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Full Net Census Takes a Hint From xkcd

Posted by kdawson on Tue Oct 09, 2007 01:01 PM
from the you-say-hilbert-i-say-dilbert dept.
The Internet Math
netbuzz writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute says it's the first full census of the 'visible Internet' since David Smallberg canvassed a piddling 315 allocated addresses in 1982. They're talking about 3 billion pings directed toward 2.8 million addresses over the course of 62 days. Oh, and they credit the comic strip xkcd for sparking the idea of presenting the data using a Hilbert curve." The main page for the census project has links to versions of the census at various scales.
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Submission: Researchers tout full 'Net census ... thank xkcd by netbuzz (955038)
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  • first census (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:03PM (#20914703)
    here I am. continue counting...

  • Yay, we really are Digg. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:07PM (#20914757)
    xkcd on the front page...

  • Really useful for the colorblind (Score:4, Interesting)

    by farker haiku (883529) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:08PM (#20914771) Journal
    Anyone got a colorblind friendly version of the map?
    FTA:
    Responses: positive: green, negative: red, mix: yellow.

    seriously guys, wtf.

    • Re:Really useful for the colorblind (Score:4, Funny)

      by EveryNickIsTaken (1054794) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:12PM (#20914841)
      I'm still waiting for the braile version.

      Seriously guys, wtf.

      • Re:Really useful for the colorblind (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Matthew Bafford (43849) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:58PM (#20915599) Homepage

        I'm still waiting for the braile version.

        Seriously guys, wtf.


        The main difference being, of course, that designing visual medium so that it supports both color-blind and normal visioned people equally well is extremely easy. Designing visual media that supports blind people is extremely difficult. There's no excuse, other than ignorance (which is the real reason in most cases), for not supporting color-blind people.

          • colorblindness IS fairly comon (Score:4, Informative)

            by Matthew Bafford (43849) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @02:21PM (#20915941) Homepage

            The main similarity being, of course, that both color blindedness and .. blindedness .. are rare enough that the designers of the image hadn't even thought of it.


            Stats vary (and you can look them up easily enough), but the general idea is that 1/12 males are color-blind to some degree. That means most groups are fairly likely to have at least one color-blind person in them. Now the severity of color-blindness as well as the affect that has varies significantly from one color-blind person the next.

            I, for example, am color-blind, but didn't find the chart to be horribly difficult to use. Different colors might have made things easier, but it doesn't bother me in this case. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered when designing. Like I said, most color problems are due to plain ignorance as to how common the problem really is. I don't blame people for not considering it, as long as they really didn't realize.

            • Re:colorblindness IS fairly comon (Score:5, Funny)

              by kefler (938387) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @02:36PM (#20916139)
              as well as the affect that has varies significantly from one color-blind person the next.

              Now, I'd normally think this should be 'effect', but I wonder if you might be doing this. [xkcd.com]

              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by Matthew Bafford (43849)

                The frequency of colour-blindness varies with race. Amongst males of Asian descent, the incidence is as high as 30%. It's rarest for Africans, with Europeans somewhere in between. There is also variation in degree (as well as different kinds, with different colours affected).

                Ah, I had forgotten about that. I wonder if that helps explain why so many electronics use multi-color LEDs. I imagine price is a bigger factor, though.

                I had a friend to whom the grass was brown - he had very few green cones. Another

          • What about simply not caring? Isn't that an excuse?
            Sure it is; excuses are really quite easy to generate. Reasonable excuses are a little harder to come by, though.

    • God, STFU (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:39PM (#20915257)
      I'm colorblind and I can see the difference in shades just fine.

      Maybe you should ask the people you're acting like you care about whether they actually need you to whine for them.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by adamziegler (1082701)
        Even though you too are red green colorblind... it does not mean that you are seeing it the same way as the parent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Congenital_color_vision_deficiencies [wikipedia.org] Besides... its fairly simple to design a website or chart that makes things easy for even those who are color blind. I too am color blind... Honestly, I can't tell if the negatives and positives are mixed together when I look at it. (Not that I am fluent in reading the chart anyway!)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pcgabe (712924)
        I'm red-green colorblind, and I absolutely, positively, cannot tell the difference between these two colors on this map. I can see the shades, sure. I just can't see what they are shades OF.

