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The Internet

Around The World In 1 Year (On A Website) 86

Posted by timothy from the vacation-on-sealand dept.
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!"
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Around The World In 1 Year (On A Website) More

Around The World In 1 Year (On A Website)

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  • Cool... (Score:5, Funny)

    by inertia187 ( 156602 ) * on Saturday April 26, 2003 @04:30PM (#5816163) Homepage Journal
    1. Beowulf cluster - $900
    2. Airline tickets with bulk baggage - $3000
    3. Spending two nights in customs - just your dignity
    4. Getting it all Slashdotted after all that - priceless

    There are some things money can't buy.
    For everything else, there's Mastercard [martin-studio.com].

  • How original! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 26, 2003 @04:33PM (#5816176)
    Tsunamii.Net and Fragnetics are working on taking the Tsunamii.Net website around the world by obtaining webhosting services in 44 countries.

    You mean... just like your standard warez site?

  • Uhh... Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jack William Bell ( 84469 ) on Saturday April 26, 2003 @04:34PM (#5816179) Homepage Journal
    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].

    • Re:Uhh... Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Telex4 ( 265980 )

      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, whe

  • and to be /.'d in every country... (Score:3, Funny)

    by caino59 ( 313096 ) on Saturday April 26, 2003 @04:34PM (#5816180) Homepage
    that will be great bragging rights

    (depending how you look at it)
  • Where does this system get you (other than the cultural ideas)? The ability to crash servers then move to the next?

  • Farthest away (Score:3, Interesting)

    by G3ckoG33k ( 647276 ) on Saturday April 26, 2003 @04:48PM (#5816240)
    Well, semi-on-topic, sort of... The e-mail from farthest away I have ever received was from - Antarctica! I got it from a colleague back in 1991 (or was it 1992?) who was on a research vessel visiting Antarctica. I had it printed in my drawer for years, as a collectible, and after few room switches and h/d-crashes all traces are lost... sigh

  • Content ... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Sod75 ( 558841 )
    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... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kinnell ( 607819 ) on Saturday April 26, 2003 @04:55PM (#5816265)
    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.
    • That's called the Internet. Why mockup/simulate what already exists.

      Now if the concept was slashdot-a-country-per-day that'd be cool. Monitor the effects of page availability of other sites in the country that were not specifically slashdoted, etc. Similar to what Keynote [keynote.com] does.

      Could we bump a country off the internet just for giggles? Hmmm.
    • 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.

  • correlating IP addresses to physical locations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jonbrewer ( 11894 ) * on Saturday April 26, 2003 @04:56PM (#5816272) Homepage
    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)

  • Slash-Log (Score:3, Funny)

    by Malicious ( 567158 ) on Saturday April 26, 2003 @05:05PM (#5816289)
    Their next adventure should be keeping a log of the IP's that helped slashdotted them.

    Then plot that on a map, and see where the bulk of the /.'ing came from.

  • And the point is? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Saturday April 26, 2003 @05:05PM (#5816290) Journal
    No, really. Not trying to troll here, I'm curious what people hope to achieve with this.

  • The Route (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 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 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gobbligook ( 465653 )
    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 a
    • and IPs are easily portable when EVERYBODY does it?

      You can't really do that without making the routing tables even more ungodly huge than they already are.

      Everytime you sign in, you would have to have your new upstream (since we're signing in from ANYWHERE) advertise your IP on the BGP tables. That's fine for /19s and bigger, but is fucking impossible to have BGP peer every single IP individually.

      Apparently there's work going on in this area for wireless mesh networks and the like, but it isn't practica
  • Two words, The moon.

    I want my webspace hosted off of the moon! Out of this world website speed! (and reliability!)
    • Would the International Space Station be good enough? That would be more easy to do, though expensive. Alpha Centauri would be the coolest place, just think of the ping time though.
    • SEEMS like this is totally possible! * Bridging the Interplanetary DIGITAL DIVIDE! Someone did say they wanted to host their site on the moon. The Interplanetary Internet from the building-for-the-future dept. posted by Hemos on Monday May 05, @10:16 (internet) http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/05/112722 1
  • Ummm so why don't these guys just backpack around the world, why do they require an excuse using a PC as elaborate as this?

  • Our teams need the help of the Slashdot community to plot a traceroute for each server we visit.

    For the next few days, you need new hosts every few minutes, as they and their connections buckle under the load...

  • why not use DNS LOC records to get better geographical locations of the browsers?

  • Myanmar? Whoa? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ElGanzoLoco ( 642888 ) on Saturday April 26, 2003 @08:00PM (#5816819) Homepage
    Are they serious about going to Myanmar with their website?

    I've lived there for three years, 1993-1996. Myanmar is ruled by a repressive, brutal and notoriously paranoid military junta.
    In a nutshell, "they no like internet".

    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)

    Besides, I'm not sure you would/could actually be able to host a website there (hint: without the government's permission, it's probably "forget it"). A mere slashdotting could bring the whole country's internet system to its knees. Even the government's websites are hosted in other countries, mostly US and Australia. Only some of them are in Rangoon...

    Well, maybe things have changed over there. But somehow, I doubt it.

    • Re:Myanmar? Whoa? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nettdata ( 88196 )
      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. :)
    • Last I checked (about a year ago) it was a big deal that they were letting some of the (state censored) news sites go online -- outside the country only, since as you say most people inside the country aren't allowed computers. The trouble was, since all the content had to be posted by the government to insure that no illicit information got out, when it went up at all it was a couple of months behind the print version.

