Slashdot Mirror
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!
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...
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?"
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.