Live Minecraft server connections | Hacker News Reader

Live Minecraft server connections

stats.minecraft.net

47 pointscitricsquid17 comments

The perfectionist in me is slightly bugged that traffic from Australia to the US flies over Europe.

They should have the server or client send a traceroute with the data it sends when it logs a connection for more accurate mapping!

Lots of connections from the US to a couple of "hot spots" in France and Germany. I'm guessing those are the locations of a couple of popular dedicated server providers?

Yup! OVH (http://www.ovh.co.uk/) and Hetzner (http://www.hetzner.de/en/) seem to be the most popular hosts for minecraft servers

Greetings professor Notch... would you like to play a game?

(sorry)

Suddenly, I feel like I'm playing DEFCON.

http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/

I remember this from the first node.js competition. Back then you could go to #nodejs on free node and it would show locations of messages if you were to mention someone while typing. Cool stuff

Here's the source for that one: https://github.com/mape/node-wargames

Can someone explain me this in a layman's language?

Whenever a Minecraft player connects to a Minecraft server, the server communicates with Mojang HQ to verify that the user is actually the person they're trying to connect as. This means that Mojang gets to log a bunch of "client with address X connected to server with address Y" records.

It looks like they've used some geolocation API to guess at GPS coordinates for each address, and animated a little line connecting from the client coordinates to the server coordinates.

Does anyone know if these "connection records" are available somewhere? That would be a great source of information to study the Minecraft ecosystem...

I'm pretty sure you just need a court order and you can get them.

Seriously.. Where's the privacy? Are you asking if someone hands out a specific kind of traffic log for their users? So that you can check where that griefer from your last game lives?

As darklajid says, there'd be privacy implications in the way of getting the whole logs.

If you ask mojang nicely, though, they might be able to offer the logs with the users anonymised to, say, a /24 subnet, or to just their geolocation results (seeing as those aren't exactly accurate enough to single out individuals).

Yes, absolutely, I understand there are privacy implications. I am from academia so I might be somewhat naive about what companies are willing to provide, but even anonymized data (e.g., replace every distinct IP address by a random number, possibly keeping coarse/country-level geolocation) would already provide a wealth of information about user connection patterns.

On the submitted page, at the bottom it says:

Is There More Data?

Yes, we have some raw hardware data right now. When we get more we'll launder it and present it nicely for you.

...where 'raw hardware data' is a link to http://stats.minecraft.net/public/snoop.tar.gz

That might be worth looking at.

How do you code something like this? (without reimplementing everything!)

"Data Hose Offline" :(

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