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README.md

Birdbrain

Birdbrain

Save the web. Prove you saved it.

An open-source desktop tool for OSINT investigators. Every capture is fingerprinted, timestamped, and linked to the one before it — so months later, you (or anyone you hand the case to) can prove nothing was quietly edited.

Latest release Status: alpha Platform License: MIT Stars

Birdbrain Case workspace

Download for Windows Download for macOS Download for Linux

What it does

Capture

Save any page from Chrome as MHTML, with a screenshot and the extracted page text alongside it. Captures stream into your local app over a loopback HTTP server — no cloud, no account, no telemetry.

Annotate

Mark up screenshots with shapes and pinned comments. Write per-capture notes. Annotations are burned into exports, so the markup travels with the evidence.

Find

Per-case full-text search across captures and notes. Define text or regex Selectors and Birdbrain runs them across every Capture in the Case — past and future — caching the matches for instant case-wide counts.

Explore

Every capture is auto-mined for indicators: IoCs (IPs, domains, hashes, CVEs), tracking pixels (GA, GTM, Facebook Pixel), social handles, .onion and I2P hosts, emails, and more. Browse them in a column navigator — pivot from category to indicator to the pages it appeared on.

Prove + Export

Every Capture is fingerprinted (SHA-256), timestamped, and chained to the one before it in a per-Case manifest. Verify the chain in-app. Export the Case as a self-contained HTML report with the manifest included — readable in any browser, verifiable without Birdbrain installed.

Install

  1. Download Birdbrain for your platform from the latest release and install it.

  2. Open Birdbrain. On the dashboard, click Install Extension — Birdbrain will open the extension folder for you.

  3. Load the extension in Chrome. Open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and point it at the folder Birdbrain just opened.

    Loading the unpacked extension in chrome://extensions

  4. Pin the Birdbrain extension to your toolbar so it's one click away.

  5. Return to Birdbrain. The dashboard will walk you through creating your first Case and capturing your first page.

Works with Chrome, Edge, and Brave. Full step-by-step (including Edge and Brave quirks) lives in docs/install-extension.md.

What Birdbrain doesn't do (yet)

This is an alpha tool built by one person. A few things to know before you commit:

  • Search is per-case. No cross-case search.
  • Capture is page-level. No element selection, no region screenshots, no PDF or video capture.
  • Capture is manual. You trigger every save from the extension — there's no auto-capture-on-visit.
  • The extension isn't on the Chrome Web Store yet. You'll install it as an unpacked extension (see Install above).
  • Single-user, single-machine. No shared cases, no team sync, no cloud backup.

Contributing

Birdbrain is open source under MIT. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome — please open an issue. For non-trivial PRs, open an issue first so we can talk about shape.

Acknowledgements

Birdbrain stands on top of a lot of good open source:

License

MIT — see LICENSE.