The man who can see the Internet

washingtonpost.com

87 points·ghosh··6 comments

It's articles like this that remind me the tools I take for granted like BGP, traceroute, and viewing the structure of the Internet at a fundamental level, are a complete mystery to most people outside the industry. Yet everyone depends on the end product every day.

Little bit humbling.

Seconded.

It's also humbling to think how such common tools can be used in a new way to get novel and useful insight into global politics by a relatively small group of people.

It reminds me how I'm constantly underestimating how powerful a lever for the mind computers can be.

I feel the same way about quantum mechanics.

It's also an article like this how much journals' titles could be sensationalized...

My workplace does run BGP but we don't have the whole table. Is there anywhere I can see something like that "BGP ticker" ? Is that channel on a publicly-available IRC network?

There are various BGP looking glass servers that can enable you to see the output of various things like this.

Better still is some of the 'bgplay' tools that are out there. For example, RIPE hosts one here:

https://stat.ripe.net/widget/bgplay

This gives a nice graphical diagram of the way BGP routes have changed over the past few days to a server of your choice.

If you stick in an Internet address that has changed paths recently (e.g. 131.111.150.25 would currently be such an example), you'll then see how the BGP paths have changed, and what ASNs the traffic has travelled through. Very useful for debugging potential network problems.

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