2007 Internet Census
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I thought this was pretty cool. According to NewScientist, John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin of Southern California University, have completed the first Internet Census since 1982. This recent census involved 2.8 billion IP addresses compared to a paltry 315 back in 1982. It took 62 days worth of PINGing but the entire Internet was eventually mapped out which is visually shown using a graphic filled with blocks. Researchers due note that, because of security settings, 61% of the servers didn’t respond to the PING request while the majority of others responded with ‘no comment‘. The following image is an atlas of the internet based on those machines that responded to the PING request. Each square represents a block of IP addresses beginning with that number.
A single pixel inside each square represents colour-coded averaged responses from some 65,536 (216) addresses. All-positive responses are bright green, all-negative bright red, and equal numbers bright yellow, with brightness declining where fewer addresses responded.
According to other research, we are expected to run out of IP addresses by 2010. This same team is now beginning to work on movies of Internet evolution which I’ll be intensely keeping an eyes on.
Click for Full Size:
Thanks Jeff, much appreciated! Been a busy week for me and going away just did not help things, you have saved the day. Great post - Dave
October 25th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
[...] Just the other day, I wrote about an article published by NewScientist which discussed an internet census that was conducted, mapping out the entire internet. The map they provided didn’t provide very much in the way of detail and at times, was difficult to read. Now, someone has taken the idea two steps further by creating a map of the internet that can be navigated similarly to the way you would browse Google Maps. [...]