June 2026
What is a passive network monitor?
Passive network monitoring watches traffic without interfering. It observes, records, and reports, but never blocks, modifies, or redirects.
Northsline network firewall appliance with local management, no cloud dependency, no accounts, no telemetry
NORTHSLINE
Private tech through hardware.
Know what your devices are doing. Keep what you learn to yourself. No subscriptions to cancel, no data you can never take back, no one watching from the other side.
Why is this needed?
Video surveillance is booming, from $33.8B in 2024 to $47.9B by 2030, with AI surveillance growing 30.6% annually to $28.76B. And 90% of apps collect personal data, 80% share it, still, 67% of people don't know how their data is used.
70%
of governments employ Face-ID tech on large scale
$12 billion
market exists for data collected from mobile phones
10% growth
in fake cell tower devices used to intercept phone communications
Your devices watch you, your networks watch back, and the data they collect grows every year. The tools to track you are everywhere. The tools to see them are barely there.
COMMUNITY
Everything shared, everything inspectable.
Pinout documentation, firmware, guides, and tools. All created openly and available to everyone. Build it yourself, modify it, or buy it assembled. Everything is on GitHub.
No trust required. Verify everything.
You can't protect what you can try to protect what you don't see, but it's like shooting with your eyes closed.
From the blog
June 2026
How to monitor DNS traffic on your home network
DNS is the phonebook of the internet. Every device on your network uses it constantly. Monitoring DNS traffic shows you what your devices are doing.
June 2026
Why local management matters
No cloud dependency means your data never leaves your network. No accounts means there is nothing to sign up for, no password to forget, no database to leak.
June 2026
Why Heron keeps data local
No cloud, no accounts, no telemetry. DNS queries stay on the device, on your network. Nothing leaves. Open source firmware lets you verify it.