Map of the Internet

Wellington Grey writes "Author of the popular webcomic xkcd has put up a hand made map of the internet as today's comic. He also has an interesting blog entry detailing some of the work that went into it, such a pinging servers and creating a method of fractal mapping to display related regions as contiguous sections on the grid." The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody get on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.

Comments

Real Map of Internet

[Delta-9]

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

MIT

[minus_273]

I always laugh at how MIT half as much as all of latin america and as much as all of Africa.

I remember being in MIT and getting a real fixed IP for every single device. We actually had a coke vending machine that was hacked and online with its own IP. Considering they has so much that they are no where near running out, I'm sure there are a ton of toasters online at MIT as well.

Re:MIT

[Pasquina]

Each dorm is assigned all of a second-level IP: 18.XXX.*.*, that's 65536 IP addresses per dorm. At about 300 students per dorm, that's more than 200 static IPs per student...just in case. My fraternity is assigned 512 IPs for 45 guys.
If nothing else, it has skewed my opinion on how quickly we're running out of IPv4 addresses.

I've also heard that MIT rents some of their IPs to Portugal. (This was also the subject of a supposed hack that some MIT student took out an entire country's internet service for a little while.) Does anyone know if either half of this is true?

Good job, but...

[level_headed_midwest]

They did a good job in labeling things like local, multicast, loopback, and VPN addresses, but they forgot to note 169 as such.

Use Domains+Web Sites, instead of IPs?

[Kadin2048]

Although a map of the IP address space is probably more interesting and informative, something that was based on the distribution of domain names might be more appealing to a non-technical audience; perhaps something showing the relative size of various sites beneath each TLD, with some factor based on popularity and grouped by semantic distance and interlinking.

E.g., so you'd end up with something that had big regions for the major TLDs, and then within them you'd have semantically related regions (sites that are related based on keywords or link to each other heavily). The base unit could be sites, and their size would be proportional to their number of publicly-accessible pages times a 'popularity factor.' Maybe you could extract some of the popularity information from Google (not that they'd probably like you hitting them with a lot of scripted searches).

I think it would be neat, particularly if you ended up with something that showed such locales as the Spamblog Ghetto, Fortress Corporate America, and, of course, the Porn District.

A good reason to move to IPv6

[Rocketship Underpant]

Isn't it kind of sad that the entire continent of Africa gets the same number of IP addresses that Prudential, an insurance company gets?

Re:Rasterizer.

[ei4anb]

obligatory reference to the CAIDA maps: http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/as_core_net work/

I realy do like the simple structure of the xkcd map though; like the London Underground map it is a simple representation that took much work to make it so simple!

Re:xkcd

[loconet]

Here is another hilarious one.