Beautiful, Intriguing, and Illegal Ways to Map the Internet | WIRED In 2013, an anonymous hacker ma
Beautiful, Intriguing, and Illegal Ways to Map the Internet | WIRED In 2013, an anonymous hacker mapped the Internet through illegal means, and in the process exposed rampant security problems. The project, called Internet Census 2012, used 420,000 networked devices, dubbed the Carna Botnet, to ping IP addresses across the globe in 2012. Every one of the devices was either entirely unsecured with no password protection, or used the standard password “root” that comes with many off-the-shelf routers (users are supposed to change the password, but rarely do). The hacker released all of the collected data to the public domain in a sort of research paper. The animation above is a map based on that data that shows 24-hours of Internet use. This map from 2011 by designer Nicolas Rapp shows the fiber optic cables that traverse the oceans carrying information from one continent to the other. The shades of blue show the percentage of a country’s population that uses the Internet (darker shades indicate a lower percentage). This “Map of the Submarine Cables connecting the World” pays homage to “the lost art of cartographic sea monster illustrations.” The sea monsters are borrowed from real historical maps, including three from Olaus Magnus’s legendary Carta Marina.The Opte Project was created by Barrett Lyon to help people visualize the internet by making a map of the relationship between every routable network using a single computer and Internet connection. The result is the map on the left from 2004. The colors represent regions (blue is North America, red is Asia Pacific, green isr Euope/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa, yellow is Latin America and the Carribbean, cyan is RFC1918 IP Addresses, and white is unknown). The image on the right from 2010, currently on display at the MoMA in NYC, uses BGP rather than raw traceroutes. The most connection points are represented by the highest temperature colors of light. -- source link