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Map of the Internet 186

Posted by Hemos from the truly-impressive dept.
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.
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Map of the Internet More

Map of the Internet

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  • Rasterizer. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by celardore ( 844933 ) * on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:13AM (#17193744)
    The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody got on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.
    Have you tried something like Rasterizer? [rasterizer.de]

    • Re:Rasterizer. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Council ( 514577 ) <rmunroe AT gmail DOT com> on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:43AM (#17194048) Homepage
      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 [xkcd.com] 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.
      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jZnat ( 793348 ) *
          Porn District? We'd lose a large level of detail since that'd take up a majority of the poster. ;p
        • Not exactly a direct reply to parent, but is there a simple way to get mappings from domains to IP address space--in bulk? There is the RIPE DB for the IP space and Whois lets you do single queries on domains, but is there some sort of publicly available list of valid domains with or without IP addresses belonging to them?

          • DNS? (Score:2, Informative)

            by Kadin2048 ( 468275 )
            is there a simple way to get mappings from domains to IP address space--in bulk?

            Erm, I don't know of a publicly-available list, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to generate one by just using DNS queries.

            What you're asking for is pretty much the function of the DNS system, after all. You could easily write a script that took a list of domain names and resolved them to IP addresses -- you'd just want to make sure that your upstream DNS provider didn't block you for being abusive or for looking too mu

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ei4anb ( 625481 )
        obligatory reference to the CAIDA maps: http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/as_core_net work/ [caida.org]

        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!

      • Why are the three IPs with private ranges all marked differently? All of 10. and all of 172. are private...

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by AFCArchvile ( 221494 )
          The private, nonroutable IP ranges, according to RFC 1918 [ietf.org] are:
          10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix)
          172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix)
          192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rspress ( 623984 )
      Or keeping with the fractal theme use Genuine Fractals in Photoshop to enlarge this to nearly any size you want with very little loss in quality.

  • xkcd (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tet ( 2721 ) <slashdot@astCHEE ... .co.uk minus cat> on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:18AM (#17193798) Homepage Journal
    xkcd is a work of genius. See, for example, this classic [xkcd.com].

  • Clever (Score:5, Insightful)

    by inviolet ( 797804 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMideasmatter.org> on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:20AM (#17193810) Journal

    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.

  • Real Map of Internet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Delta-9 ( 19355 ) * <delta9 AT gmail DOT com> on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:25AM (#17193856)
    Thats neat, however opte.org [opte.org] is working on realtime maps of the internet.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by grommit ( 97148 )
      That's nice, however those opte maps don't show the same information as the xkcd map does. While a whole bunch of lines randomly spread around has a certain spartan appeal, it doesn't convey any information. I can't look at the opte maps and say, "Oh, there's so and so" or "here I am." So, I'd hardly call them maps. Maps usually have information tags describing/naming places. Maybe those LGL files contain that information? It'd be nice if they made screenshots of the output of those LGL files though.
    • The last updates to that site seem to have occured nearly two years ago. Are you sure they are still working on anything?

  • Interesting... (Score:5, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:28AM (#17193880)
    But where's the "Here there be dragons" [wikipedia.org] part?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Savage-Rabbit ( 308260 )
      But where's the "Here there be dragons" part?

      In view of the way humanity's moral compass has been recalibrated since the middle ages I think the need for the creation of a "Here be porn!" annotation is more urgent.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Stavr0 ( 35032 )
      Right there, Just left of the Multicast space. There's a picture of Trogdor, burninating lost packets and thatch-roofed cottages ...

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ei4anb ( 625481 )
      The Dragons are shown in real time on this map http://isc.sans.org/large_map.php [sans.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by British ( 51765 )
      Right next to the Asia-pacific part, which could be captioned "here be the spam".
  • What amazes me most is his ability to make you see the character's face expression although it's a faceless stick figure (eg this [xkcd.com]). That and that he seems to be an absolute geek :)

  • MIT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <aaaaa@NOspam.SPAM.yahoo.com> on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:28AM (#17193886) Journal
    I always laugh at how MIT half as much as all of latin america and as much as all of Africa.

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I always laugh at how MIT half as much as all of latin america and as much as all of Africa.

      Buh?

      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.

      Wuh?

