Remember the good old days, when you'd stare at Rx and Tx on your shiny new Supra 1200bps modem, and actually know what the heck was going on? Systems tend to talk a lot more nowadays, and somewhere along the line I completely lost track of who mine hangs out with. And I kind of miss my blinkie lights.
But we live in a world of Arduino and cheap LEDs — maybe there's a way to play with electronics, talk about security, and show the kids a thing or two — all at the same time. Imagine if one of those USB toys on your desk could actually give you an indication of which countries you were trading packets with, or alert you to unusually long-running sessions. 'cerealbox' will demonstrate how an 8x8 multicolor LED matrix, Arduino, and a network monitoring program can be used to make an LED-based sniffer for around $60. And if that doesn't sound interesting, just wait until you see Port Scan Inferno.