Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Blog #3: Light, Electricity, and Copper

Immediately entering chapter 5, Blum mentions that although he now understands where the Internet is, but he doesn't know much about what it is. Everything was made of copper as his house. From the cables on his desk, the telephone, to the wire from his backyard. Except that when it came to the heart of the Internet, everything was made of glass fibers filled with pulses of light. On page 158 he states, "So far I'd been reassured that on the Internet there's always a distinct physical path, whether a single yellow fiber patch cord, an ocean-spanning undersea cable, or a bundle of fibers several-hundred thick. But whatever went on inside the router was invisible to the naked eye." I'm on the same track as Blum; still unsure as to which aspects of the Internet remain physical and which do not. Luckily this isn't something one should feel embarrassed for now knowing the answer to. A lot of individuals in my generation are very close to the Internet since they grew up with it and are quite tech-savvy to this day. I'm certain a great deal of us think we mostly understand the Internet. I myself used to believe I had a good amount of general knowledge about the Internet. Although, Blum's acts of getting to the nitty-gritty aspects of the Internet really uncover everything that makes up the Internet, including many things myself and definitely several others hadn't even heard of before. None of us probably considered the thought of: if there is, perhaps, one headquarters that runs the Internet, where is it? We most likely never thought about it consisting of separate buildings. Not only all around our country, but around the world. Different buildings in places with their own unique teams of people, all making up the massive construct we call the Internet.
When analyzing the math of increments of a second with Par Westesson, Blum gazed at all the zeros on the screen where Westesson pointed where the millisecond and microsecond marks are. Blum looked out the window and the world seemed different to him. Seeing the cars on the nearby highway, he imagined all of the devices contained inside of them. Cell phones, GPSs, radios; everything seemed alive to him, and these networked systems are everywhere. "But all invisible. To see it you had to imagine it, and in that moment I could", he mentions on page 162.
Blum ends chapter 5 with "A gig is a billion. A billion bits made of light." On page 193, Blum explains fiber-optic technology. It in itself is complex, yet the basic principle is simple. Light travels from one shore to another through undersea cables, like a subway tunnel. At each end, there is a landing station that can be compared to a lighthouse because it's job is to illuminate the fiber-optic strands. To travel a vast distance, thousands of volts of electricity travel through the copper to power repeaters and eventually the destination. Blum states his analogy of this process struck him a wonderfully poetic, as it makes a very advanced concept easy to visualize. Blum adds on page 194 that undersea cables are invisible and feel like rivers with a continuous flow of energy.
"At the logical level, the Internet is self-healing. Routers automatically seek out the best routes among themselves. But that works only if there are routes to be found", Blum says on page 200. Once I saw the visualization of the way information travels from a YouTube video, I saw it wasn't just a point A to point B type of situation. I saw this network of connections that was almost like a maze, except that there were many different ways to get to the destination without any obstacles. Even if some parts of these connections were to become corrupted, data could still find another way to reach its destination. When he says the last statement about the process only being able to function if there are routes available, that says to me that information is still able to transfer somehow unless the entire network is down.

Discussion Questions:
1.  Blum mentioned that up until that point he had felt reassured that the Internet was composed of a physical path. What did you believe went on inside the router that Blum describes as being "invisible to the naked eye"?
2. How had you previously imagined these massive undersea cables connecting the continents, or did you believe the transferring of data overseas was wireless?

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Blog #2: Networking Through the Fibers

Blum elaborates on page 79 about one of PAIX's brand new routers. A box being the size of a shower stall, and the router inside of it being just as enormous, it could move quite the volume of data. He explains the transfer of data similar to a traffic roundabout. 160 highways meet at this singular point where they enter this 'roundabout' and the data find their way to their exiting point. He mentions the machine was one of hundreds that are all connected to one another.; the needs of just one network rather than being at the center of many. One statement by Blum made me think: "To find the scale of information as we experience it each day--to find, say, a single email--would be more akin to counting the molecules of water." My chemistry doesn't have to be very good for me to properly understand that there are trillions of water molecules in a mere glass of water. At first Blum's metaphor struck me. How could there be that much? But I then pondered the thought that, there are billions of people around the world, and of the ones with access to the Internet, they could be transmitting a vast array of data. One person alone could send multiple emails, send a few messages of Facebook, search something on Google. Things I myself do quite often on a daily basis. I considered that I usually do much more than send an email or two and message someone. I'm someone that admittedly has a slight addiction to technology and the Internet. If I'm bored, I'll browse Facebook for an hour or scroll through 9GAG until I encounter content I've already seen. I'll regularly check my school email and personal email to check for teachers' info on upcoming assignments or to check if something I ordered on eBay has been shipped. Keeping Blum's clever metaphor in mind, it's as if my use of the Internet contributes to some thousands of molecules in this glass of water containing all of the data being transferred on the Internet. As Blum was describing Fiber Vault 1 at Equinix's headquarters on page 103, he mentions,"There were all the other buildings like it on the campus, each with its own multiple fiber vaults. This was the place, but so was that. And that. And that. The Internet was here, there, and everywhere." These separate buildings in different locations with pretty much the same outlook, were all contributors to the Internet. Whether it's Ashburn or San Francisco, all of these buildings were connected and shared the same image of data processing and transferring. On page 118, Blum talks about "peering", or the agreement to interconnect two networks. Peering implies equality of size and status between the two networks. It allows information to flow freely throughout the Internet and for websites like YouTube to be free, otherwise our online videos would clog up the Internet's pipes. The Internet would be more brittle and expensive, therefore the network engineers known as "the peering community" are very important.

