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Full Net Census Takes a Hint From xkcd
netbuzz writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute says it's the first full census of the 'visible Internet' since David Smallberg canvassed a piddling 315 allocated addresses in 1982. They're talking about 3 billion pings directed toward 2.8 million addresses over the course of 62 days. Oh, and they credit the comic strip xkcd for sparking the idea of presenting the data using a Hilbert curve." The main page for the census project has links to versions of the census at various scales.
here I am. continue counting...
xkcd on the front page...
Anyone got a colorblind friendly version of the map?
FTA:
Responses: positive: green, negative: red, mix: yellow.
seriously guys, wtf.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Randall Munroe (xkcd author) also made this comic entitled "Online Communities". Also a nice way to make a map of the internet. (Extra points for those, who find "Stallman's Airship")
Don't you just hate it when the internet wraps onto the ceiling. All those packets are horrible on the acoustic tiles.
And once it gets up there you know its going to be hard to get it back down.
So what's the over under on the percentage of porn sites?
85%?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
People are doing this same thing constantly.
Not that its not cool, but acting like it hasn't been done since 1982 is grossly incorrect.
Hmm. That means there's still lots of IPs available (if bright blue = unused), right?
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I'd be willing to be a guinea pig for their next project
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Now they just need to sell the puzzle version of the map in airplane magazines.
39% are pr0n
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I assume 90% are spambots, 5% are people trying to get Frist Psot and the remainder are legit.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
... 5% downloading porn, 10% stealing copyright material. the remainder are legit.
sure, that might be 110%, but that just shows you how efficient the Internet is.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
PSH..
nmap -sP *.*.*.* > ips.txt
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I'm colorblind and I can see the difference in shades just fine.
Maybe you should ask the people you're acting like you care about whether they actually need you to whine for them.
I did something similar years ago. Probably about 10?
:)
How I did it was by downloading the zone file from the arin ftp site(I think I grabbed a few from some of the other regional registries too but like I said this was a long time ago) and doing zone transfers on all the domain servers listed. I then took all the hosts returned and scanned them using nmap(which looking it up dates this as within 10 years). I was about 3/4ths of the way though when an admin in California complained to my ISP. My ISP contacted me, asked what I was doing, I denied it promised to reinstall windows(in case I had been hacked) and stopped.
I never used the results for anything it was more fun doing it then anything but yeah thats my story hope you enjoyed
Discovering the location of Qwghlm on this map made my entire day. Thanks!
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
I knew the Hilbert curve could fill the space by replacing each segment with a copy of itself (a basic concept in fractal theory, self similarity). But I didn't know that the curve had this interesting property: Similar addresses had nearby locations in two-dimensional space. The XKCD guy is a genius.
Anyway, here's more info on the Hilbert Curve. Enjoy.
XKCD's writer shows his love for /. . http://xkcd.com/301/
There are a few discerpancies - for example the 92.0.0.0/8 block is solid blue but not on the bogons list, and it looks like APNIC has started to hand out blocks in this subnet.
Some blocks, like 10.0.0.0, ale "bluer" than others - ??
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Where do I apply to get paid doing this stuff ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
gluing captions to ur cats http://xkcd.com/262/
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Back in the mid-90's a research student in a south-east Asian country decided to do a similar experiment. They started pinging 0.0.0.0, 0.0.0.1, ...etc... When they got to 1.0.0.0 they took down BBN's network and upstream ISPs because the routers would negative-cache host routes of failed pings, thereby flushing out all the other working routes. My ISP got hosed when they got to 3.0.0.0 (Merit) since they were our customer. The attack moved up through 4.0.0.0 , then, back to 4.0.0.0 BBN, and up through other networks. On that day, the Internet suffered a rolling blackout because everyone was using Cisco routers affected by the same problem. When the source was identified and blocked, the problem stopped.
It's better to measure who is _using_ the Internet at central resources (root DNS servers, google, time.windows.com) rather than who can respond to a ping. Back when I was young, people didn't use NAT or firewalls and everything responded to a ping. Today, millions (billions?) of people don't really have public address space, and are separated from the IPv4 Internet by one or more levels of NAT or proxy servers. Clusters of web servers are mostly virtualized behind a single address served by load balancers and/or firewalls. A "ping" census is worth less today compared to prior to the rise of NAT firewalls in the late 90's. It's still interesting, but not at all accurate.
Aside: When ISPs and corporations are forced to pay equitably for the addresses (and routes!) they use, the IPv4 "crisis" will solve itself.
Stats vary (and you can look them up easily enough), but the general idea is that 1/12 males are color-blind to some degree. That means most groups are fairly likely to have at least one color-blind person in them. Now the severity of color-blindness as well as the affect that has varies significantly from one color-blind person the next.
I, for example, am color-blind, but didn't find the chart to be horribly difficult to use. Different colors might have made things easier, but it doesn't bother me in this case. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered when designing. Like I said, most color problems are due to plain ignorance as to how common the problem really is. I don't blame people for not considering it, as long as they really didn't realize.
You won't find any of my servers/boundaries responding to a ping on any address at any port for any reason. Send a TCP packet, and all of them will look at it, stroke their chins for a few microseconds, and decide whether to forward them or simply move on.
A ping test is perhaps one of the silliest, as you cite by a more accurate observation of key SOA servers over a period of time.
That said, I like Novell.com's bravery, as they always respond to a ping. It's how I know that my DNS infrastructure is working. It's a randomly successful find (I have no affiliation with them), rather it always works, when it works.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
...someone in Division 5 did the document spec for this one.
It may surprise you, but this is not new. There's even a dithering algorithm based on this idea. It's primary use compared to other dithering algoritms is to reduce the size of delta-frames in paletted animation, like GIF.
