• 2 min read
Akashic packs OSINT feeds into one self-hosted map
Akashic is a self-hosted geospatial intelligence workspace that combines public aircraft, weather, seismic, radio, satellite, and recon data with no API keys required.
Image: Hacker News
A new Show HN project called Akashic aims to do something ambitious: pull a wide range of public geospatial and reconnaissance data into a single self-hosted workspace, with no required API keys. The app is pitched as an interactive map-first tool rather than a passive dashboard, combining live and strategic layers for aircraft, satellites, earthquakes, weather, public radio, infrastructure, cameras, and country-level intelligence.
Built with Next.js 15.5.20, TypeScript 5, and deck.gl, Akashic supports flat maps, globe mode, satellite and terrain views, weather overlays, and photorealistic scenes. The map remains the primary interface, while an “intelligence deck” keeps related events, indicators, and context visible alongside it.
What Akashic includes
According to its GitHub page, the workspace can combine:
- Live ADS-B aircraft tracking, including military/private filters, trails, telemetry, airports, and selected-flight tracking
- Satellite tracking via CelesTrak TLE data
- USGS seismic events with magnitude, depth, and recency
- GDACS disaster alerts
- Open-Meteo weather and air-quality layers
- RainViewer radar imagery
- Radio Garden and radio-browser station catalogs with live playback and metadata
- OpenStreetMap, Overpass, Wikidata, and Wikimedia-based building and place intelligence
- A Recon mode for concurrent public username or email checks using definitions in data/recon-sources/
The project also pulls in strategic registries covering conflicts, sanctions, military activity, ports, shipping lanes, cables, pipelines, nuclear facilities, internet infrastructure, trade, and economic pressure points.
Setup, limits, and warnings
Akashic requires Node.js 20 or newer, npm 10 or newer, a modern browser with WebGL enabled, and network access to the public upstreams used by enabled layers. The install flow is straightforward: clone the repository, run npm install, then npm run dev, with the app opening at http://localhost:3000. The current version requires no API key or environment variable.
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The project is released under AGPL v3 or later. Its documentation repeatedly warns that upstream feeds can be delayed, inaccurate, unavailable, or subject to separate terms, and says the tool must not be used as the sole basis for safety, navigation, emergency, military, legal, or financial decisions. It also warns that recon requests are sent to third-party services and should only be used on identifiers the operator is legally authorized to process.
For security, the project says it blocks private and internal DNS results for radio URLs, revalidates server-side redirects, restricts architecture deep scans to approved public hosts, and ignores local secrets and .env files. Even so, the maintainer notes that public deployment still needs standard perimeter protections such as rate limiting, request-size limits, observability, abuse handling, and a reverse proxy.
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via Hacker News
