What you're looking at is a map of nearly every device that was connected to the internet on August 2. Or, at least, a map of ones that responded to a ping request from John Matherly, an internet cartographer. Because now, you can ping every computer on the internet fairly easily.
And you can make a map just like this without all that much technical knowledge. Within the last year, it has become exceedingly easy to scan the entire internet using open source tools. Using a method known as "stateless scanning," you can send and receive packets to, well, everyone connected to the internet on the planet, in roughly an hour, as we reported last summer.
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