    • my last job before this one was at a web/intranet firm with 5 employees. The guy had started it up in the mid 90s and managed to cheaply get an entire ...255 subnet range just before someone did the math and realised exactly how rare they were. So whilst the physical size of the operation was much smaller than MIT the scale was probably comparable. Once you subtracted the handful of servers i had almost 50 IP addresses all to myself ... handy for running VNC/SSH from home at the weekends but never did get a

    • Re:MIT (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pasquina ( 980638 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @11:45AM (#17195894)
      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?
      • That's pretty crazy. Here at Berkeley, each dorm has two third-levels. The whole campus is on a handful of second-levels.
    • Given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite, would you like a toasted tea-cake?

  • Too much time (Score:3, Funny)

    by OhHellWithIt ( 756826 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:29AM (#17193890) Journal
    Someone obviously has too much time on his hands. And to think he could have been reading /.
  • There appear to be quite a few "wild" areas on the map. People keep complaining how IPv4 address space is running out, but there is actually grass growing in some of those areas!

  • Risk? (Score:2, Funny)

    by onetwofour ( 977057 )
    Anyone fancy a game?
    Good news is that we could wipe out the USA quite quickly.

  • Good job, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by level_headed_midwest ( 888889 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:35AM (#17193964)
    They did a good job in labeling things like local, multicast, loopback, and VPN addresses, but they forgot to note 169 as such.

  • IPv4 space (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JohnnyBigodes ( 609498 ) <morphine@NosPaM.digitalmente.net> on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:38AM (#17193994)
    I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?

    • Re:IPv4 space (Score:5, Insightful)

      by forkazoo ( 138186 ) <wrosecrans AT gmail DOT com> on Monday December 11, 2006 @10:11AM (#17194414) Homepage

      I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?


      Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole /8 to itself. Think about how many people are in India and China, and compare the asian assignment vs. the US assignment. It will be impossible to ever make IPv4 fair. IPv6 allows us to just bypass the whole issue and let everybody have as much address space as they could possibly use.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Aerion ( 705544 )
        Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole /8 to itself. Think about how many people are in India and China, and compare the asian assignment vs. the US assignment. It will be impossible to ever make IPv4 fair. IPv6 allows us to just bypass the whole issue and let everybody have as much address space as they could possibly use.

        "Fair" is an odd word to be using. Does

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vadim_t ( 324782 )
      Space isn't supposed to be allocated efficiently. If 1.2.3.4 goes to the US, 1.2.3.5 goes to Spain, and 1.2.3.6 is in Japan that makes routing a huge pain.

      This is the problem IPv6 is supposed to solve. With so much address space you can just assign a range to a country which is much, much larger than all of IPv4 and forget about having huge routing tables.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afidel ( 530433 )
        Uhh, allocating based on physical location would be pretty retarded. It would ignore the real world where IP space is controlled by the ISP's and routing is done along peering boundaries, not national borders. The real way to do it would be to allocate a top level to each major ISP and have them chunk them into regional POP lists and have the POP's show up in the routing table, more entries than the national boundary concept but MUCH more efficient in the real world.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )
      They've been saying it for years. I'm thinking it's got to be kinda one of those "the earth is warming, no cooling, no warming!" type things where nobody really knows.
    • The problem never has been the number of addresses left, but the number of addresses available. Before you scream that it is the same, it isn't really: One is a indication of the number of addresses in use, while the other is an indication of political or business motivation, or ability, for making the address available to those who want them. Address allocation is never going to be an efficient task, so by having more addresses available you support the fact that %10 of the addresses will never be allocate
    • Those unused addresses are being consumed at an ever-increasng rate, and will be gone by 2009-2012.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nchip ( 28683 )
      It's not how many are free now.. It's how fast we are consuming the space.

      http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space [iana.org]

      Eleven /8 blocks where assigned this year (06). There is 71 blocks left, of which some are not usable (10/8, 127/8, ..), so that leaves about 6 years of ipv4 address space with current consumption.

      Tighter address (re)usage and (even) more NAT are likely to into place before that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by wayne ( 1579 )

      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

  • Dragons? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Marbleless ( 640965 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:40AM (#17194020)
    How boring our world has become.

    Old maps used to claim "Here be dragons", but today it is "Unallocated blocks".

    Where has the mystery gone? ;)

    • How boring our world has become.
      Old maps used to claim "Here be dragons", but today it is "Unallocated blocks".
      Where has the mystery gone? ;)

      Oh, I don't know about that. With dragons, there is no mystery - it's just dragons.

      But with unallocated blocks ... well, there's really no limit to what those might someday become! Perhaps they'll be your beloved dragons? Who knows?

