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?