I. Invocation
It does not show you packets. It shows you the shape of your attention .
[00:00:00.000] — Ingress on eth0. You were looking for anomalies. [00:00:00.001] — ARP who-has. You ignored it. Protocol nostalgia. [00:00:00.300] — TLS Client Hello (SNI: bank.com). Your pupils dilated. [00:00:00.302] — TCP Dup ACK. You scrolled faster. Avoidance registered. [00:00:01.000] — Silence. You thought of mortality. [00:00:02.000] — ICMP Echo Reply. You were not expecting this. Relief.
The manual’s final line reads: “The network is not a machine. The network is a medium. And you are the noise, the signal, and the filter. Exit with ‘:q!’ only if you are willing to forget what you have seen.” Thus pktool v2.0 — not a tool for packets, but a lens for the self that watches packets. Upgrade carefully.
pktool v2.0 ships with a --consent flag. It is not optional. The tool asks, before every capture: “Do you consent to seeing what is actually there — including the parts of the network that resemble your own forgetfulness, your own collisions, your own dropped windows?”
When invoked with pktool v2.0 analyze --depth 2 --mode existential , the tool stops filtering for you and begins filtering through you.