For the first time, researchers have conducted an Internet census by mapping the Web's nearly 3 billion assigned IP addresses, an effort that could provide important clues to how to fight computer viruses, according to the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute.
The researchers hope to discover how Internet worms spread through computers across the globe and to get a clearer understanding of how to expand the Internet's capacity. If left unchecked, the growing number of users and IP addresses threatens to limit Internet access by 2010.
The ISI has performed about 17 versions of the census since 2003, but the notable difference in the latest version is that it's the first time researchers have developed a visual representation of it.
"My research group has been exploring how to understand the Internet and how to interpret network traffic. So we realized that it was actually feasible to take a census," said John Heidemannn, a senior project leader at the ISI and a research associate professor in the computer science department at USC. "We worked out how to do that and we're trying to understand the data we've collected."
The census, which was funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation, was conducted when the team sent an Internet probe, also known as a "ping," to the 2.8 billion IP addresses currently in use.
An IP address is a unique, permanent 10-digit number assigned to nearly every piece of hardware that taps into the Internet.
When the probes contact IP addresses, the addresses automatically send a response signal back to the origin of the probe, allowing the researchers to record the results. As the addresses responded, Heidemann and colleague Yuri Pradkin began mapping them according to their numerical location on a grid. What resulted was a clearer image of computers and other devices that use the Internet all over the world.
It took Heidemann 62 days to send messages to each of these addresses and several more days to develop the graphs of the addresses.
"There are many purposes one could use this data for," Heidemann said. "One purpose is trying to better understand Internet security."
Like the "pings" Heidemann sent out, Internet "worms," viruses that replicate themselves, probe IP addresses randomly. Those not protected by firewalls might be vulnerable to worms.
"Understanding how [IP addresses are] used and allocated, we can better understand how worms might spread," he said.
But computer security isn't the only reason to explore the Internet's addresses, according to Heidemann.
In the current system, there are a limited number of IP addresses -- just more than 4 billion. If we run out, which some experts predict could happen as early as May 2010, some users might be unable to tap into the Web.
Although a new system under development would make more and longer addresses available, it has been slow to catch on, according to the researcher.
"We have more than 4 billion [IP addresses], so less than one per person," Heidemann said. "I think users of the Internet are starting to realize that this is a problem that they're going to be facing soon. My hope is that our data will help shed some light on this challenge."
The Institute plans to continue performing censuses to keep track of how addresses are used and how fast the Internet is growing.
"The work is still ongoing," he said.
Computer Security Can Double As Help For The Blind
Science Daily — Before you can post a comment to most blogs, you have to type in a series of distorted letters and numbers (a CAPTCHA) to prove that you are a person and not a computer attempting to add comment spam to the blog.
Images from a research shopping trip with GroZi a Grocery Shopping Assistant for the Visually Impaired developed by UC San Diego computer science professor Serge Belongie. On October 15, 2007 Belongie presented a paper at an interactive computer vision conference and described how people posting comments on blogs could provide data critical for this project. (Credit: Serge Belongie / UC San Diego)
What if -- instead of wasting your time and energy typing something meaningless like SGO9DXG -- you could label an image or perform some other quick task that will help someone who is visually impaired do their grocery shopping?
In a position paper presented at Interactive Computer Vision (ICV) 2007 on October 15 in Rio de Janeiro, computer scientists from UC San Diego led by professor Serge Belongie outline a grid system that would allow CAPTCHAs to be used for this purpose -- and an endless number of other good causes.
"One of the application areas for my research is assistive technologyfor the blind. For example, there is an enormous amount of data that needs to be labeled for our grocery shopping aid to work. We are developing a wearable computer with a camera that can lead a visually impaired user to a desired product in a grocery store by analyzing the video stream. Our paper describes a way that people who are looking to prove that they are humans and not computers can help label still shots from video streams in real time," said Belongie.
The researchers call their system a "Soylent grid" which is a reference to the 1973 film Soylent Green (see more on this reference at the end of the article).
"The degree to which human beings could participate in the system (as remote sighted guides) ranges from none at all to virtually unlimited. If no human user is involved in the loop, only computer vision algorithms solve the identification problem. But in principle, if there were an unlimited number of humans in the loop, all the video frames could be submitted to a SOYLENT GRID, be solved immediately and sent back to the device to guide the user," the authors write in their paper.
