Slashdot Mirror
Map the Internet... In One Day?
rjbrown99 writes "There have been numerous stories over the past few years on Bill Cheswick's Internet Mapping Project. The Lumeta folks even created a company out of it. Well, now there is a competitor. A single guy with a single computer is working to accomplish the same feat - within ONE DAY and using open-source tools to do it. The new project is called Opte and can be found at www.opte.org." He's made some progress and is looking for volunteers.
Exactly why do we need a "map" of the Internet?
Life in Orange County
I think he means that the program will take less then one day to completely map the internet. Not less then one day to write/compile/run.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
You can't make money with computers anymore because some jackass is always trying to give away the same thing you're doing.
You: Mam, can I help you over the street?
Old Woman: Oh that's so nice from you.
I'mTheAmericanDream: Hey wait, you can't help that woman for free. I've built my business plan on this. THIEVE!
That's the whole point. Existing methods take months while he claims it can be done in a single day with a single computer.
Why bother mapping it, just post a link on /. and we've already sent a majority of the internet straight to him.
We should just stand in line, take a number, and tell him the path we took to get there.
How it appears graphically is decided by the person who translates the database to an image. They could make it S shaped if they really wanted. Not creepy.
This is nothing new, you can find free software to solve just about any problem. People buy commercial software because in some cases free versions aren't advanced enough or easy enough to use or they want to buy support.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Has anyone noticed that nearly all of the maps have a more or less tree-shaped structure?
This means concentration of power. So, the real, failure-tolerant internet is gone, at least it seems to be.
If he's mapping the whole Internet in a day he should be able to stand up to a little Slashdotting, shouldn't he ?
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Notice that he maps the paths from his computer to the rest of the world. That is not the same as a map of the entire Internet.
To illustrate, if I map routes from, say Chicago, I'm likely to miss the direct connection between Seattle and San Francisco, as there is no traffic I could generate that would take that path.
Of course, this could simply be a matter of traffick using the fastest route available. If there's an information superhighway and an information dirt path, then as long as the superhighway stays up, it's going to be used.
In other words, the low-level interconnects probably wouldn't show up in a scan like this, because the backbone nodes are faster. That doesn't mean they aren't there, just that data prefers the faster routes as long as they are available. There could be a million paths that don't include the backbone nodes, but traceroute only shows one (fastest) path per trace, and thus they would never show up as long as the backbone stays up. To interpret this to mean they don't exist is analogous to taking the same route to work each day and saying there's no other possible route, since you've never used any other route. But as soon as there's an accident that causes that main road to become useless, traffick will simply use alternative paths, slowing it down but not stopping it entirely.
To properly map the Internet, you would need millions of volunteer nodes, making traceroutes near and far. You can _not_ map the Net from a single point of view, because that's excatly what you get: a single viewpoint, which might show some detail nearby, but only the major traffick points at the far side of the Net. To get truly accurate results, you'd need to run this program from every single one of the class C networks, and then combine the results.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.