        Maybe you should ask yourself whether you're acting like a jerk for attention.

        [It's great that YOU can read this map just fine, but that doesn't help ME. In fact, coming here and saying that there's no problem for anyone is actually detrimental. Perhaps you can keep your mild color-blindness to yourself in the future
    • The ANT Lab doesn't care about color(blind) people.

  • See also xkcd comic "Online Communities" (Score:5, Funny)

    by saibot834 (1061528) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:09PM (#20914781) Homepage
    Randall Munroe [wikipedia.org] (xkcd author) also made this [xkcd.com] comic entitled "Online Communities". Also a nice way to make a map of the internet. (Extra points for those, who find "Stallman's Airship")

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kandenshi (832555)
      For the lazy it's just to the "southwest" of the IRC isles, southeast of wikipedia. Easier to see in the blown up version of the strip here [xkcd.com]

    • Randall Munroe (xkcd author) also made this comic entitled "Online Communities". Also a nice way to make a map of the internet. (Extra points for those, who find "Stallman's Airship")
      It's a bit out of date, facebook expanded a lot. Myspace shrank and wheres slashdot.

  • Plot of the internet 9ft tall (Score:5, Funny)

    by N1ck0 (803359) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:11PM (#20914815)
    Don't you just hate it when the internet wraps onto the ceiling [isi.edu]. All those packets are horrible on the acoustic tiles.

    And once it gets up there you know its going to be hard to get it back down.

  • So what's the over under on the percentage of porn sites?

    85%?

  • What _is_ this site coming to? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JeanBaptiste (537955) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:15PM (#20914869)
    People are doing this same thing constantly. [google.com]

    Not that its not cool, but acting like it hasn't been done since 1982 is grossly incorrect.
  • Hmm. That means there's still lots of IPs available (if bright blue = unused), right?

  • Well if they need it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by CaptainPatent (1087643) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:17PM (#20914903) Journal
    I'd be willing to be a guinea pig for their next project [xkcd.com]

  • 61% are non-replies (Score:4, Funny)

    by digitaldc (879047) * on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:23PM (#20915005)
    39% are pr0n

  • Stand up and be counted? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:29PM (#20915101) Homepage Journal

    They're talking about 3 billion pings directed toward 2.8 million addresses over the course of 62 days.

    I assume 90% are spambots, 5% are people trying to get Frist Psot and the remainder are legit.

    • ... 5% downloading porn, 10% stealing copyright material. the remainder are legit.

      sure, that might be 110%, but that just shows you how efficient the Internet is.

  • nmap (Score:3, Informative)

    by blhack (921171) * on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:35PM (#20915201)
    PSH..

    nmap -sP *.*.*.* > ips.txt
  • I knew the Hilbert curve could fill the space by replacing each segment with a copy of itself (a basic concept in fractal theory, self similarity). But I didn't know that the curve had this interesting property: Similar addresses had nearby locations in two-dimensional space. The XKCD guy is a genius.

    Anyway, here's more info on the Hilbert Curve [wikipedia.org]. Enjoy.

  • And in other news... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2007, @01:52PM (#20915515)
    XKCD's writer shows his love for /. . http://xkcd.com/301/ [xkcd.com]

  • rolling blackout (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ziegast (168305) * on Tuesday October 09 2007, @02:11PM (#20915781) Homepage
    Back in the mid-90's a research student in a south-east Asian country decided to do a similar experiment. They started pinging 0.0.0.0, 0.0.0.1, ...etc... When they got to 1.0.0.0 they took down BBN's network and upstream ISPs because the routers would negative-cache host routes of failed pings, thereby flushing out all the other working routes. My ISP got hosed when they got to 3.0.0.0 (Merit) since they were our customer. The attack moved up through 4.0.0.0 , then, back to 4.0.0.0 BBN, and up through other networks. On that day, the Internet suffered a rolling blackout because everyone was using Cisco routers affected by the same problem. When the source was identified and blocked, the problem stopped.

