23rd
The maps of the Internet
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The Opte Project was created to make a visual representation of a space that is very much one-dimensional, a metaphysical universe. The data represented and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling the Internet, analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution, detecting the result of natural disasters, weather, war, and esthetics/art.
“Within two weeks the self-described technologist and entrepreneur Barrett Lyon had created a program that could output a detailed visualization of Internet connectivity in a few hours. Seven years and billions more Internet-connected devices later, Lyon is still at it. This cosmic-looking image, one of his newest creations, traces the millions of routes along which data can travel and pinpoints the hubs receiving the most traffic. Internet giants such as AT&T and Google manage the most heavily used networks, which appear here as glowing yellow orbs; they tend to concentrate in the center of the sphere. The less popular local networks (red) sit on the periphery. Although Lyon’s visualizations have appeared in computing textbooks and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”
— The Internet Looks Like a Fractal Dandelion, DISCOVER Magazine, Nov 11, 2011
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“This map is built off of our database using two different graphing engines: Large Graph Layout (LGL) by Alex Adai and Graphviz by Peter North at AT&T Labs Research.
This graph is by far our most complex. It is using over 5 million edges and has an estimated 50 million hop count.
Graph Colors:
Asia Pacific - Red
Europe/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa - Green
North America - Blue
Latin American and Caribbean - Yellow
RFC1918 IP Addresses - Cyan
Unknown - White
Date: Nov 22 2003
Today the image has been used free of charge across the globe and is part of the permanent collection at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Boston Museum of Science. It has been used in countless books, media, and even movies.”
Internet Mapping Project
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Image colored by IP address in 16 August 1998. More: The Internet Mapping Project.
See also:
☞ The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis
☞ Cyber Geography Research
☞ The Rocketfuel ISP topology mapping engine
