This Map Shows Every Connected Device On The Internet

This Map Shows Everything On The Internet At Once

Here's a new way of looking at the world: A map showing the location of every single device connected to the Internet.

The image was created by John Matherly, founder of Shodan, a search engine for connected devices. He pinged every device online, then mapped the location of the ones that responded:

The colors show how many devices are in an area. The redder the dot, the more the devices. The bluer, the fewer. Some areas have no dots, and you'll notice a single dot near the middle of Greenland.

A user on reddit, 2pete, identified it as a NOAA observatory.

Matherly explained how he created the map on Twitter:

"(T)he technical aspects are very straight-forward: send a PING request to every IP on the Internet, store positives response then plot them on a map," he wrote.

On reddit, he offered some more details:

"My ping request would only reach whatever is directly connected to the Internet (i.e. your modem), which for a lot of people is their router," Matherly wrote. "Note that it does also reach phones sometimes, I've seen iPhone/Android devices pop up on Shodan before."

It took about five hours to get the data, Matherly said, and another 12 hours to create the map.

Matherly wrote on Twitter that he collected the data on Aug. 2, and that he plans to do this again and track the changes over time.

"I would expect certain areas (especially in Africa) to become brighter, but the only way to know for sure is to gather empirical data and keep track of it that way," he wrote on reddit.

For those interested in more details and the problem with trying to map data in some areas, read the full discussion on reddit.

(h/t Anonymous)

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