Web exploration
Exploration of the Internet is a peculiar activity since it involves both technical curiosity and a thrill of (quasi)social interaction. The latter is messed up if you think about it.
In the process of auto-domestication we somehow managed to interpret our most primal desires in such a bizarre way that even the slightest suggestion of social interaction(even virtual) can trigger them and
give us certain feelings of gratification, almost like our brain suggests we are moving in a right direction in terms of fulfilling our biological purpose of finding a mate. Because that is where all our activities come
from after all, but this is too big of a topic. What we need to know now is that machines we interact with on the Internet are not just machines, they were set up by someone, someone created web pages they host, someone
uses services they run. That what makes it even more interesting than the exploration of the nature. Not only you get to discover bizarre forms the data can assume, you also gain knowledge of the people behind that data.
Public IP addresses
One of the ways to discover some more obscure sections of the Internet is finding publicly available IP addresses that might host web or other services. A site called ip-neighbors.com has a huge list of addresses, their owners
and hosts. Mostly they are big hosting providers but the ability to sort records by the number of hosts makes it quite easy to find addresses owned by private individuals, small networks etc. And among those there is a lot of
valuable material. A lot of these machines host some empty\under construction pages, which, I'm almost sure have a lot of vulnerabilities to be exploited. I've discovered a couple of such hosts, some inside what I
believe to be corporate LANs, but didn't attempt to break in yet. There is also a lot of shady places to be found. Lots of pages that look kind of normal but give me the feeling of the whole thing being a cover-up for something.
Need to investigate those. A lot of state-owned IP ranges, wonder what a skilled and willing person can do with those.