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I think you ought to have a map of the Internet on your wall. ThinkGeek used to sell one, but they don't seem to have it anymore, sadly.

However, if you have access to a reliable printing shop (and being a university department, you should) consider printing and/or re-rendering one of these visualizations for your wall.

http://www.opte.org/maps/

They're not claiming otherwise. They made it clear that the structures depend on the width of the rendered image, and only touched upon the idea that information might be modulated in genetic code, a theory which has been about for much longer.

Ever seen a few "maps" of the Internet? Completely pointless, but it helps people to visualise the scope of the whole thing, even though they can't do anything useful with it. It's mainly art, but it also shows us something we can't understand in a way that is more human than a set of repetitive characters spread over pages.

I mean, you can see a human as a bitmap image, that's gotta be cool, hasn't it?

I created this small partial map of the Internet from the 2005-01-15 data found here 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. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 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.

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

http://www.opte.org/

This is the same guy featured on the DDOS story a while ago. What's interesting is that he is a philosophy graduate, rather than a CS student, and also that he built this map up in a day or two...

R.

This seems like a very cool\interesting\geeky project. Yet I am cautious as to it's reliability.

Take a note at the 'Percentage Completed' section. Opte Project Status Page

The volumes of useless traffic (traffic that is not used to communicate with anyone) he sending is causing a Denial of Socket (DoS) to networks across the world.

I just want my network connection to be left alone. The art he is producing is entirely abstract and no use for judging the effects of natural disasters on the Internet as he suggests.

Large Graph Layout (LGL) - http://www.opte.org/maps/

I propose that someone add Radioactive Symbols where http://www.opte.org/ used to be in the map, since their server had a meltdown.

It's in the pipeline:

Where am I?
This page will create real-time maps of where your IP address is located in the map. It will let you create your own poster sized maps that you can print or use for your desktop, etc.

In a sense, the results of the project do seem to match earlier research on the topology of the web; at a glance, the graph arrived at, does seem to be scale-free in nature.

Which, actually raises an interesting question. Scale free networks, by their nature, are supposed to have certain highly connected nodes, the connectivity of which, is extremely critical to the network as a whole.

In particular, look at the resultant graph for one-third of the net. Note the single link in the middle between two nodes that seems to connect all four sub-trees together. Now imagine that link being, say, DDoS'ed. (You can see it in the one-fifth-of-the-net graph as well; only, it's more clear here)

(Additional points for all you neurologists out there:- we've been comparing the structure of the human brain with that of the Internet, do you know of any such neurons?)

[Even more points:- Will you tell the world if you've found one? :-) ]

In a sense, the results of the project do seem to match earlier research on the topology of the web; at a glance, the graph arrived at, does seem to be scale-free in nature.

Which, actually raises an interesting question. Scale free networks, by their nature, are supposed to have certain highly connected nodes, the connectivity of which, is extremely critical to the network as a whole.

In particular, look at the resultant graph for one-third of the net. Note the single link in the middle between two nodes that seems to connect all four sub-trees together. Now imagine that link being, say, DDoS'ed. (You can see it in the one-fifth-of-the-net graph as well; only, it's more clear here)

(Additional points for all you neurologists out there:- we've been comparing the structure of the human brain with that of the Internet, do you know of any such neurons?)

[Even more points:- Will you tell the world if you've found one? :-) ]

This Picture has two hosts out of place, one on the far right and the other far bottom, with the billions? of others all next to each other..

Why?

When I first saw the image on the right it looked like a human brain. It would be creepy if the Internet had a sort of fractal self-similarity to our physiology.