A New Map of the Internet

An anonymous reader writes "The Chris Harrison project has created a series of maps that show the geographical structure and distribution of the Internet. At the site you can view a global, geo-spatial map of the global internet. The visualizations were put together using data from the Dimes project. One visualization shows the density of Internet connections worldwide while the other displays how international cities are connected. Detailed Maps of Europe and North America are included as well. It's amazing how skewed the distribution is — beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere has only a peppering of connectivity."

Shocking

So the parts of the world that are developed and wealthy have a larger internet presence than the third world countries? I am shocked, shocked I say.

Map of Tubes

RE: Map of Tubes

Hello, Ted Stevens here.
I find this map of tubes very intriguing. As you may know, I have been a proponent of protecting the Internet's tubes from clogging up. I think this new geo-spatial map will show how the tubes are distributed. It shows that I was right all along! The Internet is like a truck! You can't just throw stuff on it or it slows it down. As a matter of fact, my secretary is sending an Internet right now and NO CARRIER

Very Truly Yours,
Ted Stevens
U.S. Senator
--
Write in the man! George W. Bush in 2008.

map visual appeal

well, in a few years, when the one laptop per child project succeeds, and the world has successfully moved to ipv6 and most computers have real IP addresses, there may be some really interesting pictures in the developing world as well. in fact, since by that time the West will probably be saturated with networked devices, the only maps that are interesting visually may be those in the poorer countries.

Re:

I hate to tell you this, but there are these huge stretches of land in the US called the "fly-over" states..perhaps you've heard of them. I doubt they will be ever saturated with anything, much less IPv6 networks. Maybe cows, I dunno. Whenever you get the

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The tubes must be clogged.

*Paging plumber to tube 23562 by 43566 by 23466*

North-South Divide, nothing new.

Beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere is largely less developed in all kinds of ways than the north. This plays out in lots of areas international organizations like the UN deal with. It's nifty that the 'ne

Re:

...the southern hemisphere is largely less developed in all kinds of ways than the north.

Well, beyond those and Antarctica (Imagine... a whole continent without a Walmart!), much of the southern hemisphere is still under water.

Re:North-South Divide, nothing new.

nooo! South America is sinking!

*glug glug glug...*

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I find the exceptions to the general patterns interesting. For example, on the map of connections, there's a cluster going to somewhere around the Gulf of Guinea... are those lines there to transport all the scam-spam from deposed Nigerian millionaires?

Why such a map doesn't mean much

I've worked on trying to identify geographical locations based on IP, reverse mapping, and a number of other measures. Trust me when I say that it's near impossible to get even a passable degree of accuracy. DIMES does the best they can with what they have, but I would not put too much stock in it.

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I know what you mean. Xtraceroute hasn't worked properly for years now.

Re:Why such a map doesn't mean much

Trust me when I say that it's near impossible to get even a passable degree of accuracy.

This is assuming you try to ID the location from a single place. If you probe the IP from ten different geographic locations you can get within 100 miles of the actual destination and quite often a lot closer than that. Quite often the address we guessed was within 10 miles of that listed in the DNS records (which is not always the right one due to corporations collocating their servers at a different address than the DNS record).

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Offtopic, mod me so quickly.

So what your signature is telling me is that I'm going to have a job when I graduate? Fuck yes.

Re:Why such a map doesn't mean much

Well somebody is getting it right... I am living in a shitty little village in Denmark and and the "Meet interesting girls in..." adverts from Adult Friend Finder have zeroed in. A year ago they gave towns 60 km away from here, now they are always within 10 km.

prior art

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGfNSA3QmWg&NR=1 [youtube.com]
http://xkcd.com/store/ [xkcd.com]

Kinda looks like this

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/earth_night.jpg [nasa.gov]

Re:Kinda looks like this

I wondered the same about the line when I first saw that map. I could be mistaken, but I think its the result of towns springing up around the Trans-Siberian Railway [wikipedia.org]. It had the same type of effect on Russia that the Transcontinental Railroad did for the US.

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I had no idea my grade 12 geography project would EVER come in handy but...

Cities tend to grow up around train (now highway) lines. For reasons I'd think would be obvious.

Toronto in the 50s was a perfect example. One line north south (Yonge) and east west

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They have lots of artificial lighting in Canada. It's plain on the picture. The farthest north reaches just don't have that many inhabitants. Much of Canada's population lives just north of the US border.

As for the horizontal line across Asia, I'm going to

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Indeed, more than "much". 90% of our population lives within 160km (100 miles) of the US border. That's 3.5% of the greatest north-south extent of the country. We've got electric lights, computers, cellphones, even broadband here in the north, but it doe

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That's the great firewall [wikipedia.org] of China. It's like a filter, in the tubes.

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As any paranoid US nationalist knows, nearly the entire Canadian population is massed on the US/Canada border, in preparation for an invasion. They've turned off all the lights in the rest of the country to protect it from retaliatory air raids.

no match

The Chris Harrison project will prove to be no match for.... The Alan Parsons Project.

Re:

More likely he'll run afoul of the previous generation of global computing: The Forbin Project.

Obligatory

http://xkcd.com/195/ [xkcd.com]

http://xkcd.com/256/ [xkcd.com]

What can we call this "New Map"?

