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    The State of the Internet: Living on the Network of Networks
    The State of the Internet: Living on the Network of Networks
    The State of the Internet: Living on the Network of Networks
    Ebook146 pages2 hours

    The State of the Internet: Living on the Network of Networks

    By Ryan Richardson Barrett

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    About this ebook

    The Internet has become one of the most peculiar realms that humanity has ever created. Come along as Ryan Richardson Barrett explains the elaborate networks that the Internet is comprised of in their current state and how they came to be. Outlined herein are not only the technological advancements that have brought the Web to its modern form but also the influence Internet connectivity has on individuals, both the good and bad. The State of the Internet strives to be as entertaining as it is informative and maintains a humanistic narrative even though the subject matter focuses on the Web, networking, search engines, and psychological impacts of Internet use.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRyan Richardson Barrett
    Release dateSep 10, 2024
    ISBN9798990156272
    The State of the Internet: Living on the Network of Networks
    Author

    Ryan Richardson Barrett

    Ryan Richardson Barrett is a writer and cybersecurity professional from North Carolina who writes primarily about computer science and any subject that inspires him to learn and better himself.

    Read more from Ryan Richardson Barrett

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      Book preview

      The State of the Internet - Ryan Richardson Barrett

      Chapter 1 - Introduction

      The thing nearly looks like clumps of fine string gathered together, forming sections separated by different brilliant shades of color. Many of the strands are grouped together and resemble small feather dusters, while in the center of the image exists a thick entanglement that crosses over all these brilliant colors. Altogether, the colorful strands make up a visualization of how the Internet is structured and how IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are organized together in order to communicate. A map of the Internet is as strange and beautiful as any geographic map.

      Computer science is oddly intimate with psychology and, thus, sociology. This fact remains despite the presumed distance between biology (natural) and technology (synthetic). However, technology strives to improve human efficiency while humans strive to improve technology. Most systems of technology, such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and computer programming languages, take direct inspiration from human activities and methodologies. Programming is human language translated into computer instruction, which is binary. Meanwhile, machine learning is a strategy for finding procedures or creating new methods of completing a task, which is both algorithmic and tangible in nature. Cybernetics is a field of study that handles turning complex decision-making into objectively explained processes. Society's thoughts and actions are more influenced by computer technology than ever, and another important relationship (perhaps the ultimate semantic relationship) grows more prevalent every day: the Internet.

      To continue the theme of the close connection between computers and people, the Internet is effectively the world’s largest conversation. The elaborate network that makes up the Internet is easily engageable by anyone with an Internet-connected device, and these devices have become prolific, resulting in the Internet of Things (IoT) and broader Internet access in nearly all countries. Some developing nations have mobile data Internet access that is better in quality than their drinking water.

      The digital discussion carries on daily on ports 80 and 443. Internet access gives freedom to people who would otherwise live in a world that is thoroughly confined cognitively and even politically. No matter the limitations of someone’s physical world, they can find freedom online with the right know-how. But, at the same time, the Internet can cause people immense issues with information overload and instill in them a reckless desire to constantly seek validation with unlikely satisfaction; Internet use can be addictive. Ultimately, the Web is as complicated as society, and subsequently, it is one of the best places to broadly evaluate humanity due to the mostly unregulated nature of the world online.

      Humanity’s collective conscious memories are available for anyone to sift through online. Fortunately, there are numerous technologies, one of which is search engines, to help climb the lofty mountain of madness online. There is no lack of stored information; in fact, there is potentially too much to sort through systematically. The ideas and data that are encapsulated by the Web are a substantial information explosion with waves that are still being felt by people today. The Web is far too elaborate to control, and most of the authoritarian control online is blatant censorship. People can make their own reasonable decisions about how they engage with the world’s most expansive network, which is ultimately built by people, even if it is being more widely used by bots.

      At some point, electronics become a network when they are connected to allow for communication. In this case, communication is the exchange of packets, the most simplistic form of data exchange. All of the CPUs (Central Processing Units), RAM (Random-Access Memory), capacitors, and other motherboard devices communicate together and make up a lone entity: a computer. But what is the required number of devices to form a network, and at what scale? Perhaps the entirety of the Earth is a network, seeing as how the open air contains enough radio frequencies from phone towers, satellites, and wireless access points to link humanity's collective conscience. Catching these frequencies that go dashing through the atmosphere between 2.4GHz and 6GHz, and coursing through copper cable veins that are strung along the Earth’s surface, is easier than ever. No one is condemned to being trapped in a lonely world, yet everyone online is now doomed to hear the racket from the Web. Humanity is as connected and anxious as ever before. Yet, there is much hope in this bizarre network with which people have daily conversations. Some consciences carry too much guilt; others carry too little. The Internet seems to be cutting the deck to find a nice medium. A few things that were cut off, those being misinformation and bias, were only replaced by billion-dollar corporations peddling trash and turning ideologies into monetized products and services.

