Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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?
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."
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."
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.
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?