Let's see, it's a new way to map the network, a new map ... I've got it! We'll call it "NMAP"!

not 100% right.

this map needs a lot of interpretation: the southern hemisphere looks dark compared to the north, but that's because of the way population is distributed. In the US, there's town after town, and that's why mid-to-north US looks so bright, and we know that in the left, it isn't so. Europe is the same. Lots of people crammed in relatively small territories. But then you see Brazil and Argentina, and we look dim. Too dim. Well, that's because we have vast extensions of nothing. Wild rainforest, the wonderful pampas... sure, these places are "disconnected". But then again, nobody lives there (keep in mind, for example, Argentina is 2/3 the size of the US and 1/10 the population). But look closely: central america is bright. Why? Easy: small countries, many cities together. They look brighter in the map. I mean, south america isn't "disconnected", it's just not so densely connected, and I guess there's an important factor too:

This map was, I guess, made with some sort of "geolocation" database. I happen to be a customer of a large ISP, they don't assign a whole netblock to my city, so it's registered as part of Buenos Aires . So the data may lie a little (I know that hundreds, if not thousands of Latin American small towns have -paid- wi-fi. Some of them through satellite links, others, the luckier, through leased lines. I happen to be in the industry and have set up 4 wi-fi ISPs, and I know of at least another 10 in my province alone). I think the "world at night" ( http://www.atimes.com/atimes/images/earth_night.jpg [atimes.com] ) map represents what I'm trying to mean. I bet that if the data was completely precise, it would look a lot like this map.

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,i>this map needs a lot of interpretation: the southern hemisphere looks dark compared to the north, but that's because of the way population is distributed.

I don't think so. If you ignore brightness, and compare the number of connections coming out of

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That map of the night is crazy.
I mean most of it looks spot on to me.
Except for the part where most of Canada is using night goggles instead of lamps.

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If you scaled each region by population, scaled the thickness of each line by bandwidth scaled the brightness of each line by reliability, and used the three primary colours to indicate whether the line supported IPv6, MPLS or multicasting in addition to t

i thought that was here?

http://xkcd.com/256/ [xkcd.com] =p

I just ask the locals..

okay.. so ya take a right at ol' Goog's,
then, veer left and avoid goats.ex,
take a pitt stop at fark.com - but don't chat with the locals unless ya' wanna get made fun of,
drive straight past slashdot, it's just a tourist trap
take a right at myspace.com.. and be sure to leave them alone. they don't tolerate much
and there ya are.. PORN!

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There's something wrong with your tubes if you have to sail that far to reach the ocean of pr0n... :P

It is already out of date...

Already he needs to remove his own burning ruin of a server from the list.

Re:It is already out of date...

mirror, full article + pics: http://freedomsforums.com/viewtopic,p,1385.html [freedomsforums.com]

How about for Google Earth?

It would be nice if this could be viewed via Google Earth. And if it has been done, sorry, the article is slashdotted.

Mirror link

I have mirrored the maps temporarily at http://www.clearchaos.com/worldBlack.jpg [clearchaos.com] and http://www.clearchaos.com/worlddotblack.jpg [clearchaos.com] at least until my server turns into a smoking ruin.

Another Mirror link

Allow me to add my server into the fray, since that is just such a cool map. At 500K each, no wonder his server is down...
http://phot.ogra.ph/worldBlack.jpg [phot.ogra.ph] (connectivity map)
http://phot.ogra.ph/worlddotblack.jpg [phot.ogra.ph] (hosts map)

Re:

Here too: http://www.networkmirror.com/giEZfw_My0Wv7jzm/chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/index.html [networkmirror.com]

Coral Caches:
http://www.netdimes.org.nyud.net:8090/new/ [nyud.net]

Not so shocking...

"beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere has only a peppering of connectivity."

That's because beyond those countries, the Southern hemisphere only has a peppering of prosperity. If you want to know why, read "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations".

Penguins

Well, most of the southern hemisphere is water and although there are penguins in Antarctica they are not really all that into this internet thing...

This is obvious

Look at all the US botnets slamming russia.

Is it classified like Sean Gorman map yet?

Sean Gorman mapped out the US fiber-optic telco fiefdoms.
Parts of his dissertation where "removed".
He showed the choke points and critical links.

Maps reminds me of...

Wargames [imdb.com] movie and DEFCON [everybody-dies.com] game.

Oddly enough

Every road leads to porn...

Mirrors for High Resolution PNGs

Medium Resolution JPGs:

http://slinging.org/InternetMap/medium/worldBlack.jpg [slinging.org]
http://slinging.org/InternetMap/medium/NorthAmericaBlack.jpg [slinging.org]
http://slinging.org/InternetMap/medium/worlddotblack.jpg [slinging.org]
http://slinging.org/InternetMap/medium/worldBlack.jpg [slinging.org]

High Resolu

useless map

in my opinion, this map is useless UNLESS it is overlaying a map of the world. i for one, cannot find the capital city, cairo, of my country, egypt in these maps, only vaguely, but then again, it could also be tel aviv

Poor vs Rich

Proves again how incredibly privileged we are.
This is a definition of third world countries. We are so used to being connected that we take it for granted. Rich countries are perfectly delineated by the amounts of connections they have (USA, Europe, Japan, Southern Australia) and clearly showing that South America, Africa, the Caucasus, India and South Asia are clearly the areas needed to develop.

Yes some points are visible like Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Mumbai, etc. But it should be the same for the rest of the world. Similar of the map of the world when illuminated at night by city lights. Connectivity should be as common as electrical power.

Re:

If the Internet is a series of maps, does that make spammers the people who put push-pins into random places that make no sense?

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I would guess a lot of it - looking at Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, on the high res version you can clearly see at least 15-20 lines coming out of it. In reality, there are only two fibre cables connecting the state to the rest of the country, and these a