I pinged every IP address that wasn’t reserved. The image is 8k by 8k and is re-encoded as an AVIF to be friendlier to mobile devices. Like every other survey done, it is using a Hilbert Curve to convert the linear address space to a contiguous 2d space. The hotter the colors (blue is coolest), the denser the ping responses were.
(If you are interested the full-resolution pyramidal-tiled TIFF can be downloaded and viewed in QuPath on desktop. I’ve also compressed the ping response data into its own format down to about 150 MB. PM me for a link)

Here is a 2006 survey to compare.

Some observations: Big Tech (USA) is in the top left. US government allocations, for the most part, did not respond to any pings. And maybe you didn’t realize this before, but Multicast (Class D) & Class E consume a whopping 12% of the IPv4 range.
The Hilbert curve visualization is surprisingly satisfying.
It’s interesting how certain companies and organizations have such large ranges, 16m IP’s each for both that old printer company and a farmaceutical company is a lot. It really shows the history of the internet and how seemingly certain companies that adopted it first ended up with huge chunks of the available IPv4 space.
How long did it take to ping the whole world?
Or more specifically, what is the sum of all latencies divided by the number of responses times the total numer of requests sent (to scale up for the ones that didn’t reply, assuming their average latency would have been similar to the total average)?
Exactly the same thing had been done in this very interesting video I had watched some time ago. Did you get the idea from there?
Yeah, a link to the tiff would be great.
Updated
Thanks!
Forgive me if this is an ignorant question. How did you do the incremental address to address search? In my head I would start with “000.000.000.000” and then “000.000.000.001” and so on but that doesn’t account for the “000.000.000.1” scenario, or any combination thereof.
Essentially, IPv4 addresses[2] are just numbers from 1 to 2147483647, for example 3405804031. However, since address routing is often based on common binary prefix, more intuitive methods like 203.0.113.255 are used. This notation is just a length-4 list of integers from 0 to 255. To convert from an integer to a common IP address, you divide-with-remainder with a constant divisor of 256. For example, 3405804031 /% 256 = (13303921,256), 13303921 /% 256 = (51968,113), 51968 /% 256 = (203,0), and 203 /% 256 = (0,203).[1] Collecting all the remainders in reverse order, then joining them with periods, produces 203.0.113.255. (This notation is just for people to read; aside from parsing code, none of IPv4 uses this notation.) When you enter an IPv4 address, the opposite happens — an expression like ((203 * 256 + 0) * 256 + 113) * 256 + 255, which evaluates to 3405804031, is performed. These octets are just numbers — using 203.000.113.255 or 203.00.113.255 in place of 203.0.113.255 is merely a choice of how to write the address, as 203 * 256 + 0 = 203 * 256 + 000. mraow
[1]: this operation can be omitted; I include it for symmetry. [2]: though all of this holds true for IPv6, I really didn’t feel like going through 128 bits of address
Writing it out like 000 is just a convention.
.1is the same as.001. They are actually hex numbers from0toFF.They’re not “actually hex”. Hex is just a representation. Same as base 10.
If anything, it’s actually binary…
It’s all binary.
What communicates what they need to know at the level they’re at? I can get technical about octets and bounded decimals, or I can give a simple answer that puts those values into a familiar context.
You think introducing hex was clarifying?
Yes I do.
https://lemmy.ca/comment/24351633
Feel free to explain to them how “it’s all just a representation, man. Nothing means anything. It’s just electrons moving around.”
I mean - they are “numbers”. Numbers are not in hex or decimal. Saying “they’re really hex numbers” is not just wrong it’s kinda meaningless since
ff==255.You’ve explained it badly.
Lie-to-children. See also “perfect is the enemy of good.”
This was very hard for me to understand, particularly when the simple answer in school that was provided for the benefit of the rest of the class didn’t come with a deeper follow-up, but I now recognize the great value in meeting people where they are.
Hey, I can see my house from here!
every IP address
every IPv4 address




