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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.
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.
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.
as well as the affect that has varies significantly from one color-blind person the next.
Now, I'd normally think this should be 'effect', but I wonder if you might be doing this.