Full Net Census Takes a Hint From xkcd

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.

Really useful for the colorblind

[farker haiku]

Anyone got a colorblind friendly version of the map?
FTA:
Responses: positive: green, negative: red, mix: yellow.

seriously guys, wtf.

Why has nobody commented on the Hilbert Curve?

[Spy der Mann]

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.

rolling blackout

[ziegast]

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.

set icmp_messaging off

[postbigbang]

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. It's a randomly successful find (I have no affiliation with them), rather it always works, when it works.

Re:Really useful for the colorblind

[UbuntuDupe]

Right, but the transformation itself should be pretty simple, right? Just a rotation/inversion/dilation of the color wheel.

And since Firefox has a really easy process for writing plugins...

Re:colorblindness IS fairly comon

[WeirdJohn]

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). I had a friend to whom the grass was brown - he had very few green cones. Another friend had it so mildly that he only got confused with a few pastel shades. I'm somewhere in between.

Colour-blind people have an evolutionary advantage - most forms of camouflage are ineffective. This works for natural and artificial camouflage, so I'll be a better hunter in the post apocalyptic hunter/gatherer society. In times of famine I'll provide more food for my family. Conversely, my family is much more likely to be injured due to my failure to see a big hailstorm coming.

The Internet Auditing Project of 1999

[meridian]

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]

Hoarding IP addresses and blocks of Phone Numbers

[Dr.Who]

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

I used to work for a Fortune 500 company with 30 K employees that had 3 and now has 6 class B IP address ranges so that each computer could have a unique IP address. At the same time, they configured all routers to block all inbound traffic to all but a few of those addresses corresponding to servers for mail, HTML, and FTP!

A small fee of even 1 $/month would make that hoarding go away. Perhaps the first 5 or so could be reserved at a lower rate. The same is true for companies hoarding blocks of 1000 or 100 phone numbers which is causing all of the split and overlays in the NANP.

Re:colorblindness IS fairly comon

[Matthew Bafford]

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 friend had it so mildly that he only got confused with a few pastel shades. I'm somewhere in between.

Colors are pretty much always what they are unless I can't distinguish them. For the most part interactions are where the problem comes in. Colors disappear, or I can't tell two colors apart. However, given a single item I can usually name the color. The blue-purple-black scale is hard. Grays and pinks can be identical. Pastels are annoying. Green, red, and grey shirts can all three look grey to me depending on the shade.

Still, my point is that I learned what blue looks like to me, so I call things blue. So many people ask me, "what color does this look like?" as if they expect my world to be some weird psychedelic mixture of colors. It's really more a matter of minor shifts in color than anything.

Colour-blind people have an evolutionary advantage - most forms of camouflage are ineffective. This works for natural and artificial camouflage, so I'll be a better hunter in the post apocalyptic hunter/gatherer society. In times of famine I'll provide more food for my family. Conversely, my family is much more likely to be injured due to my failure to see a big hailstorm coming.

I don't care how accurate that is, we obviously think alike in this respect. I shall proudly tout my post-apocalyptic Darwinian advantage to all who care to hear. Perhaps we should keep quiet about it, though - maybe they will adapt and use those colored dots for camouflage instead... The camouflage not working thing is really real, though - I remember seeing hunting catalogs where ads had pictures of a person in camouflage hiding in the woods and I could always spot them immediately.