All the net's a page...

[mdlbear]

The Whole Internet

What is this?

It's a map of the entire Internet. At the moment we're displaying the owner of each IP address (grey boxes), and which IP addresses are listed on the Spamhaus XBL blacklist (red dots), but we should be able to show other things in the future.

A map?

Yes, we map all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses onto a huge image and let you zoom into it and pan around. Just like google maps, but more internetty.
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How is this done?

We've taken snapshots of the internet routing table (from CAIDA for this demo, but we'd probably use a local BGP feed out of preference) to work out who owns each IP address, and a snapshot of the Spamhaus XBL as some interesting data to overlay on the map.

Then we use a Hilbert curve to map those addresses onto a two-dimensional map, as inspired by xkcd, so that nearby IP addresses are nearby on the map and so that CIDR ranges (the usual way blocks of IP addresses are broken down) map onto squares or rectangles.

As you request bits of the map we generate them on the fly (using a fastcgi application written in C++/Qt) in zoomify format to your browser, using the giant scalable image viewer.

Unfortunately the Hilbert curve mapping makes it essentially impossible to navigate to a particular address, though they're apparently working on it. And because it's taken from the routing tables, it doesn't show blocks that aren't routed to, like the Class C block I acquired ages ago before it became expensive, or the block $EMPLOYER acquired around the same time, which I'm posting from. It's still cool