

The Most Detailed Picture of the Internet Ever (and Making it Was Very Illegal) - iKlsR
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-is-most-detailed-picture-internet-ever

======
nikcub
The very premise of this article is a huge technical error that misreads the
Internet Census report. for eg.

> The map is further limited to Linux-based computers with a certain amount of
> processing power. And finally, because of the parameters of the hack, it
> shows some amount of bias towards naive users who don't put passwords on
> their computers.

The author is confusing the machines that were taken over as part of the
botnet in order to scale the mapping, as opposed to the machines that were
actually mapped (the entire IPv4 space) [1].

Again:

> the researcher hacked into nearly half a million computers so that he could
> ping each one

He hacked the machines so he could ping _other_ machines. This error is made
throughout the article:

> But on a general, half-a-million-computer level, this is what the Internet
> looks

The map below this statement is the map of the entire IPv4 space, not just the
botnet.

> but IPv4 is still pretty common.

Right, ya think? That is all that was mapped, IPv4.

> Because at the end of the day, there's a fair amount of debate over what the
> real state of play on the Internet looks like. Some say it's a map of
> connections, others say it's a Tootsie Roll Pop made up of layer upon layer
> of activity.

Here he is comparing a geographic map of IPv4 addresses and a routing map, and
in the second analogy confuses a geographic IPv4 map with a link map across
popular websites.

[1] Mapping the entire IPv4 space from a single machine would take decades.
What the researcher did, which as far as I know hasn't been done before, is he
created a botnet of 400,000 machines to help him in the task. The task of
pinging and probing the internet was divided up across the botnet. With the
large botnet he could not only ping scan the entire IPv4 space, but he could
probe the most common service ports at each responding machine and get it done
in hours, rather than decades. The article confuses the botnet with the survey
results.

~~~
hobs
I don't think mapping the entire IPv4 space would take decades from a single
machine (unless I misunderstand what you mean by that).

The founder of metasploit did this and then gave a talk about defcon about it.
[http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-
security/rsa-2013-out...](http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-
security/rsa-2013-outdated-software-biggest-internet-security-threat.html)

~~~
subsystem
Fyodor of Nmap did something similar, the talk from Defcon is pretty funny and
informative.

<http://nmap.org/presentations/BHDC08/>

------
andor
Original discussion of the source:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5395009>

------
txet
Presentation on similar research

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=b...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=b-uPh99whw4)

------
FollowSteph3
Finally a botnet being used for something not destructive or spammy

