Posted on 11/15/2006 4:29:32 PM PST by blam
Map: What Does the Internet Look Like?
Why China has as many IP addresses as an American university, which ISP should be called "Spamalot," and more.
By Stephen Ornes
DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 10 | October 2006 | Technology
Image courtesy of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis.
Information moving through cyberspace travels in tiny packets that hopscotch around the world. Using data from a two-week stretch in April 2005, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) traced these packets' paths from hub to hub and country to country to capture a snapshot of the worldwide network topology.
1 FLAT EARTH SOCIETY
CAIDA's map represents a flattened Earth, with cities positioned around the circle. Tracing the circumference clockwise corresponds to moving from east to west. Each square represents a data hub, which lines up on a spoke with the city in which it is registered. The closer to the center it lies, the more data it traffics.
2 SINOSNUB
The United States owns 74 percent of the 4 billion available Internet protocol (IP) addresses. China's stake amounts to little more than that of an American university. Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses.
3 YOU STILL WON'T GET TO HAWAII
Hubs in Honolulu—and all over the Pacific—connect to only a few other hubs, which means your data are highly unlikely to pass through the Aloha State.
4 RING AROUND THE NET
The concentric rings of squares near the perimeter result from CAIDA's mapping mechanism, which plots a hub's distance from the center according to how many connections it has.
5 BRING IT ON HOME
The farther from the center, the lonelier the hub. The squares closest to the circumference of the circle represent the Internet service providers, or ISPs, that connect home PCs to the Internet. When one of these goes down, customers have no other way to get online.
6 WELCOME TO SPAMALOT!
UUNet is one of the oldest and largest ISPs; it connects to more than 2,000 other hubs. It is also the most vulnerable to junk mail and hosts more spam-generating gangs than any other ISP.
7 CAN THE CENTER HOLD?
If a high-traffic hub goes down, the data will usually find another path. "There are shortcuts everywhere," says CAIDA's Brad Heffaker. If a packet can't find its way, it returns a discouraging message to the sender.
But there is this little tiny problem. Mandarin Chinese, one of so many Chinese dialects, has over 64,000 pictograms, not letters as in the English 26. It is highly inconvenient to deal with Chinese pictograms, particularly when you're typing on a keyboard.
Welcome to the world of the round-eyed.
Remember back in the 80's when terminals displayed eighty columns of text in a fixed format? I visited Japan in the early nineties and saw them using high resolution monitors and fancy text editors that supplied "kanji" ( literally "chinese writing" ) when you typed in phonetics. It occurred to me that the proliferation of hi-res monitors got a big push from this usage.
Recall that in the sixties people were predicting that the Chinese and Japanese would have to adopt an alphabet so that they could use typewriters. Word processing with kanji is still not the most convenient, but its good enough to extinguish the talk of abandoning it.
Wow. A lot of traffic at the North Pole. Is it Christmas already?
>>>>>"has over 64,000 pictograms"<<<<<<<
2006 Best Bet Stocking Stuffer "Mavis Beacon Teaches Pictogram Typing" (Keyboard not included)
TT
The question is, how would one go about denying Internet access to the Islamic world?
Demand truth
It escapes some geniuses to consider that a chart is useless if it can't actually be read and examined...
Mohammad didn't have the internet. Isn't that what they tell vendors of ice and ice cream before they shoot them.
I for one, cannot foresee the slightest interest, ever, for getting email from the Council of Islamic States...
If I could block them globally, I would do it in an instant.
Thanks blam.
Quix, here's a ping for ya.
jm
That's easy:
The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled. And if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. I just the other day got - an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
"Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses."
If the article is referring to IPv6 (internet protocol version 6, the net currently runs IPv4, don't ask about "v5"), The US is running hard to that standard also. Most of the routing gear in place today as well as servers, Windos XP, and many flavors of Linux support IPv6. More infrastructure will need to be in place, but it is coming. It will be stronger, more scalable, and more secure.
Cheers
The first four sentances of whatshisname saying that is my son's greeting on his cell phone voice mail.
"Mandarin Chinese, one of so many Chinese dialects, has over 64,000 pictograms,"
That's a 16 bit value per character (65,536 different combinations)... that should represent all of them :)!
"Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses."
This is probably IPv6 they are referring to...I can see the day where packets are always taxed with more header than data :). What's sick is that typically packets sent are IP wrapping TCP wrapping Ethernet...lots of overhead :)! (no, I don't have a better solution...I just like to complain :) :) I always liked ATM more ).
I know there are many different ways of doing what's described above, but it's funny how things are taxed more as they grow. Of course, if you grow the packet payload size, the tax rate of packet header decreases (i.e. you accomplish the same thing with lower taxes)....of course, with Dems in charge, they will probably push for a 64 byte payload limit to keep the internet fair for all to use resulting in a substantial packet header tax increase....I mean, it is not fair that some applications use payloads of 1500 bytes while others are restricted to 64 byte payloads.
eh, I am tired...long day...cannot think straight :P
I gotta tell ya, I'm really enjoying the stuff you're posting from Discover.
read later
Thanks.
Just think, we all have Al Gore to thank for inventing this grand thing we call the internet!
~ Blue Jays ~
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