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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

That's meaningless. That's like claiming you didn't really visit a country until you looked under every trash can.

There is a sweet spot between looking in every trash can and visiting only one of the biggest cities :)

I'm not sure there is. I'm not sure one can be truly sure he scanned the Internet before impersonating every host. Can't know anything before trying out the inside of every skin.

After all, what would you know, as a traveller, about simple lives of local people?

I've spent one hour of my life in Germany, when I was 11 years old, in a transit lounge in Frankfurt. I have 'visited Germany', but not in any real sense.

Everybody have their own threshold. I only consider city visited after I spend a night there.

There's more to the internet than just port 80, so to declare that a scan encompassing only a single port on each host is a scan of "the entire internet" is somewhat mistaken.

The more correct title would be, "a scan of the entire World Wide Web."

I doubt they used the same port in every scan.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234877

Why be in doubt when the research is published?

"Single port number" doesn't mean "same port number every time".

So what does "scanning the public IPv4 address space on a single port in under 45 minutes" really mean then?

Did you even read the documents?

They visit one port in the whole internet. This doesn't prevent them from visiting another port of the whole internet next time.

This makes "they visited the whole internet" true, "they aren't limited to web only" also true.

Even that's not correct though. Port 80 is just the default port. Not to mention the number of web servers only doing HTTPS on port 443 and not 80.

More correct would be "A scan of world wide web servers running on the default port 80"

https://zmap.io/paper.pdf From page 14, Section 8, titled, "Conclusion"

"We experimentally showed that ZMap is capable of scanning the public IPv4 address space on a single port in under 45 minutes, at 97% of the theoretical maximum speed for gigabit Ethernet and with an estimated 98% coverage of publicly available hosts."

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