From the front end, users who want to post a comment on a blog would be asked to perform a variety of tasks, instead of typing in a string of misshapen letters and numbers.
"You might be asked to click on the peanut butter jar or click the Cheetos bag in an image," said Belongie. "This would be one of the so called 'Where's Waldo' object detection tasks."
The task list also includes "Name that Thing" (object recognition), "Trace This" (image segmentation) and "Hot or Not" (choosing visually pleasing images).
"Our research on the personal shopper for the visually impaired -- called Grozi -- is a big motivation for this project. When we started the Grozi project, one of the students, Michele Merler -- who is now working on a Ph.D. at Columbia University -- captured 45 minutes of video footage from the campus grocery store and then endured weeks of manually intensive labor, drawing bounding boxes and identifying the 120 products we focused on. This is work the soylent grid could do," said Belongie.
From the back end, researchers and others who need images labeled would interact with clients (like a blog hosting company) that need to take advantage of the CAPTCHA and spam filtering capabilities of the grid.
"Getting this done is going to take an innovative collaboration between academia and industry. Calit2 could be uniquely instrumental in this project," said Belongie. "Right now we are working on a proposal that will outline exactly what we need -- access to X number of CAPTCHA requests in one week, for example. With this, we'll do a case study and demonstrate just how much data can be labeled with 99 percent reliability through the soylent grid. I'm hoping for people to say, 'Wow, I didn't know that kind of computation was available.'"
This work incorporates recent work from a variety of researchers, including computer scientist Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University. His reCAPTCHA project uses CAPTCHAs to digitize books.
Soylent Grid?
The researchers call their system a "Soylent grid" and titled their paper "Soylent Grid: it's Made of People! Both the grid name and paper name are references to the 1973 cult classic film Soylent Green, a dystopian science fiction film set in an overpopulated world in which the masses are reduced to eating different varieties of "soylent" -- a synthetic food that suggests both soybeans and lentils. The line from the movie that inspired the title of this paper comes is delivered when someone discovers that soylent green is actually made of cadavers from a government sponsored euthanasia program -- prompting the phrase "Soylent green, it's made of people!" The computer scientists are playing off this famous phrase with their title: "Soylent Grid: it's Made of People!" The idea being that people from all over the world need to jump through anti-spam hoops such as CAPTCHAs, and the power of these people can be harnessed through a grid structure to do some good in the world.
Article: "Soylent Grid: it's Made of People!" by Stephan Steinbach, Vincent Rabaud and Serge Belongie
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by University of California - San Diego.
Q: Why is it that when I receive mail with graphics, there is an empty box with a red X or a logo in the upper left-hand corner of the box? Conversely, when the graphics are present in the mail I receive, when I forward said mail, the graphics don't show up. By the way, I right-click on the red X and then select "show pic," but nothing happens.
A: Think of the red X as protection against the digital unknown. But what's so dangerous about an image in an e-mail? Don't get paranoid, but remember that computer viruses are often spread when someone opens an infected e-mail. Usually, a suspicious attachment is to blame.
Images are another way for the outside world to know what you're doing at home on your computer. Some images don't live inside the e-mail. Instead, they are sitting on some company's computer. When you open the e-mail, the message pings that company's computer to get the image. Thus, that company knows not only that you opened the e-mail but also when you did it.
Microsoft has added a feature to its e-mail programs to block images. In Outlook or Outlook Express, e-mails by default don't show images; the red Xs appear. In these messages, you'll notice an "InfoBar" at the top that says, "Some pictures have been blocked to help prevent the sender from identifying your computer. Click here to download pictures." Click to see them.
If you don't mind advertisers snooping around, here's how to turn off image blocker. In Outlook Express, go to "Tools" in the menu bar, select "Options" and then select the tab that says "Security." Uncheck the box directly under "Download Images" if you really want to see the images all the time. I don't recommend this.
In Microsoft Outlook, go to "Tools," select "Options" and pick the "Security" tab. In the middle of the window, where it says "Download Pictures," select "Change Automatic Download settings." Then follow the instructions.
Yahoo mail also blocks some images. Go to your mail account and click "Options" link. Select "Spam Protection" feature, and Yahoo takes you through three steps. The last step lets you select what sort of image blocking you prefer.
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