Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Map of the Internet

Posted by Hemos on from the truly-impressive dept.

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.

30 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Rasterizer. by celardore · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody got on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.
    Have you tried something like Rasterizer?
    1. Re:Rasterizer. by Council · · Score: 5, Informative

      To everyone who's asked for a large poster of this -- I'm going to be offering large prints of it in the xkcd store before too long, but for a handful of reasons I can't easily do it immediately (I'm in the middle of the holiday rush with shipping out t-shirts). It's cool to hear so many people are interested, though! Thank you!

      I would actually like to see someone else create a computer-generated poster with a higher level of detail (there will be algorithms for the mapping on the blag soon). I think you can do some interesting things with this fractal; it'd be neat to see all the websites you visit marked with red dots, more detailed survey info for the registry patchwork, server density/space usage (the 63-74 blocks are more densely populated than anything else), etc.

      --
      xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
    2. Re:Rasterizer. by ei4anb · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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!

  2. xkcd by Tet · · Score: 4, Funny

    xkcd is a work of genius. See, for example, this classic.

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
    1. Re:xkcd by Thornae · · Score: 4, Funny

      Note that there is no request for a password.

      The implications of this are left as an exercise for the reader...

      Be warned: If you're viewing xkcd for the first time, you might end up reading through all of them. It's simple but brilliant.

      --
      |>
      Here be Dragons
    2. Re:xkcd by erpbridge · · Score: 5, Funny

      Methinks the Girlfriend is insecure? Seems she is easy to root.

      Since the girlfriend takes commands over the air, that makes her an open access point?

    3. Re:xkcd by loconet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Here is another hilarious one.

      --
      [alk]
  3. Clever by inviolet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow, I wish I was clever enough to come up with stuff like this.

    The author gets additional Cleverness Points for thinking to post the geonetric locations of the major geek sites (slashdot, digg, boingboing, etc.) in order to encourage those sites to repost links to the author's website.

    --
    FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
    1. Re:Clever by strider44 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not like he gets ad revenue. XKCD is the best computer comic I read and I don't really think he craves the attention so much.

  4. Real Map of Internet by Delta-9 · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  5. Interesting... by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Funny

    But where's the "Here there be dragons" part?

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  6. MIT by minus_273 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    The war with islam is a war on the beast
    The war on terror is a war for peace
    1. Re:MIT by Pasquina · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

  7. Too much time by OhHellWithIt · · Score: 3, Funny

    Someone obviously has too much time on his hands. And to think he could have been reading /.

    --
    "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
  8. Good job, but... by level_headed_midwest · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
  9. Re:Running out? by revlayle · · Score: 3, Funny

    THAT what must be clogging the tubes. Not porn... GRASS!

  10. IPv4 space by JohnnyBigodes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?

    1. Re:IPv4 space by forkazoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?


      Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole /8 to itself. Think about how many people are in India and China, and compare the asian assignment vs. the US assignment. It will be impossible to ever make IPv4 fair. IPv6 allows us to just bypass the whole issue and let everybody have as much address space as they could possibly use.
    2. Re:IPv4 space by forkazoo · · Score: 3, Informative
      This sounds suspiciously like "640K ought to be enough for anybody."


      Have you looked at how many IP's you get in IPv6? Seriously, I once saw the number and it took me several minutes of googling to figure out how to say the number outloud because I had never encountered a number that large. Given that IP will only be useful for a single planet network, we should be good for a very long time.

      Quickly googling, I saw these explanations of how many addresses we get with IPv6:

      (667 sextillion) addresses per square meter

      3.4 times 10**38 addresses, or 5 times 10**28 (50 octillion) for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today

      I'm perfectly comfortable being quoted saying that 50 octillion addresses ought to be enough for anybody. (Considering the whole of the current IPv4 Internet is only 4 billion some odd addresses...)
  11. Dragons? by Marbleless · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How boring our world has become.

    Old maps used to claim "Here be dragons", but today it is "Unallocated blocks".

    Where has the mystery gone? ;)

    --
    --I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
  12. So why by dattaway · · Score: 3, Funny

    does a company like Halliburton get a whole square? Are they planning to invade others?

  13. Use Domains+Web Sites, instead of IPs? by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  14. One Factor by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Funny

    In reality, the security of the girlfriend system is hardware-based; it requires the presence of a specialized dongle.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  15. A good reason to move to IPv6 by Rocketship+Underpant · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
    He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
  16. IPv6 is there too... by scsirob · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just float your mouse over the picture and he will tell you what the IPv6 version looks like.

    Even more clever, and sooooo right ;-)

    --
    To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
  17. Re:Why was 192 picked as private? by rednuhter · · Score: 3, Informative

    in binary 192 is 11000000
    so with bit masking it makes sense.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_mask

    --
    ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
  18. oblig. by Bugs42 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Almost makes me want to install Linux on my girlfriend, just so I can try that. You know, of course, what this means.

    Slashdotter1: Dude, I met the most awesome girl last night! She's hot, funny, smart, AND a gamer!

    Slashdotter2: Yeah, but can she run Linux?
    --
    Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
    1. Re:oblig. by Rheingold · · Score: 4, Funny

      Now imagine a whole clone army of Natalie Portmans running Linux, serving up hot grits.

      Wow, that was so 2000.

      --
      Wil
      wiki
    2. Re:oblig. by dosquatch · · Score: 3, Funny

      Now imagine a whole clone army of Natalie Portmans running Linux,

      So, you're suggesting we imagine a babeowulf cluster of these?

      --
      "Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
  19. Re:Beeb by Andrew+Kismet · · Score: 3, Informative

    http is the killer app of DARPA's platform.
    The British deserve a pretty damn sizable chunk of it, with respect to population and usage.