Map of the Internet

Wellington Grey writes "Author of the popular webcomic xkcd has put up a hand made map of the internet as today's comic. He also has an interesting blog entry detailing some of the work that went into it, such a pinging servers and creating a method of fractal mapping to display related regions as contiguous sections on the grid." The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody get on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.

Rasterizer.

The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody got on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.

Have you tried something like Rasterizer? [rasterizer.de]

Re:Rasterizer.

To everyone who's asked for a large poster of this -- I'm going to be offering large prints of it in the xkcd store before too long, but for a handful of reasons I can't easily do it immediately (I'm in the middle of the holiday rush with shipping out t-shirts). It's cool to hear so many people are interested, though! Thank you!

I would actually like to see someone else create a computer-generated poster with a higher level of detail (there will be algorithms for the mapping on the blag [xkcd.com] soon). I think you can do some interesting things with this fractal; it'd be neat to see all the websites you visit marked with red dots, more detailed survey info for the registry patchwork, server density/space usage (the 63-74 blocks are more densely populated than anything else), etc.

Use Domains+Web Sites, instead of IPs?

Although a map of the IP address space is probably more interesting and informative, something that was based on the distribution of domain names might be more appealing to a non-technical audience; perhaps something showing the relative size of various sites beneath each TLD, with some factor based on popularity and grouped by semantic distance and interlinking.

E.g., so you'd end up with something that had big regions for the major TLDs, and then within them you'd have semantically related regions (sites that are related based on keywords or link to each other heavily). The base unit could be sites, and their size would be proportional to their number of publicly-accessible pages times a 'popularity factor.' Maybe you could extract some of the popularity information from Google (not that they'd probably like you hitting them with a lot of scripted searches).

I think it would be neat, particularly if you ended up with something that showed such locales as the Spamblog Ghetto, Fortress Corporate America, and, of course, the Porn District.

xkcd

xkcd is a work of genius. See, for example, this classic [xkcd.com].

oblig.

Almost makes me want to install Linux on my girlfriend, just so I can try that.

You know, of course, what this means.

Slashdotter1: Dude, I met the most awesome girl last night! She's hot, funny, smart, AND a gamer!

Slashdotter2: Yeah, but can she run Linux?

Re:oblig.

Now imagine a whole clone army of Natalie Portmans running Linux, serving up hot grits.

Wow, that was so 2000.

Re:xkcd

Note that there is no request for a password.

The implications of this are left as an exercise for the reader...

Be warned: If you're viewing xkcd for the first time, you might end up reading through all of them. It's simple but brilliant.

Re:xkcd

Methinks the Girlfriend is insecure? Seems she is easy to root.

Since the girlfriend takes commands over the air, that makes her an open access point?

One Factor

In reality, the security of the girlfriend system is hardware-based; it requires the presence of a specialized dongle.

Re:xkcd

Here is another [xkcd.com] hilarious one.

Clever

Wow, I wish I was clever enough to come up with stuff like this.

The author gets additional Cleverness Points for thinking to post the geonetric locations of the major geek sites (slashdot, digg, boingboing, etc.) in order to encourage those sites to repost links to the author's website.

Re:Clever

It's not like he gets ad revenue. XKCD is the best computer comic I read and I don't really think he craves the attention so much.

Real Map of Internet

Thats neat, however opte.org [opte.org] is working on realtime maps of the internet.

Interesting...

But where's the "Here there be dragons" [wikipedia.org] part?

Amazing web commics

What amazes me most is his ability to make you see the character's face expression although it's a faceless stick figure (eg this [xkcd.com]). That and that he seems to be an absolute geek :)

MIT

I always laugh at how MIT half as much as all of latin america and as much as all of Africa.

I remember being in MIT and getting a real fixed IP for every single device. We actually had a coke vending machine that was hacked and online with its own IP. Considering they has so much that they are no where near running out, I'm sure there are a ton of toasters online at MIT as well.

Re:MIT

Each dorm is assigned all of a second-level IP: 18.XXX.*.*, that's 65536 IP addresses per dorm. At about 300 students per dorm, that's more than 200 static IPs per student...just in case. My fraternity is assigned 512 IPs for 45 guys.
If nothing else, it has skewed my opinion on how quickly we're running out of IPv4 addresses.

I've also heard that MIT rents some of their IPs to Portugal. (This was also the subject of a supposed hack that some MIT student took out an entire country's internet service for a little while.) Does anyone know if either half of this is true?

Too much time

Someone obviously has too much time on his hands. And to think he could have been reading /.

Running out?

There appear to be quite a few "wild" areas on the map. People keep complaining how IPv4 address space is running out, but there is actually grass growing in some of those areas!

Re:Running out?

THAT what must be clogging the tubes. Not porn... GRASS!

Risk?

Anyone fancy a game?
Good news is that we could wipe out the USA quite quickly.

Where's the money?

1. Work out fractal map.
2. Place domains on map.
3. Ping servers and put them on map.
4. ?
5. Profit!!!

Or is there pure geek value in this?

Good job, but...

They did a good job in labeling things like local, multicast, loopback, and VPN addresses, but they forgot to note 169 as such.

Re:Why was 192 picked as private?

in binary 192 is 11000000
so with bit masking it makes sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_mask [wikipedia.org]

IPv4 space

I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?

Re:IPv4 space

I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?

Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole /8 to itself. Think about how many people are in India and China, and compare the asian assignment vs. the US assignment. It will be impossible to ever make IPv4 fair. IPv6 allows us to just bypass the whole issue and let everybody have as much address space as they could possibly use.

Re:IPv4 space

This sounds suspiciously like "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Have you looked at how many IP's you get in IPv6? Seriously, I once saw the number and it took me several minutes of googling to figure out how to say the number outloud because I had never encountered a number that large. Given that IP will only be useful for a single planet network, we should be good for a very long time.

Quickly googling, I saw these explanations of how many addresses we get with IPv6:

(667 sextillion) addresses per square meter

3.4 times 10**38 addresses, or 5 times 10**28 (50 octillion) for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today

I'm perfectly comfortable being quoted saying that 50 octillion addresses ought to be enough for anybody. (Considering the whole of the current IPv4 Internet is only 4 billion some odd addresses...)

You are here --

--> 127.0.0.1

Dragons?

How boring our world has become.

Old maps used to claim "Here be dragons", but today it is "Unallocated blocks".

Where has the mystery gone? ;)

So why

does a company like Halliburton get a whole square? Are they planning to invade others?

Netcraft map of the ..

I recall Netcraft produced a map of the Internet. Anyone know where it can still be found.

Type of fractal...

That's a Peano Curve if anyone wants to know. : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve [wikipedia.org]

Someone you've never heard of

I was curious about the "BB&N" who had the 4 and 8 nets (how binary!!). Turns out they're described here [wikipedia.org]
One of their guys wrote "[IEN-74] Sequence Number Arithmetic - William W. Plummer, BB&N Inc, September 1978", which is referenced by [RFC 1982] [ietf.org] Serial Number Arithmetic.

Hilbert curve

FYI he uses a Hilbert curve to map the IPv4 space on a square. This is simply brilliant, elegant and beautiful, clearly the best map of the Net I've seen in years. I love how the range of Multicast IPs renders as a square.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve [wikipedia.org]

DEC?? I think not

I have news for this guy. DEC (net 15) hasn't existed in nearly a decade, and HP and Compaq merged like four years ago. So Nets 15 & 16 should be labeled "HP".

All your IP space belong to us!!! Bwahahahaaaaaa!!!

- Necron69

A good reason to move to IPv6

Isn't it kind of sad that the entire continent of Africa gets the same number of IP addresses that Prudential, an insurance company gets?

IPv6 is there too...

Just float your mouse over the picture and he will tell you what the IPv6 version looks like.

Even more clever, and sooooo right ;-)

Tubes?

I don't see any of the tubes

47.x.x.x belongs to Nortel

It's labelled as Bell North on the diagram, probably because their R&D used to be called Bell Northern Research, but they're Nortel now.

Where Y'At?

Giant wall poster? Somone make a simple CGI that plots IP# arguments clearly on that map. So when I want to know "where someone is" when I have their IP#, I can see on the map. And keep a log of IP#s, and plot them all, maybe in increasing colors by timestamp or sequence.

Useful

That's actually quite useful to me. Twice I've watched somebody attempt to brute-force their way into an FTP server that I run for myself (which I have since taken off of the public internet, since I realized I only use it on my LAN), and now I know that the attacks which came from 61/8 and 62/8 are in Asia and Europe, respectively (therefore I don't have to worry about blocking those entire IP ranges, since if my FTP server were public again, I would never be in one of those ranges trying to get in). Anybody else have a practical use for this?

No Microsoft?

Seems most tech companies have a large chuck of that map, except the most greedy one of all :P

Equality

That small red point in the upper-left corner of the map... is there a label "China" attached to it?

Internet map from Wikipedia

THE MAP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Internet_map_10 24.jpg [wikipedia.org]

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

I created this small partial map of the Internet from the 2005 [wikipedia.org]-01-15 [wikipedia.org] data found here [opte.org] using a slightly different rendering technique than was used to generate the maps there. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses [wikipedia.org]. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C [wikipedia.org] networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 [ietf.org] allocation as follows:

• Dark blue: net, ca, us
• Green: com, org
• Red: mil, gov, edu
• Yellow: jp, cn, tw, au de
• Magenta: uk, it, pl, fr
• Blue-green: br, kr, nl
• White: unknown

Big BIG HUGE (probably unusable in articles) version can be found at Image:Internet map 4096.png [wikipedia.org].

IPs are assigned, not sold

The upper left section shows the blocks sold directly to corporations and governments in the 1990's before the RIRs took over allocation.

IP addresses were never sold, and they are not property. In the days before IANA, there wasn't even a few associated with getting an address assignment. Nowadays, you need to become a member of a Regional Internet Registry (RIR) to directly receive addresses through them, but more commonly, you get your IPs from your ISP.

Considering that there are a number of sleaseballs that want to get IP address assignments to be recognized as property, and be able to trade in them, the distinction is important. Considering the money making schemes we now see around domain names, I don't want to think about what those people would do to connectivity if they'd managed to get that established in court.

Great

Great work... but why did he single out SuicideGirls??

Oh...

Various Registrars

Shouldn't that be "Here Be Dragons"?

snarkth

Re:Beeb

I'm pretty sure you can claim hypertext or http or something like that, but not the network itself. The network was a DARPA project.

Re:Beeb

http is the killer app of DARPA's platform.
The British deserve a pretty damn sizable chunk of it, with respect to population and usage.