven) present console hacking at 27C3, covering Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 exploits. They explain how the PS3 was cracked after Sony removed Other OS.

The scene from the 2001 film Swordfish in which Hugh Jackman's character is forced to hack while under pressure. The clip is widely known for its absurd depiction of hacking.

A one-minute NCIS scene in which two characters type on the same keyboard to fight off a hacker. It is widely mocked as absurd TV hacking.

Deviant Ollam and Howard Payne give an in-depth DEF CON 22 explanation of how elevators work, from the pit to the penthouse. It covers their control modes and how pen testers use elevators to bypass building security.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science explains how electrophoretic e-paper displays work and how he modified the driver firmware and waveform lookup tables of a 4.2-inch panel to reach roughly 3Hz partial refresh. It covers the tweakable constants in the refresh process and touches on colored e-ink microcapsules.

A short NASA Goddard visualization from the GEOS-5 model showing a year of atmospheric carbon dioxide moving around the globe. It shows plumes from sources, hemispheric differences and seasonal swings as plants grow and die back.

A six-minute journey through the layers of a neural network using Deep Dream, with each frame fed back into the network starting from random noise and the targeted layer changing every four seconds. It is set to downtempo music.

Samy Kamkar demonstrates OpenSesame, a device that opens many fixed-code garage doors in seconds by exploiting a newly found attack, built around a Mattel toy. The video explains the attack and which brands are affected.

A three-minute capture of SORTDEMO.BAS, the sorting visualization that shipped with QBasic. It animates insertion, bubble, heap, exchange, shell and quick sort with chiptune-like sound.

A Gource visualization of 826 days of Minecraft development, from alpha 1.2 to release 1.5, condensed into eight minutes. Each dot is a file, folders are links, and developers fly around zapping files as they work on them.

A very short clip from The Matrix Reloaded in which Trinity runs nmap and then uses an SSH exploit. The scene is notable for showing a real tool.

A short explainer showing what walking through walls would look like with movement in a fourth spatial dimension, using the 4D puzzle game Miegakure.

A short clip from the 1995 film Hackers in which the characters attempt to hack the Gibson supercomputer, shown with flashy stylized visuals of digital intrusion.

A comedic Kung Fury spinoff in which Hackerman demonstrates 'hacking' household objects through time. It parodies 1980s hacker tropes.

An animated visualization of basic quantum mechanics using a free particle, with simulations based on the actual equations. It covers waves, particles, and how measurement collapses the wavefunction.

A roughly hour-long live hacking session in which Go team members Andrew Gerrand and Brad Fitzpatrick write the new version of tip.golang.org, the site serving leading-edge Go documentation. It is unedited pair programming on a real Go project.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

Deviant Ollam's two-hour conference talk explains how elevators work, from the pit and buffers to the car top, controller logic and access-control features. It shows how this knowledge can be used for optimization and for bypassing building security.

Tom7 explains how he built a SIGBOVIK 2017 paper made only of printable ASCII bytes that is also a valid DOS executable. He writes a C compiler targeting printable x86 without self-modifying code and solves the puzzles the constraint creates.

The Thought Emporium's host describes making and taking a DIY gene therapy to treat his own lactose intolerance. It uses an AAV virus to deliver DNA coding for the lactose-digesting enzyme, made with biohacker Gabriel Licina's help.

Roy Beck's short gumball presentation using World Bank and Census data to argue that letting people immigrate to the US cannot solve world poverty because the numbers are so large. It is made by NumbersUSA, an immigration-restriction advocacy group.

3Blue1Brown visualizes high-dimensional spheres to explain a surprising puzzle about how a sphere fits in a box as dimensions grow. It builds geometric intuition for counterintuitive properties of high-dimensional space.

A HOPE X talk giving an in-depth explanation of how elevators work, from their history in hacker culture to using their control systems to bypass building security. It covers features and abilities of elevators that most people never see.

3Blue1Brown visualizes the Riemann zeta function and the analytic continuation that extends it beyond where its series converges, building toward the Riemann hypothesis.

Gary Garrett's stop-motion animation of his song Flying Dream, with notes arranged on a lattice of fifths and major thirds. It shows how harmony looks in just intonation, inspired by Harmonic Experience.

A visualization and sonification of 15 sorting algorithms, from selection sort to bogo sort, run on shuffled integers in six minutes. Each algorithm gets a size and speed scaled to its complexity.

A recording of the TASBot block at Awesome Games Done Quick 2017, where a robot plays games via tool-assisted speedruns, including Super Mario 64 and Portal on an SNES via arbitrary code execution, and ending with a Twitch Plays segment. It showcases console exploits and creative hardware hacking.

PBS Infinite Series explains how Shor's algorithm lets a quantum computer break RSA encryption, building on earlier episodes about cryptography and the math of quantum computers. It works through the idea step by step.

An artist describes discovering she has aphantasia, the inability to form mental images, and how it affects her work. She asks viewers about their own visualization.

A Motherboard documentary episode from Nebraska about farmers and mechanics fighting manufacturers like John Deere over access to the diagnostic software needed to repair modern tractors. It shows how software locks have taken away farmers' traditional self-reliance.

Isao Hashimoto's time-lapse map shows all 2053 nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1998, with each nation getting a blip and a running tally. Each second represents one month.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund presents Dollar Street, a project photographing homes in dozens of countries, from stoves to beds to toilets, and sorting them by income. She shows how data visualization can change how we see the world.

A Google Tech Talk by Laurens van der Maaten, co-creator of t-SNE, on visualizing high-dimensional data by mapping it to two dimensions. It explains how the technique works and how it compares with other visualization approaches.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.