Guys, have a look along the bottom edge and stick a flag in 86.0.202.223 for me ;-)
With all the hosts behind firewalls and NATs, id be interested in the number, and the methodology of estimation.
Configure your firewalls to respond to all inward-bound pings for your entire address space. This will not consume any significant resources, and will not inform any skeery crackers of anything (in fact it's a better way to fool them than blocking ping, since they will not need to resort to stealthier scans that require more resources to detect or block). Log who pings you to the router console and leave a dumb terminal running on it, or pump it into a secure internal web page. Treat ping flooding like any other kind of packet flooding - you can't really make it impossible to DDOS you simply by blocking specific ICMP types anyway. Don't forget to implement packet source ingress and egress filtering, obviously.
Google, yahoo, and Novell all respond to ping. It's a service they kindly provide to the rest of us, a service we should all provide to make the Internet's tubes easier to see through. You aren't going to get hurt by a ping unless you have no idea how to set up a network... in which case dropping ping packets won't save you.
Don't make researchers have to develop new ways to punch through firewalls, let's all just use good ol' friendly, simple, and useful pings.
Let's reclaim the Multicast range. It is not routed over the Internet, so the maximum size the multicast pool needs to be is that of a big corp, which is like /16, or if you really need it, /8. But not /4!
Same thing for 127.0.0.0/8. How many localhosts do you have again?
These guys port scanned 36 million hosts connected to the Internet and published some of their findings. It makes for a very interesting read especially the bit about when their Japanese team gets hacked into during the scan after apparently annoying someone in China a little bit after scanning their subnet blocks. http://reactor-core.org/internet-audit.html
meridian at tha.net
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company with 30 K employees that had 3 and now has 6 class B IP address ranges so that each computer could have a unique IP address. At the same time, they configured all routers to block all inbound traffic to all but a few of those addresses corresponding to servers for mail, HTML, and FTP!
A small fee of even 1 $/month would make that hoarding go away. Perhaps the first 5 or so could be reserved at a lower rate. The same is true for companies hoarding blocks of 1000 or 100 phone numbers which is causing all of the split and overlays in the NANP.
That map looks a lot like the graphical output from Toneloc. (Wardialing app from way back when)
The Total Perspective Vortex is the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected. It shows its victim the entire unimaginable infinity of the universe with a very tiny marker that says "You Are Here" which points to a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot.
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Posting useless XKCD-themed memes on Slashdot.
That's a good question. I can't think of a case where it's been enough of an issue on the web that I've felt a need for such a plug-in. For the most part, things tend to be slightly more confusing than they have to be, but they aren't unusable. The real kicker for me is buying clothes and multi-colored LEDs. I also have a hard time at the local rock gym distinguishing the color tapes they use on the bouldering problems.
I actually might be bothered more online than I really realize - I just probably tend to forget the annoyances fairly quickly. I imagine people with more severe color-vision problems are more in need of such a plug-in.
I also don't know what color manipulation algorithms would provide reasonable results. I'd need some images I couldn't decipher clearly and start manipulating, I imagine. Maybe those color dot pictures with hidden messages.
All in all, it's just not a very itchy itch.
I've been that color blind person who spoke up in many a design meeting. Fairly often it's followed by someone else saying "hey, I'm color blind, too." It's also often followed by people constantly asking if stupid combinations are going to cause problems, so I don't often say anything unless it's really an issue. I imagine most of my fellow pastel-shy people don't bring it up for that same reason.
So, yeah, I don't think it's a huge problem, the image from TFA isn't a big deal, and I'm not sure the original complainer really cared. I do disagree with not considering colors in design because color-blind people are "rare" - that's just faulty data.
I don't know what typeface they used the image on for http://www.isi.edu/ant/address/ but it looks very odd. It's hard to concentrate on the whole image. I mean, look at the 'c's!
-1 not first post
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
How can this count possibly be accurate if they're using simple pings, which are generally blocked by most consumer routers(Think Linksys, D-Link, and Netgear specifically.) by default?
www.isoHunt.com
How useful is it to know that 93% of all IP addresses pinged are non-replies?
Our version is here: http://thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com/
It's just a technology demo right now and is on a server that likely won't survive a slashdotting, but it's a fun toy as-is. The next step is to add bookmarking and search-by-IP, search-by-ASN and some additional data sources to overlay.
Hilbert curves are special cases of a Weinerstrauss Monster, so named, because Weinerstrauss worked on curves that were continious, and diffrentiable nowhere.
Please call these curves, Weierstrass Monsters.
So, a bit of History, Weinerstrauss was looking at the curves in the 1870s, Hilbert came along around 1890, and Maldenbront with the help of computers looked at them in the 1970s.
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/61209.html ( text, but excellent refrence for Math )
Obviously, if even someone who knows about this can't recall the spelling in two adjacent lines, no one with less interest will either. "Hilbert" is far easier to recall.
Sorry,
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
first full census of the 'visible Internet' since David Smallberg canvassed a piddling 315 allocated addresses in 1982.
Internap does/did this regularly. In fact if you search firewall mailing lists/security pages you'll find entries discussing Internap pings and describing them as of legit origin and of benign nature.
Except I didn't say that they are rare, but just that they're rare enough that the designers wouldn't even think about it.
I specifically qualified "rare" that way for this very reason. It seems we disagree, though, on the perception of people who aren't color blind, in terms of their familiarity with it or its prevalence. Note, also, though, that this was not just about color blindedness, but also blindedness itself.
Sure, I just don't think they are really that rare. Definitely not rare enough that people shouldn't consider it. We are a fairly non-vocal group, though, so the perception of rarity is probably a lot higher than reality.
All in all, I really don't care unless I'm trying to figure out if my camera battery is charged or not.
Cheers.