Slashdot Mirror
Mapping the Internet Evolution
Shire writes "Science magazine is running a story on the DIMES project, which has ventured to map the structure and evolution of the Internet (PDF) using open source distributed clients in the style of SETI@Home and such. DIMES has already collected more than 40 Millions measurements which resulted in some nice pictures and several scientific presentations. Those who use traceroute may find it a useful (and colorful) alternative."
Rebel spies have intercepted the plans to the Death Star and posted them on this site.
http://www.netdimes.org/ipmap.png
They obviously don't know that much about internet evolution...
I have freaks! I did something right...
http://mirrordot.org/
:-)
All the links mirrored.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
The Internet is far too complex to have just "Evolved". Things like this don't just spring into being without an Intelligent Designer. We even know exactly who the designer was: Al Gore. And we know exactly why he designed it: to route around nuclear wars. The media needs to stop trying to represent unproven theories as the truth when we already know the truth.
Mirrordot Science magazine is running a story on the DIMES project, which has ventured to map the structure and evolution of the Internet (PDF) using open source distributed clients in the style of SETI@Home and such. DIMES has already collected more than 40 Millions measurements which resulted in some nice pictures and several scientific presentations
If you pay your taxes you support terrorism!
More informational links about DIMES that aren't slashdotted...well, at least not yet:
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- http://dawn.cs.umbc.edu/INFOCOM2005/shavitt-sl.pd
- http://dawn.cs.umbc.edu/INFOCOM2005/shavitt-abs.p
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
I will have to take another look.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Mirrordot mirrors of the pictures, karma-whore free: one two
Cmon now... can't we all agree that this was intelligent design? I mean, look at a router... its so intricate, so... functional.... it must have been put here for this purpose by a higher power.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Blasphemy indeed! Everyone knows the internet is FLAT! Only heretics believe the internet is ROUND! If you send a packet with a large enough TTL, it falls right off the edge!
Generally speaking, one is not Slashdotted every day. I've been Slashdotted once before (and I consider myself lucky for it). I can remember feeling a sense of relief/pride when the servers held and my Open Source PHP CMS project didn't crap out into oblivion due to the pressure. There was no outage... just a crapload of pages served.
Sensible code and good bandwidth are the only way to fly.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
They aren't the first to pursue mapping the internet. If I remember correctly there was a story on slashdot about a month ago that talked about Denial of Service attacks which mentioned that a young guy who is a consultant for thwarting such attacks also has a project that is mapping the internet. So it would seem that its up for debate and research to figure out who started first and is doing a better job.
Did anyone look at the IP Map and immediately think, "Boy that looks a lot like a Skittles commerical." ?
Breasts.
I have freaks! I did something right...
I have my own little internet mapping project ( http://tr.meta.net.nz/ ) which is designed in a similar way (people run traceroute nodes on their machines and information is merged together to provide pretty graphs). I wrote it because people would say "I can't get to this site, can anyone else get to it?" This lets you type in the hostname of a machine and it will take lots of traceroutes from around the Internet and merge them into a graph that you can use to figure out which particular segments of the Internet can/can't access it and where they all get tripped up. Or you can see that you're going via an international route, where as almost everyone else is going across a local exchange point. Also as it has AS# information on it you can determine who's fault it is.
r osoft.com.png . google.com.png o ot-servers.net.png
tr produces a "small" section of the Internet (it doesn't map the entire thing) but it produces it in a way that can be interpreted by anyone savvy in network administration. It's mostly based in NZ (as thats what I care about, and thats where I have contacts where people are happy to run tr nodes) but it does show how the NZ Internet works extremely well, and provides reasonable detail to the rest of the Internet.
Some interesting examples:
Microsoft: http://tr.meta.net.nz/output/2005-04-08_20:08_mic
Google: http://tr.meta.net.nz/output/2005-05-16_10:14_www
F root server anycast: http://tr.meta.net.nz/output/2005-05-16_10:16_f.r
Hi guys, hopefully I'm not shooting my self in the foot here, but here are some screenshots of how traceroutes look from our agent: by ISP, by country and here's another one. You are all welcomed to try our agent out. Linux version will be coming soon.
does it works on Linux?
The answer is: it may work, after all is java based. But since it is bundled inside a Windows-only installer we may never know!
What's the point of writing a Java application, that's supposed to be cross-platform, if you bundle it inside a Windows-only installer!?!?!?
I looked at the site, to download the darn thing... but couldn't find an more OS agnostic installer, or package! Can anyone point me one?
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
I had the slightest clue what those images meant.
It's simple. Your ship is the white blip in the center. You have to shoot your way out as the concentric rings rotate around you. I think it's based on Yars Revenge or something.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
In a nutshell, it's kinda showing you connectivity and relative size of an ISP. What it's showing with the red spheres is that there are a few Autonomous Systems (AS) that have lots (hundreds or thousands) of inbound and outbound links to other ASes. Think UUNet or Sprint, alot of people are connected to them, as well as some ISPs. Then you have those smaller (tier-2, the orange to blue skittles) ISPs that are connected to UUnet and also connected to tens of other ISPs. All the way at the edge, you have people who are single homed only to their ISP, but they are not a transit network, meaning they don't send traffic from one AS to another. Any traffic on their link is either from their network or to their network. And there are lots and lots of those, they are the little purple skittles on the outside.
The lines represent the connections between these ASs. All the real connections arent there, the entire background would most likely be completely black if they were.
So it's showing that there are some really huge ISPs that form the "backbone" of the internet, and lots of smaller ISPs and thousands of even smaller ISPs. When you see a line that does not connect to/from the center, that's a connection between a tier-2 ISP to another tier-2 ISP. Usually this is done as a backup mechanism, sometimes it can also be done to more effectively get traffic to another network. For example, if UUNet charges you per byte, and they can get to anyone, you would think that you could just send all your traffic to UUnet. But you might find that a large percentage of your traffic is going to networks that are directly attached (peered) to Level3's network, and Level3 charges less per byte. It might make sense then to peer with Level3 in addition to UUNet, or completely with Level3. I'm leaving some stuff out here but this is the general idea, and what the picture is showing you.
Incidentally, there is also a concept in the internet backbone called "hot potato routing". If I am in LA with Sprint and sending traffic to NY to a UUnet customer, Sprint will do everything it can to put the traffic on UUNet's network while in LA. In otherwords, if this traffic is for a UUnet customer, it won't be sent across Sprint's network from LA to NY. Sprint drops it on UUNet's network at the first opportunity. The routing protocol for the backbone, BGP, has more than 10 different metrics it looks at to decide which route to take, and several rules to follow to decide what is the "best" path. Best is not always shortest or fastest once all the metrics are taken into account. So if you thought the internet was a big harmonious cooperative effort, guess again!