Everything connected to the Internet, in one map

Andrea Peterson, The Washington Post
Published: August 29, 2014

Sometimes it's hard to visualize just how connected the Internet has made our world. But, behold, programmer and "Internet cartographer" John Matherly is here to help:

The map shows where devices are connected to the Internet -- with red indicating a higher density of devices and blue showing less density. As you can see, it differs pretty substantially from where people are in the world. Much of Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, is highly populated but remarkably dark on Matherly's map.

Matherly is founder of Shodan, which is sometimes called the "scariest search engine on the Internet" by the media. Shodan can uncover unsecured technology that is connected to the Internet, but despite that ominous nickname is primarily used for good. Bad guys actually have a vested interest in keeping vulnerabilities quiet, but researchers use Shodan to uncover lax security protocols and fix them.