    It's better to measure who is _using_ the Internet at central resources (root DNS servers, google, time.windows.com) rather than who can respond to a ping. Back when I was young, people didn't use NAT or firewalls and everything responded to a ping. Today, millions (billions?) of people don't really have public address space, and are separated from the IPv4 Internet by one or more levels of NAT or proxy servers. Clusters of web servers are mostly virtualized behind a single address served by load balancers and/or firewalls. A "ping" census is worth less today compared to prior to the rise of NAT firewalls in the late 90's. It's still interesting, but not at all accurate.

    Aside: When ISPs and corporations are forced to pay equitably for the addresses (and routes!) they use, the IPv4 "crisis" will solve itself.

    • You won't find any of my servers/boundaries responding to a ping on any address at any port for any reason. Send a TCP packet, and all of them will look at it, stroke their chins for a few microseconds, and decide whether to forward them or simply move on.

      A ping test is perhaps one of the silliest, as you cite by a more accurate observation of key SOA servers over a period of time.

      That said, I like Novell.com's bravery, as they always respond to a ping. It's how I know that my DNS infrastructure is working.

      • Play nice, let your firewall answer all pings. (Score:4, Informative)

        by Medievalist (16032) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @04:03PM (#20917439)

        You won't find any of my servers/boundaries responding to a ping on any address at any port for any reason. Send a TCP packet, and all of them will look at it, stroke their chins for a few microseconds, and decide whether to forward them or simply move on.
        Are you sure that's all they are stroking? Just kidding. It seems a bit unnecessary to shut down your site's ability to help others test connectivity to you. You really aren't doing anything but crippling harmless diagnostics; it's very easy to make your network safe to ping.

        A ping test is perhaps one of the silliest, as you cite by a more accurate observation of key SOA servers over a period of time.
        But, you see, there's no single trustworthy authority that has root access to all the nameservers. Think about how DNS works, and how the hints file interacts with local and intermediate caches, and you will see that your idea is not really any more workable than a ping test. It's too impossible to co-ordinate. I cache at three levels for good solid reasons not having anything to do with "fear of a bad ping". On the other hand I assume pings are friendly and only monitor them for performance and bandwidth reasons, and I have not yet been hacked despite many years of pen tests by outside agencies we've hired.

        That said, I like Novell.com's bravery, as they always respond to a ping. It's how I know that my DNS infrastructure is working. It's a randomly successful find (I have no affiliation with them), rather it always works, when it works.
        Aha! You admit that your fears are impacting your ability to serve the community - in a way that you admit is valuable! This admission is the first step to great power! OK, just kidding again.

        Configure your firewalls to respond to all inward-bound pings for your entire address space. This will not consume any significant resources, and will not inform any skeery crackers of anything (in fact it's a better way to fool them than blocking ping, since they will not need to resort to stealthier scans that require more resources to detect or block). Log who pings you to the router console and leave a dumb terminal running on it, or pump it into a secure internal web page. Treat ping flooding like any other kind of packet flooding - you can't really make it impossible to DDOS you simply by blocking specific ICMP types anyway. Don't forget to implement packet source ingress and egress filtering, obviously.

        Google, yahoo, and Novell all respond to ping. It's a service they kindly provide to the rest of us, a service we should all provide to make the Internet's tubes easier to see through. You aren't going to get hurt by a ping unless you have no idea how to set up a network... in which case dropping ping packets won't save you.

        Don't make researchers have to develop new ways to punch through firewalls, let's all just use good ol' friendly, simple, and useful pings.

  • The Internet Auditing Project of 1999 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by meridian (16189) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @04:46PM (#20918007) Homepage
    These guys port scanned 36 million hosts connected to the Internet and published some of their findings. It makes for a very interesting read especially the bit about when their Japanese team gets hacked into during the scan after apparently annoying someone in China a little bit after scanning their subnet blocks. http://reactor-core.org/internet-audit.html [reactor-core.org]

  • Oh no! The Total Perspective Vortex (mark 0.7) (Score:3, Funny)

    by tjwhaynes (114792) on Tuesday October 09 2007, @05:26PM (#20918525)
    The Total Perspective Vortex is the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected. It shows its victim the entire unimaginable infinity of the universe with a very tiny marker that says "You Are Here" which points to a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot.

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