Around The World In 1 Year (On A Website)

chrischoo writes "From the guys who brought you a crushing experience, Tsunamii.Net and Fragnetics are working on taking the Tsunamii.Net website around the world by obtaining webhosting services in 44 countries. Known as alpha 3.8 Translocation, it is commissioned by the Walker Arts Center. The website is now on it's second stop in Malaysia. Our teams need the help of the Slashdot community to plot a traceroute for each server we visit. Traceroutes are plotted onto a world map which is refreshed every time the website stops at a new server in a different geographical location. Our next stops include Thailand and Myanmar. It'll be great if we have more people willing to sponsor a webserver from your country to host one of the Tsunamii stopovers!"

Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

This could just be the thing to stop the offshore outsourcing craze ... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2977035.stm Quote ... "It appears to be contained, certainly in developed countries, by very good containment and monitoring practices. "The concerns lie in the large populous regions of the world: China, India, Indonesia, where the disease reporting systems are limited and it is much less clear to work out what is going on there."

Uhh... Why?

[Jack William Bell]

Somehow this doesn't excite me too much. I mean really, why would this be cool enough to be worth the effort?

But then, I never did understand why some people consider Open Source and art form [slashdot.org].

Content ...

[Sod75]

I would've guessed they at least put some CONTENT on the site worth travelling around the world... Oh well...as long as they don't fill it with SARS !!

This would be a lot cooler if...

[kinnell]

They served loads of content which was politically or culturally sensitive in some way. The actual content of the website would change from country to country to reflect governmental regulations, or the sensitivities or responsibility of whoever was hosting the site at the time.

correlating IP addresses to physical locations

[jonbrewer]

Tsunamii's map would be a lot prettier if they'd try to do some intelligent parsing of router dns entries. For example, they treat 24.91.0.46 as located in the "United States" when in fact its name places it in Massachusetts. (bar02-p7-0.ndhmhe1.ma.attbb.net) Given the relatively small number of providers who carry the bulk of international IP traffic, it should be easy for them to decypher the naming conventions used by ATT, Sprint, Verio, Teleglobe, Global Crossing, C&W, etc. to parse out state and city names so that traffic from the US doesn't look like it's all coming from Branson Missouri, and traffic from Canada coming from bumfuck Saskatchewan. (I mean, Saskatchewan is a nice place and all, but there aren't exactly a lot of people there)

The Route

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or might the good folks at the US Department of Homeland Security get more than a little interested by a path (and consequentially the company that facilitates the path) that takes traffic from Canada through the US and on to Cuba?

It is not that I am getting paranoid these days, I always have been paranoid.

cool idea

[gobbligook]

This could be a bit off topic.

The whole point of this is a STUDY. That doesn't mean it has to have a purpose aside from educational.

I think this is a good idea. However it could lead to the government deciding that everyone was supposed to have a dedicated ip address. That way a simple traceroute could tell them where you were at any given time anywhere in the world. Much like credit card transactions can be tracked by number and location.

They are trying to do this with phone numbers. Although there are benefits to keeping the same phone number, it is alternatively an easy way to keep track of someone.

Re:Farthest away

[SN74S181]

Just type it all out again from memory with vi or emacs. Nobody will know the difference.

Re:This would be a lot cooler if...

[floydigus]

Not 'cooler', but 'cool'! i.e. it might have some cache if there was any point to it at all!!!

What a waste of effort!

If you ever get this bored, please consider donating time to a voluntary environmental organisation.

Re:Uhh... Why?

[Telex4]

Somehow this doesn't excite me too much. I mean really, why would this be cool enough to be worth the effort?

It's not exactly exciting, but it's an interesting statement, and a lot of art can essentially boil down to little more than that. The web is this worldwide phenomenon, and yet each site is located in one particular place on the globe -- why not turn the system on its head a little and have the web site rove around the world, being hosted all over the place. I say turn the system on its head, when of course in another sense it demonstrates the flexibility of the DNS/IP system. One could go so far as to say that it shows just how insignificant the web has made geography, and national borders, when it comes to information, when not one part of the web site's chain (from the hard drive to you) need be located in one place. It's also interesting to see your traceroute along with other peoples', and I'm sure that in time some interesting, and probably quite aesthetically interesting patterns will emerge.

Of course, the creators probably have much better explanations, but that's my immediate interpretation. That's the great thing about art - it serves to provoke us into seeing things from a different perspective; it questions the way we see the world, and even though it may not seem as wonderful as a huge canvas painting, this sort of art definitely has its place.

Re:Myanmar? Whoa?

[nettdata]

Going in the country with a computer is theoretically not permitted. Using a fax machine or the internet to connect abroad is considered a crime. Nationals face jail for this (and strangers too, in theory, but that never happened I think) and, trust me, you positively DON'T WANT TO GO TO JAIL in Myanmar. (death is not the maximal sentence over there: it is only second to death... by torture)

Hmmm... this just went from being useless, boring, WTF, non-news to being somewhat interesting. :)