Map of the Internet 186
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.
Real Map of Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazing web commics (Score:2, Interesting)
MIT (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Good job, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Use Domains+Web Sites, instead of IPs? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A good reason to move to IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Rasterizer. (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:xkcd (Score:5, Interesting)
Useful (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:MIT (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Good job, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been thinking for some time that 172.16-31 might be a better place to hide my LAN, away from normal expectations. In a very meager way, this confirms it.
Re:IPv4 space (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, wikipedia has a very good summary of when IPv4 address space exhaustion [wikipedia.org] will likely happen. In particular, while the IPv4 allocation graphs [potaroo.net] made by Geoff Huston aren't as pretty, they are likely far more accurate than xkcd's. The only problem with Geoff's predictions is the exhaution date keeps getting moved forward so his dates are probably best-case predictions.
Basically, yes, the IPv4 space is running out. It is still 3-5 years out for IANA exhaustion and further for the RIRs and ISPs, but it is something that people need to start planning for. The predictions about IPv4 addresses running out back in the 90s was before the development of things like CIDR allocations, NAT, RFC1918 private network numbers, HTTP1.1's virtual hosts, DHCP, and the dot-com crash. There haven't been any new "gee, we can make the IPv4 space go a lot further if..." type ideas for years and it doesn't appear likely that any more large savings will happen before it is too late to deploy them.
Re:A good reason to move to IPv6 (Score:3, Interesting)
These days, any infrastructure device is perfectly capable of looking up addresses in a table, and can discover and store the mappings for your whole network with no trouble at all. With this sort of hardware (which is all that's still available), each computer only needs one address. When there are 16 million computers in Africa on the internet, they can have more addresses. For that matter, MIT would give up most of their addresses if there was a shortage; last time I checked, only 18.*.0.* was generally used.
The real reason to go to IPv6 is not that there aren't enough addresses for everybody, but rather that there aren't enough addresses to not have to worry about allocation. With IPv6, every NIC that'll ever be created can have its own IP address (based on its MAC), plus addresses it gets by being connected through a router, private addresses, loopback, and so forth. There are useful effects of having so many addresses total that you can assign large spaces of them for purposes other than just having an address for each device on the internet.
Re:Where Y'At? (Score:1, Interesting)
Done and done :-)
plot yourself on the Map of the Internet [map-o-net.com]