The demo is a map of the entire Internet. As the devloper stated, "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. Currently, 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. 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."
Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder
and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco focused on next generation websites. About Max...
07-25 12:01
Trying to decide where to go to lunch with @emilychang.
