Nmap Team Launches 5-Gigapixel "Icons of the Web" Project

[Fyodor <fyodor () nmap org>]

Fellow Nmap Hackers,

Perhaps you remember in 2010 how we capped off a massive scan of the top
million Internet web sites by creating a giant interactive collage, with
each site scaled by its popularity?  Well, I'm happy to report that we
restarted our scanners this year and have launched a brand new and much
improved edition of Icons of the Web at http://nmap.org/favicon/!  It's
interesting to see how things have changed in just 3 years.  In the social
networking and blogging worlds, Myspace, Orkut, and Hi5 collapsed to nearly
nothing, while Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter gained ground. Pinterest,
Tumblr, Sina Weibo, and Instagram quickly rose from nothing into dominant
forces. In search, Google, and Ask improved while Yahoo suffered. In media,
Youtube gained ground while the pirate sites Megaupload, MegaVideo and
Rapidshare jumped the plank.  We also saw huge growth in Chinese sites
(Baidu, QQ, Hao123, Sina Weibo, Taobao, etc.)

Anyway, you'll find many improvements in this new edition.  For one thing
it grew from 1.4 to 5 gigapixels.  Your browser would choke on such a huge
image, so we made an interactive viewer which lets you pan, zoom, and (new
for this year) hover your mouse over an icon to see the site name. You can
also click on icons to visit the actual sites, but be careful with that!
Even even sites with cute icons (like a certain Hamster) can be
pornographic or worse. We have also added a fullscreen viewing option.  A
search box lets you find your favorite sites (or your own sites if you run
any).  The viewer consists of 813,200 small files which are loaded as
needed based on your location and zoom level in the collage.  It puts quite
a load on the web servers, but we added another temporary server today and
we think they can handle it.  So give it a try, and please spread the link:

http://nmap.org/favicon/

Our most common request in 2010 was for a physical poster version. We only
printed them for 15 Nmap developers last time, but now we're making them
available to everyone!  We created a Kickstarter campaign to coordinate the
group buy:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/305251342/icons-of-the-web-poster

The campaign just launched today and has already exceeded the $1,337
funding requirement, so the print run is going to happen!  But we're only
planning one print run, so order by January 17 if you want one!

I'd like to thank Nmap's co-maintainer David Fifield for doing a huge
amount of the work behind this.  It never would have happened without his
tremendous efforts.

That is it for now.  I hope you all have a merry Christmas and happy new
year!  And don't worry, we haven't switched all our efforts into art
projects.  We've got some great new Nmap features coming up too!

Cheers,
Fyodor
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