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Latest Maps of the Internet

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu Nov 27, 2003 03:43 PM
from the just-wait-and-see dept.
The Internet
mnmonte writes "Yesterday morning Opte.org announced that they have successfully mapped the entire internet. They are currently compiling a LGL map for all to see. Currently they have a LGL map that has 'over 5 million edges and has an estimated 50 million hop count'. Also only took them 252.68 hours to complete."
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  • Good... (Score:5, Funny)

    by IANAL(BIAILS) (726712) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:45PM (#7578521) Homepage Journal
    Maybe I'll finally be able to find out where I took that wrong turn...

  • Mapping engine status: Stalled (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dolo666 (195584) * on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:45PM (#7578524) Journal
    "Also only took them 252.68 hours to complete."

    If they can do all that, then they likely won't suffer too much from the slashdot effect. That is unless, enough of us get our grubbies on their 2.8meg PNG map from Nov 23...

    "Mapping engine status: Stalled (Damn Slashdot Bastards!)"

    I know it's a LGL map, but wouldn't it be cooler to position connections on a mock surface of our planet? That might actually be something to behold. These maps just appear to be link/traffic pointers or something to that effect.

    So when are one of us nerds going to invent a better way to tell what geographical location is associated with what IP/URL? Servers could have a kind of location grid address. That'd be neat. That way you could tell how far your data was going, and where. You could avoid posting in certain countries, or try to post in others. The flipside would be that it would cut back on privacy and the anonymity that makes the web special. Wouldn't it be kinda scary if your IP told people where to find you? I can think of a few angry gamers that might want to do me in, I don't know about you!!!

    • Re:Mapping engine status: Stalled (Score:5, Informative)

      by doomdog (541990) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:52PM (#7578557)
      Wouldn't it be kinda scary if your IP told people where to find you?

      Umm... this has been possible for quite a while: See Geobutton: http://www.geobutton.com/IpLocator.htm [geobutton.com]

        • Re:Mapping engine status: Stalled (Score:4, Interesting)

          by doomdog (541990) on Thursday November 27 2003, @04:02PM (#7578611)
          What point??? While it may not pinpoint *your* location, it *does* show what provider you are connected to, and the exact location of that provider... If someone wants to find you badly enough, knowing where the provider is located is a good start... From there, the provider's records can be subpoenaed (or an employee can be bribed, etc) to determine where *you* connected to the provider.

          If it is broadband, the provider knows exactly where you are. If dialup, the phone company knows where to find you...
          • Erm, "whois" has provided that information for years.

            In any case, I think that's missing the original poster's point, who said it would be scary if your IP told people where to find you, not who your ISP is.

          • heh, i have a comcast IP. i'm in NH and it says I am in Michigan.

            As an aside, updating that physical location information is really easy. For instance, in north america, all our IPs are dished out by the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). ARIN wants any contiguous block of IPs larger than 7 to have the information filled in. if lying doesnt work (your admin figures out that you're just too far out of the way, like 2 states over) you could just bribe them. or flatter them, like "heh, wouldnt it be funny if you could update that info... hahaa too bad you cant. yeeep. cant do it. be a genius if you could though." i'm an admin for a /20 and i would do it ONCE for a large mushroom pizza.

    • Re:Mapping engine status: Stalled (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Space cowboy (13680) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:52PM (#7578563) Journal
      The IP map I'm (slowly) making will locate you to a city, eventually. It's only been going for about 15 days atm, but we're already up at ~15-20% successful at locating cities, according to visitors :-)

      I doubt that locating to city has any privacy implications, and I'm only doing it to /24 for the time being, although with DSL companies giving static /29's I'll probably adapt to that soon enough...

      Simon

        • Re:Mapping engine status: Stalled (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Space cowboy (13680) on Thursday November 27 2003, @04:01PM (#7578606) Journal
          [grin] It sort of guesses wrong on purpose if it doesn't know - my theory is that people are more likely to correct it if it's wildly wrong than slightly wrong :-)

          I'm working on the lat/long stuff this weekend, then there's a bunch of networks that can be automatically located. With this map of the net, I can start intelligently looking at IP's as well, rather than probing random ones that might not exist :-)

          Tx for the correction :-))

          Simon
          • Perhaps you also need to define better what kind of location you want people to enter. You ask for a city, but I don't live in a city. I entered the name of the municipality I live in, because that's a commonly used indication of location here in Belgium. But perhaps I should have entered the name of a nearby city?

            Just an idea, maybe you could use Wikipedia's lists of locations, such as its list of Flemish municipalities [wikipedia.org] instead of letting users choose them by themselves.

            Also, how do you handle ISP's wi

            • I don't really mind what people use, so long as it makes sense.

              I now have some 15000 or so place-names in Belgium (not in the public DB :-) which ought to cope with whatever people type in. If it's not recognised, the system will then try a soundex match on the name, and present a list, or ask for a new name. Only the recognised names will then get through (which will help with the dupes as well :-) This isn't ready yet, but it will be soon...

