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The Internet

Latest Maps of the Internet 203

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-wait-and-see dept.
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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Latest Maps of the Internet More

Latest Maps of the Internet

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  • Good... (Score:5, Funny)

    by IANAL(BIAILS) ( 726712 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @04:45PM (#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 @04:45PM (#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 @04:52PM (#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]
      • I'm not in Belleville, but it says I am. See my point?

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

          by doomdog ( 541990 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @05:02PM (#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...
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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

            by digitalsushi ( 137809 ) * <slashdot@digitalsushi.com> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @09:13PM (#7579610) Journal
            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.
      • They think I am in a town 70 miles away.
      • > See Geobutton Or Geo::IP, IP::Country, javainetlocator or any other free, open source services. You shouldn't be paying $49 for a developers license to read the WHOIS data.

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

      by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @04:52PM (#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
      • You told me I was from Washington State. I'm from TX. Lots of work to do here. (i submitted a correction)

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

          by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @05:01PM (#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

          • Even though my ISP is in Birmingham, UK, half a country away... your site guessed Bridport, UK, which is just down the road.

            I dunno how you did it, or whether it was a complete fluke, but I'm impressed! :-)

      • You may want to narrow down how new cities are entered. Right now you have about a dozen different cities that are all Toronto, Ontario.
        • Yeah, I'm working on it. One of the problems of free-text entry is that people often re-type-in a city name....

          I've got a big list of cities now, so I should be able to make the 'type-in' thing mail me to add it, rather than just trust the name. If I spell that out, perhaps people will look a little more carefully for their name.

          A bit of de-duping is certainly in order, though :-)

          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

      • <plug>javainetlocator [sf.net] and IP::Country [cpan.org]</plug> are also available.

        The city data are unreliable. I've posted elsewhere (link1 [burri.to], link2 [burri.to]) the reasons why, but will repeat the main points here.

        • All IP geolocation techniques assume the user of an IP address lives close to the company which registered the address.
        • The above assumption is mostly true if you define 'close' as 'in the same country'.
        • In the USA, a lot of people live in (or close to), the same city as the company who registered their IP ad
    • I guess that black hole on the map is where OPTE used to be.
    • Go look at the H3 viewer here [stanford.edu]. This is the definitive work in this area. Tamara is now at UBC, I talked to her at a conference, she's cool.

  • no more excuses (Score:5, Funny)

    by selderrr ( 523988 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @04:47PM (#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 @04:47PM (#7578533) Homepage
    Quick! They've done something really cool and clever. Let's Slashdot them back to the stone age. That'll teach them!

    • It is done...

    • Re:Slashdotted... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Jeff Probst ( 459812 )
      I don't think this project is as cool as you think. Just recently, I was cut off from my ISP for sending too many TTL expired messages and port unreachables back to random places in the Internet. My ISP thought that I was the target of illegal hackers. I did not ask for this traffic to be sent to me, yet it was. If Barrett is reading this, I am located behind 66.35.250.0/24.

      The volumes of useless traffic (traffic that is not used to communicate with anyone) he sending is causing a Denial of Socket (Do

  • The Map (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @04:48PM (#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 @04:48PM (#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 @04:50PM (#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

    • Cool idea.
      You're in DIRE need of a better locator selector. Make it 2-step - select state first, then city - or something...

  • "Also only took them 252.68 hours to complete." (Score:4, Funny)

    by SYFer ( 617415 ) <syfer@syf e r . n et> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @04:50PM (#7578546) Homepage
    ...and it only took 6 minutes to /. their server.

  • Neat (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @04:51PM (#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 @04:51PM (#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.
  • Is this not basically a map of the PSTN with webservers instead of phones at the end of the line or am I missing something here.
    • Is this not basically a map of the PSTN with webservers instead of phones at the end of the line or am I missing something here.

      You're missing the servers that hang off cable connections, at least.

