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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.
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.
I'd be willing to be a guinea pig for their next project
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
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
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 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/
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.
It was a low bandwidth activity. Had you told the truth to your ISP, they likely wouldn't have given a shit.
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.
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