              As for dynamic IP's, well obviously I can't. I can flag up when
    • So when are one of us nerds going to invent a better way to tell what geographical location is associated with what IP/URL?"

      Geo::IP [cpan.org] is per-country, or per-city if you pay for it and the city's in america.

      Google did something using zip-codes it found on websites to identify a country. That's useful, because the location of your webserver has sod-all relevance to the location of anybody using it, whereas zip codes are the company address. Actually it wasn't google, but someone winning a google
    • I guess that black hole on the map is where OPTE used to be.
      • I see your point. Long/Lat is enough I guess, eh? Would be nice to have mine calculated from my current machine. Anyone know of a GPS software prog that works over the internet from your machine? See my point?
        • Actualy you can encode your Lat and Long into your DNS record it's a pretty much unused tag but it's there. With this you could do a reverse lookup on a an IP and then forward lookup the location.
          • I would have to know my Lat/Long to do this. I don't have GPS, so how am I going to find out? In order for society to grow forward and advance into a new tech era, it would be smart if we knew where things were -- exactly, at all times. I'd say that we're currently in the positioning stone age. Still a ton of things to do yet!

            I envision a society that has many virtual road signs and better targeting systems, so you can have autopiolot in cars. Cars could move faster with this tech, and we could have more l

  • no more excuses (Score:5, Funny)

    by selderrr (523988) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:47PM (#7578529) Journal
    I'll print it and give it to my wife. If she ever needs directions again on the web, I'll give her the map, slap my forhead and mumble 'oh yeah, that's right : women can't read maps'


    ooh i'm so bad :-)

  • Slashdotted... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ctid (449118) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:47PM (#7578533) Homepage
    Quick! They've done something really cool and clever. Let's Slashdot them back to the stone age. That'll teach them!

  • The Map (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub (11606) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:48PM (#7578535) Homepage Journal

    "Hey, I can see my house from up here!"

  • One Less Point... (Score:5, Funny)

    by suwain_2 (260792) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:48PM (#7578539) Journal
    Their site seems to be crawling. I thought for a minute we'd have to take them off the map.

  • Or if you want a more geographical map (Score:5, Informative)

    by Space cowboy (13680) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:50PM (#7578542) Journal
    ... I'll be starting to produce maps of IP addresses to latitude/longitude by IP address soon... Been sourcing the data.(See the sig.)

    Simon

  • ...and it only took 6 minutes to /. their server.

  • Neat (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quasar1999 (520073) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:51PM (#7578549) Journal
    So now I finally know why the internet is so damned slow... people are purposely wasting bandwidth trying to 'map out' the internet, and all this time I thought it was a DDOS attack... or at the very least some new worm...silly me.

    I wonder if there are people driving around during rush hour trying to 'map out' the city...

  • Cool Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timeOday (582209) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:51PM (#7578555)
    I think this is neat. They are apparently releasing the map data itself, not just the pretty pictures. This means that the map is usable for research. There are lots of things you could look at, from average network distance between nodes to routing redundancy and who knows what else. Since it's open source, maybe others can come along and improve it, perhaps associating the nodes with geographical location.

  • Outages (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rf0 (159958) * <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:52PM (#7578564) Homepage
    How do they check for outages. IF I'm going from A->B for the first time and suddenly the route drops or changes surely that changes the map. So any idea of how many times they check a route?

    Rus

  • Torrent (Score:5, Informative)

    by shamilton (619422) * on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:53PM (#7578566)
    Torrent [slugabed.org] of their images, data, VRML, etc.

  • Where is (Score:5, Funny)

    by tarquin_fim_bim (649994) on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:54PM (#7578571)
    The 'You are Here' arrow?
    • Or like the map in the philosophy dep. of University of Oslo(Norway) Nice map, and big arrow marked with pen saying: "Why are You here?"

  • uh... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by segment (695309) <sil@po l i t r i x.org> on Thursday November 27 2003, @03:54PM (#7578574) Homepage Journal
    Seems like this is irrelevant to anything actually worth something. Considering changes occur so much online, why even bother, I mean honestly. Right now say if an ISP switched their AS to another provider which occurs you know, what does that do for the map, all that time wasted.

    Sure makes for a nice project I just threw up a /26 for some hosts they're not included in the map, so aside from novelty what real purpose does this serve? I'm not trolling I'm just trying to look at this from a different perspective outside of 'yay look what I did'.

    Side note to clarify those scared clueless crybabies who made a statement about the "magic" perl script I posted, please read on cluebie [slashdot.org]. You should check wtf your talking about the script does nothing more than what it just did scare luzers and makes for a nice honeypot. FYI the script is from Deception Tool Kit, if you dug around you would know this. Only line I added was at the bottom, which is nothing more than print

    • Indeed. The dynamic, ever-changing nature of the Internet means that by next month a significant portion of this map will probably be outdated, inaccurate, or otherwise worthless. I honestly don't see why anyone would want to do something like this in the first place. What's the point? What purpose does it serve? Why bother creating it at all?

