this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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190
Running ping for every IP address (infosec.pub)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by sacred_font@infosec.pub to c/programming@programming.dev
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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)

Non-proxied image

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.

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 92 points 1 week ago (3 children)

every IP address

every IPv4 address

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 42 points 1 week ago (1 children)

ipv6 would look like a starless sky

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 18 points 1 week ago

IPv6: a dark image

[–] sacred_font@infosec.pub 29 points 1 week ago

I left details out to be less verbose.

[–] Glitchvid@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They're working on the IPv6 part right now, just don't ask when it'll be done.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh, it's working already, but way more hassle than the 'ol a.b.c.d stuff IMO!

[–] Bazoogle@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They were joking, saying OP is working on pinging every IPv6 address right now. There are 3.4×10^38^ possible addresses, so if they started pinging a trillion IPs every second, they probably wouldn't finish before our sun implodes.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago

Oh, whoosh I guess 😅

[–] talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Nice! Now do the same for ipv6 :p

Any way to determine/estimate if the black squares are unused blocks ("give them back!") or just not responding to pings?

[–] glitch1985@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

No. Any proper firewall is going to act as if there nothing there.

[–] sacred_font@infosec.pub 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This was a ping scan, so it wasn't probing any TCP/UDP ports (see shodan.io). I suppose you could use ICMP control messages (Destination Unreachable) to determine if something was unused, but that assumes the other side is being friendly.

[–] TheSlad@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hey, I can see my house from here!

[–] skankhunt42@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 week ago

I'm in this pic too!

[–] herseycokguzelolacak@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How long did it take to ping the whole world?

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

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)?

[–] mr_satan@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago

It would be nice to have some overlay of the two images with a difference to see what changed.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Writing it out like 000 is just a convention. .1 is the same as .001. They are actually hex numbers from 0 to FF.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They're not "actually hex". Hex is just a representation. Same as base 10.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You think introducing hex was clarifying?

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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."

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] nebeker@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

This wasn't a "lie to children" - that's a simplification. This was like explaining the Pythagorean theorem by introducing imaginary numbers.

Almost nobody ever uses hex to represent IP addresses ever. There is no reason to bring up hex. It complicates things rather than simplifies.

And to say "[t]hey are actually hex numbers from 0 to FF" is just misleading to the point of wrong. Numbers are not "hex" or "base 10" or "binary". They're numbers. We only represent them as hex or base10. They aren't "different numbers".

And in this case we almost always use base10. SO WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HEX?

[–] Bazoogle@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If anything, it's actually binary...

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago

It's all binary.

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago

Ahh...makes sense. Thanks.

[–] thenextguy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They’re supposed to be (traditionally) written in octal. Which is why they are called ‘octets’.

[–] arthropod_shift@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That smells a little like folk etymology to me, are you sure about that? My understanding is that since the word is older than computers and can refer to any group of 8 things, "octet" in computing just came from the need to communicate a group of exactly 8 bits given that bytes aren't always that size.

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[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I could be mistaken, but I think based on the question, that would not be clarifying. I suppose I could've just left it as they are numeric.

[–] sgh@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The only possible improvement would be to mention that they are bytes - as said otherwise, representation is meaningless, but they factually are 8 bits each segment, which means they are effectively just a number between 0-255.

Still, I think you were able to explain yourself to the other comment, so there's that.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

That's a valid correction and unlike the other comment provides more information rather than just "that's technically bullshit."

[–] poolcritter@pawb.social 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The "." are just separators. Each segment is a number from 0-255 (1 byte). So you hold three segments static (e.g. 10.10.10.x) and then increment the last segment from 0-255 (so 10.10.10.0 -> 10.10.10.255). Then the next segment increments (10.10.11.0 -> 10.10.11.255).

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[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Where is 100.64.0.0/10. Should be reserved

[–] sacred_font@infosec.pub 4 points 1 week ago

Unlabeled grey square at the bottom

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, a link to the tiff would be great.

[–] olenkoVD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago

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?

[–] nosuchanon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

https://youtu.be/GIKfEAF2Yhw

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