      The Internet has completely changed...

      Any number of words could be placed at the end of that sentence. The State of the Internet will explain several of the entities that have been drastically altered by the network of networks. Moreover, the ongoing development of the Internet as a whole is a true historical oddity, and that story will also be explained as well as gently expanded upon when looking at the future of the online world. In effect, the Internet connects ideas to a place where they are much more approachable to the common person.

      Chapter 2 - History

      Before looking ahead, it is necessary to understand the unusual past of the Internet and how it developed into the modern Web. The World Wide Web is the main form of interacting with the broader Internet. The Internet, in its earliest form, was completely different than it is today. Finding websites or making connections to servers was usually accomplished by typing the domain name into a browser, which, of course, requires someone to know already where they want to go. When users had less specific knowledge about their end destination but understood the general type of site they were looking for, the search engine came into play and rapidly became a necessity when adventuring through the Web. Search engines are one of the key tools in using the Internet to its fullest extent, and they have progressed rampantly in the last three decades. Indexing the Web and being able to then search through those organized domains is how search engines have helped the Web develop.

      Archie was the first ever search engine, and its name comes from the word Archives. Barbados-born Alan Emtage developed Archie while studying and working at McGill University in Montreal in 1989, and the website was publicly launched in 1990. The archives that the engine sorted through were FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers, which are simplistic servers that distribute files. In 1990, there was not much to find online. After searching with Archie, the site would return a list of related files that could be downloaded. FTP uses ports 20 and 21 for traffic, which helped Archie find these servers. Several years passed before HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) websites were able to be searched for, which utilize ports 80 and 443, respectively.

      Indexing the Web improved as developers realized how expansive the Internet was becoming and recognized the necessity of organizing it. Wandex (not to be confused with the modern search engine Yandex) was a bot created to scan and count websites in 1993 in an early effort to develop a headcount for the Web. The Wanderer was the script that perused through different websites to help measure the size of the Web at the time; Wandex was the actual index that the script produced. A user can only search for what they know, and so mapping out the unlinked ether that was the World Wide Web was quite the necessary undertaking in improving the Internet’s usability, despite the fact The Wanderer was not a search engine, but it was a step towards developing such a thing. According to Wandex’s creator Matthew Gray, I was initially motivated primarily to discover new sites, as the Web was still a relatively small place.

      ***

      The element copper has been significantly important to human progress since its common use began in 4500 BCE, which signified the start of the Copper Age. Copper was used to make swords and knives, as it can be honed to an extremely fine edge. Coins were commonly made from copper because of their bright sheen and fairly consistent value. For thousands of years, copper has had diverse uses because of its unique attributes, such as being ductile and resistant to corrosion. In more recent centuries, telegraph lines used copper due to its conductive properties. Telegrams were one of the first forms of network communication, which only had a minuscule resemblance to what the Internet has become. Telegrams were the first time communication had been sent along a wire to locations across the globe. Copper lines are still vital to network communication today as both ethernet and coaxial cables primarily use copper to run a signal along the wire’s length. At the peak of telegram advancement, the Telediagraph was engineered. Images could be sent over telegraph lines using the Telediagraph, and the Associated Press maintained a service called Wirephoto that enabled the Press to send photographs far faster than the mail was capable of.

      Early Internet access was connected through phone lines and cable lines. More modern fiber optic lines are made from stretching clear glass or plastic that is then enclosed in layers of insulation. Fiber optic cables are then able to transmit flickers of light to transfer data. With the proper technology, Internet frequencies can be run on powerlines or any other electronically conductive wires, although broadband over powerline (BPL) has become more or less deprecated. BPL users would plug a modem into their wall socket to connect to the Internet that was being externally transmitted into their building’s wiring.

      Despite BPL being no longer popularly used, similar technology can transmit ethernet signals into a building's electrical wiring that originates from traditional fiber or cable Internet providers that are connected to a home or business. To explain further, an ISP (Internet Service Provider) sends ethernet to a typically wired building, and the modem translates it to an ethernet signal, which is then sent to a router, which is connected to an ethernet-to-wall socket adapter,

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