Discussion Questions:
1. What are your thoughts on the characteristics and security of the Equinix building as Blum explains it?
2. Do you think Blum chose the most efficient and understandable analogy when he was referring to Equinix's router as functioning similar to a massive roundabout?

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Blog #1: Understanding the Concept of the Internet

In Andrew Blum's Tubes, he started off in the prologue by discussing how the Internet, this massive yet abstruse thing, was acting up at his home. The Internet itself wasn't down, yet his personal connection to it was not functioning. The moment that him and the tech support worker noticed the squirrel by the electric cords intertwined with a pole in his backyard, it had sparked the dawn of Blum's curiosity of the Internet, and how it actually works. I related with Blum as I was reading the prologue. I know I too have these distinct cords and electrical boxes around my house that I don't entirely understand, but where is their outer connection? Are my assumptions true when I'm just imagining these long cords traveling under the ground, weaving with my neighbors' cables and ultimately connecting to more cables at set destinations? I didn't begin to comprehend such things until I was older, but in my defense I hadn't really thought about the concept. To be truthful, I had always imagined that most of everything was just this data being wirelessly sent from one location to another. Being a young teenager and having a cell phone, I had come across the thought multiple times, wondering just how these calls and text messages were able to be transmitted so quickly and efficiently to whatever device I told it to send it to. From that thought, I began to think about computers. At the time, we had one of those big off-white colored computers myself and multiple friends of mine would call "dinosaurs" that at the time would run Windows XP, with its distinguishable blue toolbar. I always imagined the cords hooked up to a device that would wirelessly send information. I would examine the cords behind the desk that we used this computer, almost always to retrieve a dropped pen or to occasionally vacuum the dust and dog hair that would gradually accumulate there. There was a vast array of cords of all types of shapes and sizes. I thought of how amazing it was how all of these separate cords served a purpose in making the computer function, and how difficult and time consuming it had to have been to make it all happen. My mind was not transparent yet about how the internet functions. It was hard for me to understand whether there's this massive database somewhere with giant metal machines and more cords than you could count, or if a lot of it was the work of satellites orbiting the earth. On page 21, Blum states "The Internet is everywhere; the Internet is nowhere. But indubitably, as invisible as the logical might seem, its physical counterpart is always there." Reading this was reassuring to me, since I wasn't sure how far off my idea of the Internet was from the truth. My assumption from when I was younger never really changed and I hadn't really thought about looking it up. The Internet seems to be a physical thing and a concept at the same time. Blum's quest to figure what the Internet truly is so far has supplied him with substantial information. One fact was that "the Internet lacks a central founding figure" (p.35). There's no singular person to thank for the Internet coming to be, but rather teams of intelligent people putting their thoughts and knowledge together to create something previously unheard of. As early as 1969, an interface message processor, commonly called an IMP, was installed at the University of California-Los Angeles. It was used to interconnect networks to the ARPANET, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, which would allow information to be sent within it. Large computer companies began running their own networks by the early 1980s. Networks such as HEPnet, MFENET, SPAN, and EARN all were functioning networks, but the problem was that they weren't connected. The transition of communications protocol from NCP (Network Control Protocol) to TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) allowed data to be sent to several different networks rather than within a singular network. A networking company called MFS created a hub called MAE-East (Metropolitan Area Exchange). The purpose of creating this was to have all of these separate networks act as one, and MAE-East blew up with popularity. 20% of American adults were Internet users by 1997 when just years before the number was nearly 0. The art of the Internet is far more complicated for the average person to comprehend. The process took several years of altering to make communication much easier.

Discussion Questions:
1. What are your thoughts on Blum's questions on page 28 "But I was still hung up on what seemed like a simple question: What physically were all those lines? And where precisely did they run? If TeleGeography properly understood the Internet as being "point to point", what and where were the points"?"
2. How did you imagine what the Internet physically looked like and why?

ITR Presentation - World Wide Web

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1waCwm_2b5woB_Sl7c8VRYaTfGWmBqk2s4b654QF0Y04/edit#slide=id.g1ca6a86b46_0_5