      Anyway, there is at least some web serving capacity in the country. Still, I agree with
    • If you read their concept a little more carefully, you would recognize that they are not bringing a computer or fax machine, or even a body into Myanmar, or any other country on their list. They are simply uploading the website to a webserver in each country, then updating the dns entry to the new IP address.

      BTW how were you able to live there for 3 years without a computer? That my friend was self inflicted torture, can't blame the junta for that.
      • If you read their concept a little more carefully, you would recognize that they are not bringing a computer or fax machine, or even a body into Myanmar, or any other country on their list. They are simply uploading the website to a webserver in each country, then updating the dns entry to the new IP address.

        I did, in fact, RTFA. My point being that the simple fact of hosting a webserver over there is complicated. I mean, nationals don't even have the right to own a computer. And I'm pretty sure you need
    • Myanmar is ruled by a repressive, brutal and notoriously paranoid military junta.
      In a nutshell, "they no like internet".

      Yes it's true. I travelled through Myanmar(aka Burma) for several weeks, and the parent poster is right on.

      One thing that I found really interesting, there were only 2 places in the country where I could use my credit card. The national bank in rangoon, and mandalay. That's right, 2 places in the entire country that accept credit cards in order to withdraw funds. Not exactly the mos
    • Absolutely right: not much has changed in Burma, it's still a brutal and repressive military regime - one that almost makes Saddam Hussain look like Abraham Lincoln. This is one country that could really use regime change.

      Frankly, even pointing an IP address there is loathsome. There's an international boycott of the country in protest at the human rights abuses, lots more information on that here [burmacampaign.org.uk].
      • Absolutely right: not much has changed in Burma, it's still a brutal and repressive military regime - one that almost makes Saddam Hussain look like Abraham Lincoln.
        Hmmm... this is exagerated, at the least. I don't want to compare two juntas in two totally different contexts, but I don't think Saddam's regime was any milder than the burmese's is. Both are equally horrid.


        This is one country that could really use regime change.

        Yeah, but guess what? There's no oil in Burma, so I don't think Burma is in
        • Yeah it'll be kinda difficult for our teams to get webhosting in some of these countries, but we'll be trying anyway and documenting the procedures that we go through and the correspondence. For Myanmar we've discovered that they now offer webhosting services - http://www.bagan.net.mm . We aren't saying that we'll get it for sure, but the whole point of this is to show that the Internet is not the free medium everybody seems to think it is. Just looking at the traces alone in the past day shows that either
          • Yup... I noticed www.bagan.net.mm... Did a traceroute to that IP. The program I use (iFoundU for OS X) has it ending up in ... Milton, Australia. (The program might be wrong, though, and showing the location of the ISP rather than the one of the IP itself; only IP I could find that pointed to rangoon was www.e-application.com.mm, which are government-run.)

            Though, it's a good idea to document what kind of procedures you go through to be able to host a webserver over there...

            but the whole point of this is
    • I did an interview - with a friend who works in Yangon,who started an art center there. When the project first started, he said it was impossible to use internet and an e-mail account cost 150US$. But he just came back and said it has changed... they are allowing internet surfing (of course a luxury for corporates) but even bangan.net.mm is probably owned by the government.

      "Myanmar has one of the high literacy as a country. Bookshops are extrememly popular. - And also schools set up to teach web-desig
      • But he just came back and said it has changed... they are allowing internet surfing

        Nice to see things changing over there, even if it's "the burmese way": sloooooowly.
        The junta probably just figured out they needed internet to appeal to foreign investment and tourists? (the junta badly needs cash right now, and is trying to develop tourism and economic activity). bagan.net.mm is probably state-run, or at least tightly controlled.
        I wonder if they run some kind of filtering, like China does?

  • A new milestone (Score:3, Funny)

    by cr@ckwhore ( 165454 ) on Saturday April 26, 2003 @10:51PM (#5817283) Homepage
    OH MY GOD! We've Slashdotted Luxembourg!

  • This really reminds me of that one scene where natalia punches in all that crap to traceroute to boris' computer in south america (you know, the one with the big satalite dish). it wasn't all that great of an effect, but it was a neat demonstration of technology anyways...
  • I don't know if this exhibit was at the Walker the last time I was there...I'll have to check it out next time I have a weekend free. Something other than the cherry-on-the-spoon, at least. ^_^ Although, I don't seem to see any mention of this project on the Walker site listed in the article...does anyone know if there will be anything at the actual museum comemmorating this project? Or is it just for those of us "in the know"?
  • Looking at the traceroutes there remind me of something that I've wondered about for some time. Is there any point in trying to route some of the traffic between Europe and Asia more directly (i.e. avoiding the Americas)?

    Even traffic from here in the UK to India goes via the States. Africa is the same.
  • Unfortunately, the Malaysian parts of network mostly don't support reverse DNS lookups, so I can't tell where they are, though some of them are Telekom Malaysia [AS4788], and the actual machines are part of AS17464, address space owned by Telekom Malaysia's hosting division, but might be operated by Webvisions, a company in nearby Singapore. It'd be nice if the Tsunamii folks could provide a bit more information. Telekom Malaysia [AS4788] has BGP connections with UUNET [AS701], Sprintlink[AS1239], and Te

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