Blog 3: A City of Cables

These two chapters Blum seemed to focus a lot on the cables that connect the Internet. He went into detail about when he went to go observe workers install some of the fiber lines in the heart of New York City. This was really interesting to learn about how they connected the new lines to the old. It was also interesting to see how long the process actually takes to install these new lines. They basically have to pop off the cover that seals these underground tunnels and place a casing that stretches to the place they are trying to connect their lines. In this case it ended up being about a quarter mile. They then have to put the cables inside these tubes and connect the old to the new. The way Blum describes these underground wires as if the tunnels are crowded with them. It was also cool to know that they reused a lot of the space that telegraph wires inhabited decades ago.

Blum also focused a lot on the cables that span the oceans of Earth. This is something that was new to me knowing that cables actually connected the Internet to people in different countries. It seems weird to have cables that go underwater and have to travel such distances just to be able to connect people. It also blew my mind the speed at which you can still retrieve data from different countries. The miles that these cables have to span to connect each of us and it can take mere seconds to get data or communicate with people long distances away. Something else that stood out to me in these chapters was how expansive and sophisticated the Internet actually is. What I mean by this is the example Blum gave us of an earthquake that happened near Japan and it took out 7 of the 9 major cables that were underwater. How they were able to solve the issue of the 2 working cables being overloaded was rerouting the traffic to other lines that went the other way around the world. It also shows how difficult it would be to take out the Internet.

Questions:

Do you think we will get to a point where we have too many cables crowding cities? Blum made it seem like it was easy to pop off the cover of these tunnels because of how jam packed they were with cables.

Do you ever think we will progress enough with technology to not have to use cables to connect to us to the Internet?

Blog 2: The Internet Highway

Chapter 3&4 went deeper into figuring out where the internet “starts”. Blum’s curiosity for figuring out where the internet is led him to interview someone who gave him a good analogy as to the type of traffic hubs such as the one in Milwaukee got. “The building in Milwaukee was the Internet equivalent of a small regional airport...the Palo Alto Internet Exchange is like San Francisco International [airport], or bigger” (Pg. 78). These analogies really help give the readers perspective as to how the internet really works. The big points that Blum made in chapter 3 were when you request data from a certain internet page, it requires your data to travel through many different hubs to find the page you are looking for. The major hubs (or “airports” as Blum writes) could be Milwaukee or the Palo Alto Internet Exchange. I think this is very interesting and if you want to confirm what Blum talks about you can open up a command prompt window on a Windows machine and type, “tracert [a website of your choice]” and it will show you the time it took the data to travel to a hub and how many hubs it had to go through before reaching its final destination.

Chapter 4 focuses on many things but the thing that I found most interesting and important was when he talked about the places that stored the actual data that people requested. Blum talks about the heavy security that is involved to get into these buildings. Blum interviewed some of the people who were veteran internet infrastructure workers. A good point that one of these workers brought up about Blum’s mission to figure out how the internet works was about how he could be potentially telling people how to take down the internet. I found it interesting but I think Blum had a very appropriate reaction to defend himself. His thought process was that he wanted to make people more aware of these places so that they could properly be protected.

Questions that I have for these chapter are,

Going back to the discussion we had on Tuesday, do you think that these “hubs” need more security than they already have?

Do you think Blum is revealing too many elements about the internet infrastructure that could potentially lead to attacks in the future?

Blog 1: The Infinite Internet

Before I talk about what Blum wrote about I think it is important to know what I have previously learned about the Internet before reading these chapters. I have had a lot of background information about how the Internet came to be from taking HSCI 4321 History of Computing. We talked a lot about ARPANET and the transition to the Internet. The information that Blum talks about was not new to me. However, his perspective of how he came to be so interested in the Internet was very interesting.

Blum talks about how one day he was using a VOIP service (such as skype) and the connection started getting fuzzy. He called his Internet Service Provider (ISP) to come take a look and see what was going on. In the process of trying to figure out what was wrong, they discovered that a squirrel had decided that the wire connecting Blum to Internet was going to be a snack. This is how Blum became so fascinated. He wondered where that wire went and how the Internet actually worked.

Something that stuck out to me was how he kept saying that he thought the Internet was infinite before realizing that it was just a bunch of computers connected by cables. His first stop was in Milwaukee to what was once Milwaukee’s Athletic club, which is now the center of the Internet for Milwaukee. He was given a tour and saw all the fiber optic cables running through the building which ran to different parts of the country like Chicago. Next on his stop he took a trip back in time to meet the person who helped install the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) Leonard Kleinrock. He goes on to talk about how IMP was used to create the ARPANET which consisted of “nodes” sending information to each other. The next thing he does is go on to explain MAE-East. This section of the chapter was a little confusing to me but it basically seems like the ISP's came up with a hub that used existing data lines to essentially create a roundabout for the Internet. Something that I noticed, was Blum never mentioned Tim Berners-Lee. Tim Berners-Lee invented HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which is the basis of how we browse the Internet today. Maybe this will be coming up in a future chapters.

Questions that I have for this chapter are,

Do you see the Internet as this infinite entity (the cloud) as Blum previously describes it or do you think of it as a physical network with a bunch of cables?

Why do you think the ARPANET took so long to get from the military into the hands of the public?

About Me

My name is Patrick Richard. I am a Senior majoring in Individualized Studies. This allows me to choose three areas of concentration from any fields. I chose to focus mainly on Computer Science. The other two concentrations are Digital Media Studies and TWC (Technical Writing and Communication).

I am hoping to go into web development after college.