      The only thing that would make this useful at all is if it managed to identify any particular chokepoints on the Internet; i.e. places where a lot of heavy traffic
      • what this is leading up to would be realtime mapping and browsing the resultant structure as it changes...

        all al la William Gibson and his cyberspace novels...

        have YOU no imagination???

    • You miss the point - the system will be able to map the entire net within one 24 hour period. It will create one map per day. None of them will be very outdated. Lots can be done with this - you can check historical patterns, route changes, etc. For instance, the automated system will take the data out of the database, use a new color scheme, and show major route changes or additions each day. I think that's pretty damn cool.

      Also, the smallest BGP route is a /24, so your new /26 wouldn't show up in the map
  • "Also only took them 252.68 hours to complete" is also the amount of time before their slashdotted servers will be back up to make the file available for download!

  • Still wouldn't ask for directions (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2003, @04:06PM (#7578627)
    As a woman I am betting that most of you men would still refuse to stop and ask for directions, no matter how big the map is.
  • They're the big red "splat" on the map right about now...
  • Also only took them 252.68 hours to complete

    I suppose that is real-time, depending on what is is.

    Probably should be labeled: Best Used By November 20, 2003.

    (Yes there is a subtle joke in that.)

  • A "You Are Here" sign... Reminds me the HHGTTG and the cookie machine which drove the wife crazy.

  • Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by Moonwick (6444) on Thursday November 27 2003, @04:24PM (#7578702) Homepage
    I'm working on a mirror of the pretty pictures. It's available at http://leela.lasthome.net/maps/ [lasthome.net].
  • I'm having troubles understanding conceptually how this is possible?

    Did they spider every registered domain? Is that list available?

    Or did they just spider, like google? In that case, how do they know they didn't miss some?

    Assuming they did, I'll be the party pooper.

    *registers theonetheymissed.com*

    HAHA! They do NOT have the entire internet indexed.

    Clif

    Blogzine.net [blogzine.net]

  • mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by kinzillah (662884) <douglas.price@[ ... u ['mai' in gap]> on Thursday November 27 2003, @04:44PM (#7578760)
    The large map [price-net.us] is available here.

  • Uh.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NoMoreNicksLeft (516230) <john DOT oyler AT comcast DOT net> on Thursday November 27 2003, @05:11PM (#7578852) Journal
    The internet is 1-dimensional? They must be describing it metaphorically. Because it sure as hell has a geometry, and an N-dimensional geometry at that (where N is larger than 1, even if I don't know the exact value).

    For example, I've experimenting with networks that have a regular geometry, where every router might have 6 links to other routers, arranged in a 3d grid type of geometry. In the logical sense, a router is certainly "to the right" of another, or "above" another. In such a network, it's easy to see that it has 3 dimensions. With the internet, the geometry is very irregular, even 'organic'.

    All that said, should I Subject this post with "Fr0st t3chn1cal p0ts" ? Even an hour later, everything seems to be lame kiddy banter....
        • I said with so much certainity mainly because earlier research into the topology of the Web, by Barabasi et al had already suggested that it is a so-called scale-free network (my post in the earlier story on this had more references [slashdot.org]), which, arguably, are fractals.

  • what a change in 30 years (Score:3, Interesting)

    by oldhacker (265635) on Thursday November 27 2003, @09:43PM (#7579959) Homepage
    The 1st time I encountered the internet was in the early '70s in a graduate level CS course at the University of Illinois. I remember the prof saying he had just come back from an early conference of net sites and everyone was excited because you could no longer draw the whole ARPAnet on a 3x5 index card, you now had to use an 8.5x11 piece of paper. Of course, even then the official map didn't have every site. There was a big grey box in one corner of the Center for Advanced Computation machine room that connected to the internet through U of I's router and reportedly went to some hush-hush military installation somewhere, but the map didn't show this connection at all. It was a real bulletproof router, though - made to military standards and looked like you could pound on it with a sledge as long as you wanted without causing it to drop a packet.

  • Mapping TCP/IP w/ Internal NAT (Score:3, Insightful)

    by detritus. (46421) * on Thursday November 27 2003, @10:11PM (#7580032)
    As opposed to mapping interconnected hosts, I wonder how it would look if we took internal networks (192.168./16, 10./8 172./8, etc..). Instead of mapping the Internet, it would be interesting how many computers are actually connected to the internet, even if by means of NAT, (transparent) proxy, interior routing, etc.. Although it's an impossible task to do without contributors, but I think it would be a very interesting visualization when combined with a map like this.

  • military implications (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Frisky070802 (591229) * on Thursday November 27 2003, @10:47PM (#7580125) Journal
    Mapping the internet isn't new, though it seems this is noteworthy for its completeness and its speed.

    One of the earlier works appeared in Slashdot, for instance here [slashdot.org] in 1999. But neither that column nor this hits for me on a search for military despite the military implications.

    Specifically, there was a paper [usenix.org]about this work in the 2000 USENIX Annual Conference. It mentioned detecting a loss of network connectivity during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the period of their study, something the military could use to monitor the efficiency of their campaign.

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