Friday, March 28, 2008

fourmilab (202 = 74?)

This one I don't understand at all.  Fourmilab, founded by John Walker of AutoCAD fame, is an eclectic download site for a wide variety of computer utilities, articles on mathematics, nanotechnology, etc.  
You can see its access logs for January 2004, here, which is presented in descending order of the amount of traffic that was coming from an IP.  Here is a screen-cap of the top four 'heavy hitters':


This log suggests that two of the IPs that we've been tracking had hit this site 100,000 times over three months. Also present is 66.185.85.74 (not one of the IPs that we've been tracking).

Also puzzling is the fact that these three Rogers IPs, which began their visits to the site within a day or so of one another, and all begin with wc07. I think that we have to assume that they are somehow related, and that this reflects the kind of shifting back and forth that we've noticed elsewhere, but over a longer timescale for a massive amount of traffic.