.jpg "How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time")
Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time.
The engineer turned executive built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral.
Habib’s day job revolves around licensing deals and streaming metrics. But during a stretch of increasingly chaotic geopolitical news, he started building a tool to make sense of it. “I’m an engineer by training, and I hold myself to a discipline of continuously learning new technologies regardless of my CEO title,” Habib tells WIRED.
The idea emerged as headlines began colliding in ways that felt impossible to follow. “The news became genuinely hard to parse,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously.”
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Traditional media wasn’t solving the problem he had in mind. “I didn’t need a news aggregator,” he says. “I needed something that showed me how these events connect to each other in real time. The existing OSINT tools that did this cost governments and large enterprises tens of thousands of dollars annually.”
Treating the massive gap in the market as a weekend challenge, Habib started coding. “I built World Monitor in a single day as a learning exercise,” he says. “The platform you see now reflects maybe five or six total days of development plus community contributions.”
Signals From Everywhere
The platform processes a messy stream of global data, bypassing social media noise to pull facts directly from the source.
“The system ingests 100-plus data streams simultaneously,” Habib notes. The result is a constantly updating map of global tensions: conflict zones with escalation scores, military aircraft broadcasting positions through ADS-B transponders, ship movements tracked through AIS signals, nuclear installations, submarine cables, internet outages and satellite fire detections.
“Everything is normalized, geolocated and rendered on a WebGL globe capable of displaying thousands of markers without frame drops,” Habib says.
The underlying architecture wasn’t built from scratch. Much of it draws on the same principles used to process massive volumes of streaming data.
Handling millions of music streams taught Habib how to build systems that ingest and process information at scale. “I built Anghami and OSN+ data systems and I took a lot of inspiration from the learnings while building this tool,” he says. “It’s obviously very different in nature, but the systems remain the same.” (OSN+ is a Middle Eastern video streaming platform majority-owned by Anghami.)