  • Outages (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) * <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @04:52PM (#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 @04:53PM (#7578566)
    Torrent [slugabed.org] of their images, data, VRML, etc.
    • Content-type: text/plain

      Please fix that and real browsers will understand it better.
    • Contents are: 1068668226.Graphviz.2D.1884x1884.jpg 1068672750.Graphviz.2D.1884x1884.jpg 1069524880.2D.coords.txt 1069524880.2D.txt 1069524880.3D.coords.txt 1069524880.3D.wrl 1069524880.LGL.2D.2048x2048.png 1069524880.LGL.2D.400x400.png 1069524880.LGL.2D.700x700.png 1069524880.lgl.txt 1069646562.2D.coords.txt 1069646562.2D.txt 1069646562.LGL.2D.400x400.png 1069646562.LGL.2D.4096x4096.png 1069646562.LGL.2D.700x700.png 1069646562.lgl.txt The images are quite nice, especially the monster png. I have to find m

  • Where is (Score:5, Funny)

    by tarquin_fim_bim ( 649994 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @04:54PM (#7578571)
    The 'You are Here' arrow?

    • Re:Where is (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NorwBlue ( 711956 )
      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 @04:54PM (#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

    • Re:uh... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by The One KEA ( 707661 )
      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???

    • Re:uh... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rjbrown99 ( 144423 )
      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
    • yes, but once they get a complete map, couldn't they just run the spider (or whatever) software and rsync the difference nightly? with moore's law, optimization, and maybe even a distributed approach, they could start covering a majority of the internet in less than 24 hours, and all changes are rsynced to a new map... how sweet would that be?
  • Do they have a packet saying 'can you hear me now'?
  • "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 @05:06PM (#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 @05:24PM (#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]
    • It's not domains, this is based on networks / IP addresses. The systen traceroutes to every endpoint network on the Internet, saves it in a database, and maps the results. Then it repeats. The goal is to eventually have enough scanning nodes in the system that it is done in near-realtime.
    • I'm having troubles understanding conceptually how this is possible?

      Easy. They just kept surfing until they hit this page [mythologic.net], and then they were done.
  • I can see my house on there...

  • mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by kinzillah ( 662884 ) <douglas.price@ma ... u ['t.e' in gap]> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @05:44PM (#7578760)
    The large map [price-net.us] is available here.
  • Wjhat's it mean? Wnat is what?
    The FA is /.ed so i can't read it if it answeres this.

  • Uh.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 ) <john.oyler@ c o m c a st.net> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @06:11PM (#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....
    • No it isn't; it has fractional [bu.edu] dimensions. In which case, will be interesting to find out what exactly is the dimension.
      • I was aware that it probably is fractal, but not being sure didn't want to state it as fact. Besides, the main point is that it > 1, whether its 1.678... or 6 is splitting hairs. I like the link, btw. The "measure of how complex" phrase struck a chord....
        • 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.
  • I propose that someone add Radioactive Symbols where http://www.opte.org/ [opte.org] used to be in the map, since their server had a meltdown.
  • You are HERE ----->(X)
  • The Internet has over 200 million hosts, hence it follows that a map of the network must have, roughly 200 million links. They have only 50 million links, so that is not a map of the network.

    Furthermore, unless they collect this information from a wide variety of locations, all they obtain is their local routing map, not a map of the network. Currently their web site is down, so we cannot determine if they used many mapping nodes, or just a single node.

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

    by oldhacker ( 265635 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @10:43PM (#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 @11:11PM (#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.
    • Read the FAQ, I do map RFC1918 stuff that is used to route Internet packets. However, I am not mapping PRIVATE networks that are not part of the Internet. We all know that private networks are huge as well. So one can assume that on the edge of every node on my maps, there exists a potential huge cluster of networks... big image. If I had enough cpu and memory I would play with that a little. -Barrett (opte guy)

  • military implications (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Frisky070802 ( 591229 ) * on Thursday November 27, 2003 @11:47PM (#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.

  • ... to avoid the area that reads 'Here be goatses.'
  • I'd like to see this with colour coding, for example they could show us which parts are porn and which aren't.

    Actually come to think of it maybe they did, and the non-porn section is just too small to see.

  • How big of a piece of fairy cake was required to map out this Total Internet Vortex?
  • This seems like a very cool\interesting\geeky project. Yet I am cautious as to it's reliability.

    Take a note at the 'Percentage Completed' section. Opte Project Status Page [opte.org]

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