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Latest Maps of the Internet
mnmonte writes "Yesterday morning Opte.org announced that they have successfully mapped the entire internet. They are currently compiling a LGL map for all to see. Currently they have a LGL map that has 'over 5 million edges and has an estimated 50 million hop count'. Also only took them 252.68 hours to complete."
"Also only took them 252.68 hours to complete."
If they can do all that, then they likely won't suffer too much from the slashdot effect. That is unless, enough of us get our grubbies on their 2.8meg PNG map from Nov 23...
"Mapping engine status: Stalled (Damn Slashdot Bastards!)"
I know it's a LGL map, but wouldn't it be cooler to position connections on a mock surface of our planet? That might actually be something to behold. These maps just appear to be link/traffic pointers or something to that effect.
So when are one of us nerds going to invent a better way to tell what geographical location is associated with what IP/URL? Servers could have a kind of location grid address. That'd be neat. That way you could tell how far your data was going, and where. You could avoid posting in certain countries, or try to post in others. The flipside would be that it would cut back on privacy and the anonymity that makes the web special. Wouldn't it be kinda scary if your IP told people where to find you? I can think of a few angry gamers that might want to do me in, I don't know about you!!!
I think this is neat. They are apparently releasing the map data itself, not just the pretty pictures. This means that the map is usable for research. There are lots of things you could look at, from average network distance between nodes to routing redundancy and who knows what else. Since it's open source, maybe others can come along and improve it, perhaps associating the nodes with geographical location.
The IP map I'm (slowly) making will locate you to a city, eventually. It's only been going for about 15 days atm, but we're already up at ~15-20% successful at locating cities, according to visitors :-)
/24 for the time being, although with DSL companies giving static /29's I'll probably adapt to that soon enough...
I doubt that locating to city has any privacy implications, and I'm only doing it to
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
How do they check for outages. IF I'm going from A->B for the first time and suddenly the route drops or changes surely that changes the map. So any idea of how many times they check a route?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
What point??? While it may not pinpoint *your* location, it *does* show what provider you are connected to, and the exact location of that provider... If someone wants to find you badly enough, knowing where the provider is located is a good start... From there, the provider's records can be subpoenaed (or an employee can be bribed, etc) to determine where *you* connected to the provider.
If it is broadband, the provider knows exactly where you are. If dialup, the phone company knows where to find you...
Indeed. The dynamic, ever-changing nature of the Internet means that by next month a significant portion of this map will probably be outdated, inaccurate, or otherwise worthless. I honestly don't see why anyone would want to do something like this in the first place. What's the point? What purpose does it serve? Why bother creating it at all?
The only thing that would make this useful at all is if it managed to identify any particular chokepoints on the Internet; i.e. places where a lot of heavy traffic is destined to pass through.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Or like the map in the philosophy dep. of University of Oslo(Norway) Nice map, and big arrow marked with pen saying: "Why are You here?"
I don't really mind what people use, so long as it makes sense.
:-) which ought to cope with whatever people type in. If it's not recognised, the system will then try a soundex match on the name, and present a list, or ask for a new name. Only the recognised names will then get through (which will help with the dupes as well :-) This isn't ready yet, but it will be soon...
/29's over (eg) ADSL ...
I now have some 15000 or so place-names in Belgium (not in the public DB
As for dynamic IP's, well obviously I can't. I can flag up when people use an IP range for more than one city, and mark it as dynamic, but over in the UK, the infrastructure is ATM, and geography plays no part in even static
For the time being I just report back whatever was last input. I'll come up with something better once other problems are sorted out (mapping, peers, etc.)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
It's not domains, this is based on networks / IP addresses. The systen traceroutes to every endpoint network on the Internet, saves it in a database, and maps the results. Then it repeats. The goal is to eventually have enough scanning nodes in the system that it is done in near-realtime.
You are HERE ----->(X)
If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
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.
The 1st time I encountered the internet was in the early '70s in a graduate level CS course at the University of Illinois. I remember the prof saying he had just come back from an early conference of net sites and everyone was excited because you could no longer draw the whole ARPAnet on a 3x5 index card, you now had to use an 8.5x11 piece of paper. Of course, even then the official map didn't have every site. There was a big grey box in one corner of the Center for Advanced Computation machine room that connected to the internet through U of I's router and reportedly went to some hush-hush military installation somewhere, but the map didn't show this connection at all. It was a real bulletproof router, though - made to military standards and looked like you could pound on it with a sledge as long as you wanted without causing it to drop a packet.
One of the earlier works appeared in Slashdot, for instance here in 1999. But neither that column nor this hits for me on a search for military despite the military implications.
Specifically, there was a paper about this work in the 2000 USENIX Annual Conference. It mentioned detecting a loss of network connectivity during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the period of their study, something the military could use to monitor the efficiency of their campaign.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Fragmentation is a problem, however, I am not seeing it as fargmented as I thought it could be. I would say about 99% of the ip's in /24's route to the same last two hops. Some isp's break it up a lot, but that's on their small part of their networks. When that happens it is relfected in the image with "less resolution" of the edges.
The scanning is done using random /16's that are checked out from the valid address space, they are scanned by 3 different nodes on different backones in different parts of the world. Soon they will be done from maybe about 6 different backbones.
Also, using the old term, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe), the "map" is a working image of data, nothing more. It's art, math, whatever you want to call it, but I never say "this is the internet."
The best image I have now is stated as: "This graph is by far our most complex. It is using over 5 million edges and has an estimated 50 million hop count."
If you want to see the data for yourself and play with it, you should download Alex's LGL view .jar file and load the data. You can zoom in on every single route on any point and then turn on the ID (or IP of that point) run some traceroutes of your own and you will see that your traceroutes match the data in the images.
Anyway, back to my point: No image can be "the Internet", it is just an image. :) Depending on what philosophy you subscibe to.
This was a small project that grew, we are prducing neat maps and we are solving issues with them as the days go on. This is about 4 weeks of work and it's neat, but not anywhere near done.
I'll be looking forward to help for anyone. :)