2015: Learning Every Day

by Hunter Thornsberry

It's 2015 now, a year has gone and went. Every year I tell myself I'm going to sit down and learn XYZ and life gets in the way. I think the largest issue with that is my goals are massive: learn JavaScript, master C++, build something awesome. So I'm going to break my goals down into something manageable on a daily basis. My goal will be to write at least every week, if not every day about what I have learned.

Some of it will be great things, some of it will be petty. All of it will be new.
January 1st
ZMap

I'm going to cheat a bit and borrow something I've been playing around with for the past day or two. ZMap is a tool built by University of Michigan.

"ZMap is an open-source network scanner that enables researchers to easily perform Internet-wide network studies. With a single machine and a well provisioned network uplink, ZMap is capable of performing a complete scan of the IPv4 address space in under 5 minutes, approaching the theoretical limit of ten gigabit Ethernet."

I've been using ZMap to get a glimpse into public facing computers and I've discovered a lot of things!

  • Security on the web is horrible
  • "admin/admin" for username and password works ~2% of the time
  • A lot of web servers serve no purpose (403/404/503) on a ton of machines
  • English is the language of the web
  • The web has massive cliques of countries

Points one and two can be grouped together in that security on the web is terrible. In my sample of ~40,000 machines (~700 responded to port 80) I've seen at least three unsecured printers. You load up the url and you're at the Admin page, no authentication needed. Other servers have admin/admin username and passwords. I've even seen an FTP server with no authentication.

Point three simply means that a lot of web servers either show "under construction", the default Apache/Nginx/etc sample page, or just simply return a 404/403/503.

Point four can be wrapped up nicely with this graph.
Content languages for websites as of 12 March 2014 - Wikipedia

Language of the web - Wikipedia

Point five is a big one, and ties into point four. The idea of cliques of countries on the web. These cliques mirror the media of the world. In general the United States, European Union, and other democratic/open-government countries are grouped together. Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand are a second group. Finally countries like Russia, and more so China are grouped by themselves, their governments are not welcoming to outside internet.

This isn't to say that all countries with open internet access do not share ideas and use the web with their denizens of the Internet in other countries, but there are some cliques.