      And before you dismiss them, unallocated blocks can be spooky and scary. Personally, I might not fear them but I certainly respect them:

  • So why (Score:4, Funny)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @09:44AM (#17194070) Homepage Journal
    does a company like Halliburton get a whole square? Are they planning to invade others?
  • I recall Netcraft produced a map of the Internet. Anyone know where it can still be found.
  • I was curious about the "BB&N" who had the 4 and 8 nets (how binary!!). Turns out they're described here [wikipedia.org]
    One of their guys wrote "[IEN-74] Sequence Number Arithmetic - William W. Plummer, BB&N Inc, September 1978", which is referenced by [RFC 1982] [ietf.org] Serial Number Arithmetic.

  • Hilbert curve (Score:2, Informative)

    by fbonnet ( 756003 )
    FYI he uses a Hilbert curve to map the IPv4 space on a square. This is simply brilliant, elegant and beautiful, clearly the best map of the Net I've seen in years. I love how the range of Multicast IPs renders as a square.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve [wikipedia.org]

  • DEC?? I think not (Score:3, Informative)

    by Necron69 ( 35644 ) <jscott DOT farrow AT gmail DOT com> on Monday December 11, 2006 @10:05AM (#17194346)
    I have news for this guy. DEC (net 15) hasn't existed in nearly a decade, and HP and Compaq merged like four years ago. So Nets 15 & 16 should be labeled "HP".

    All your IP space belong to us!!! Bwahahahaaaaaa!!!

    - Necron69

  • A good reason to move to IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rocketship Underpant ( 804162 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @10:06AM (#17194356)
    Isn't it kind of sad that the entire continent of Africa gets the same number of IP addresses that Prudential, an insurance company gets?

    • How many Internet-connected computers are in Africa? How many in Prudential?
    • Prudential used to have several large data centers scattered throughout the US (my father used to work at one), but I don't know how many are left. They had a large IT department, though.
    • Just like any other organisation, the national governments, commercial and other entities within Africa can get just as much IP space as they need. Justify your request and it will be granted. It's really very simple. Google for (eg) "AFNIC address request justify policy" (not checked that, might need tweaking.)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by iabervon ( 1971 )
      Latecomers to the internet, like Harvard and Africa, have their networks structured such that they don't need huge numbers of IP addresses. When MIT originally set up their network, their routing was done by IP address block, so the routers could all decide where to send packets based on a single octet. So, if you have one computer in a location without any other computers, it gets 65536 addresses. Furthermore, the original routing between sites was simplified greatly by having the first octet dictate which

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @10:08AM (#17194372)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Can you tell me what the default desktop in XP looks like? is it all green? (I'm assuming based on the picture where green = unassigned)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by k_187 ( 61692 )
        Its a picture of a large grassy field. The green areas are supposed to be grass on the map I believe.

  • Tubes? (Score:3, Funny)

    by j00r0m4nc3r ( 959816 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @10:16AM (#17194472)
    I don't see any of the tubes
  • Giant wall poster? Somone make a simple CGI that plots IP# arguments clearly on that map. So when I want to know "where someone is" when I have their IP#, I can see on the map. And keep a log of IP#s, and plot them all, maybe in increasing colors by timestamp or sequence.

  • Useful (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Hegh ( 788050 )
    That's actually quite useful to me. Twice I've watched somebody attempt to brute-force their way into an FTP server that I run for myself (which I have since taken off of the public internet, since I realized I only use it on my LAN), and now I know that the attacks which came from 61/8 and 62/8 are in Asia and Europe, respectively (therefore I don't have to worry about blocking those entire IP ranges, since if my FTP server were public again, I would never be in one of those ranges trying to get in). Anybo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

      Funny that you mention that, it made me look at my FTP server log for the last 3 days, and I got 2 asian IPs, 3 europeeans and 1 north american.

      And all trying to crack into account 'Administrator' as I don't have such an account but rather have 'root' as an account with all disks shared and read, write and delete permissions on.

      Oh and my IP is 62.147.133.191 :-)

  • That small red point in the upper-left corner of the map... is there a label "China" attached to it?
  • THE MAP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Internet_map_10 24.jpg [wikipedia.org]

    AUTHOR'S NOTE:

    I created this small partial map of the Internet from the 2005 [wikipedia.org]-01-15 [wikipedia.org] data found here [opte.org] using a slightly different rendering technique than was used to generate the maps there. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses [wikipedia.org]. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C [wikipedia.org] networks reachable by the data collection program in

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