Nmap Developers Release a Picture of the Web 125
iago-vL writes "The Nmap Project recently posted an awesome visualization of the top million site icons (favicons) on the Web, sized by relative popularity of sites. This project used the Nmap Scripting Engine, which is capable of performing discovery, vulnerability detection, and anything else you can imagine with lightning speed. We saw last month how an Nmap developer downloaded 170 million Facebook names, and this month it's a million favicons; I wonder what they'll do next?"
Trinity (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Something's missing... (Score:4, Informative)
http://nmap.org/favicon/?q=slashdot.org [nmap.org]
Alexa? (Score:5, Informative)
just an FYI: Its based on data from Alexa. Despite what Alexa claims, I find the results to be off by an order of magnitude from true traffic.
Re:proof (Score:3, Informative)
What are you talking about? Several of those sites are porn sites.
Re:Trinity (Score:3, Informative)
Was this a fan-film? Because as far I know, there were no sequels to The Matrix [xkcd.com].
Re:A new domain specific language is born (Score:3, Informative)
NSE isn't actually domain specific, it's the tried, tested, and fast Lua (with extensions to make it fit with the Nmap scanner). You get the speed of Nmap to find hosts/ports plus the NSE scripts backing it up to do deeper probes.
Wireshark, Snort, Nmap, and plenty of other tools use Lua for scripting, so it's a valuable language to learn. I recommend it!
Re:The ico format supports better resolutions (Score:2, Informative)
Considering they only really use the 16x16 icon in the file, its really retarded to say it supports 'better' formats. If you're putting anything other than a 16x16x256 icon in your favicon.ico then you're just wasting bandwidth, all other formats will be ignored anyway.
The .ICO format is while perfectly usable, still out of date and offers no advantage over other icon formats which use more sane image qualities like real transparency.
For a favicon, 16x16x256 is as high as you're ever going to use. No sense using more colors since there are only 256 pixels to work with, you get a custom color for each pixel ANYWAY at 16x16x256.
On the flipside, with png you have support for real transparency which icons do not have, so thats a bonus, but not enough of a bonus to justify using it since ... transparency is really a little silly for something that is invariable going to sit on a white background anyway (I don't care about the random nutjobs that with ridiculous color schemes on their machines, they've clearly got no taste or understanding about designing color schemes so theres no help for them anyway)
All in all, its kind of stupid to be arguing over which is 'better' for this particular case since both formats FAR exceed the requirements for the job. .ico wins because thats what everyone expects and theres no compelling reason to change it.
Apple wants higher quality because they use the 'icon' in more places than just the title bar and tiny lines on a 'bookmarks menu'. It turns into a much larger home screen icon if you add the bookmark to your home screen for instance.
Re:And the big five are: (Score:2, Informative)
Does msdn.microsoft.com share the same one (I'm too lazy to look) because thats pretty much the only site I visit EVERY day, looking up documentation for various things. I'm betting a lot of techies spend time on MS.com everyday for the same sort of thing.
Though, I doubt it should make that much of an impression compared to all the other non-techies out there.
Re:Gravatar? (Score:3, Informative)
Gravatar? Seriously, never heard of them before today.
I presume its' there in no small part due to Wordpress' use. "Popular website" includes services. Note the high ranking for "double click", of which the average user has never heard and never visited intentionally.
PS- Pointing out your ignorance is pointless.
Re:The ico format supports better resolutions (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And the big five are: (Score:3, Informative)
I'd guess it's from automatic Windows updates.