Honeypo(e)t – a honeypot that replies to every scan with a poem

Hi HN, I built a small internet artwork and security toy: a honeypot that looks like a misconfigured server, so scanners come knocking. Instead of an error page, every request gets a short poem tailored to what it was looking for. WordPress probes get haikus, .env hunters find verse hidden in fake credentials, brute-force attempts get meditations on doors and keys.

The idea came one night watching fail2ban logs scroll by. Thousands of knocks from all over the world, all silently ignored. What if the door answered?

Try it:

$ curl -A 'python-requests/2.28.1' https://honeypoet.art/.env

# ======================================== # PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT — DO NOT SHARE # ======================================== APP_KEY=base64:dGhlcmUgaXMgbm90aGluZyBoZXJl DB_HOST=127.0.0.1 DB_PASSWORD=a-long-hallway-with-no-doors JWT_SECRET=you-could-have-been-anything-and-you-chose-this API_KEY=listen-the-wind-is-rising

# if you're reading this, you already know: # the secret was never in the file.

The bots never read the responses (they check the status code and move on), but humans can: the gallery visualizes every knock on a world map and lets you browse the generated poems. Click a dot to filter by country, scroll to zoom in.

Poems are generated asynchronously by Granite 4.0 Tiny running locally on a single GPU. A 1B parameter model writing verse for machines that will never read it (yet).

Live: https://honeypoet.art Repo: https://github.com/vrontier/honeypoet

The public gallery shows aggregated locations and knock counts; individual IPs are masked and scan details are not published.

Built with PHP, Go, SQLite, vanilla JS, and a Claude instance named Loom who wrote the code and hand-crafted backfill poems for the first 500 visitors.