The ipv4 version of the internet counts 2^32 individual addresses. I decided to ping all of them, wait for a response and if I get one: log that to a file.

I wrote a script that does this for me. If I run 256 instances of this script simultaneously I can ping the whole internet in about 10 days.
Just some logfiles are not super interesting to watch, but once you convert them into an image it becomes a lot more interesting. This is a test image I generated using the data from the 83.xx.xx.xx range. Each pixel represents a block of 256 ip addresses. The color is determined by how many devices responded in the block.

Pinged all addresses in the 83.xx.xx.xx range:

It takes about 1 hour to generate a picture like this. I will release the source once it's done

I checked their policy. They dont actively look for abnormal network behaviour, but if it disturbs the experience of other users they will contact the user that causes it. Pinging several thousand devices every minute should not be a huge load on the servers. It's not like I am attacking a single server with a distributed attack.

Looking interesting

Keep in mind that some companies might automatically file abuse reports for your IP and/or firewall you if you sequentially scan their IP ranges.
I'm not sure if this is a problem if you do this from a (slow) home connection, but you should randomize your targets if you run this script from a 1gbps server
There are some tools like zmap or masscan you could take a look at.

ICMP pings and IRC pings kinda have the same goal, but are quite different. One is used to check if the target computer has a working Internet connection and does not notify anything other than the target computer sending a single reply packet back and the other is pretty much used to check if the target user is still alive and in front of their computer.

And yeah, despite being not annoying at all, some people still finds ICMP pings annoying for various reasons (such as the risk of DDoS making your equipment slow down or just security, sometimes you don't want to tell everyone you exist at this IP so you block requests). They usually block it on their router or server or they check its rate for DDoSes and attacks.

So yeah, better take precautions so some people wouldn't take it as an attack.

Have fun with 192.168.x.x

Hint: [nobbc] tags are magic

I wonder what happens when you ping 127.0.0.1... I never tried it