"Geography is destiny." How the Internet really works

The AST publishing house is publishing an interesting book by Andrew Blam, a Wired journalist, “The Network. How the Internet is structured and works (in English it is called “Tubes” - “Pipes”). “If I follow the wire, where will it lead me? What does this place look like? Who will I find there? And what is that someone doing there? So, I decided to visit the Internet,” Blam explains the idea behind the book. That is, literally inspect the network infrastructure and see the people who manage it.

Blam distances himself somewhat from fashionable non-fiction authors: he is not trying to amaze the reader, but simply wants to understand how the physical world comes into contact with the virtual one, to unravel a complex philosophical and terminological tangle. And this generally works out. The book could be recommended as an educational program, for example, for Russian deputies who dream of cutting themselves off from the West and building their own Internet.

Slon selected several characteristic thoughts and passages.

The Internet was not intended for communication

No doubt, serious research was going on all this time, but the idea that ARPANET could be used as a communication tool was perceived as an exotic fantasy... Something happened to [one of the creators of ARPANET, Leonard] Kleinrock, which later became legendary. Returning home from a conference in Los Angeles, he discovered that he had left his electric razor in the bathroom of his student accommodation in Brighton. Connecting to the ARPANET from his university computer terminal, he entered the query WHERE ROBERTS, which was supposed to show whether his friend Larry Roberts, who was a workaholic and suffered from insomnia, was online. Of course, Larry was online and had no intention of sleeping at three in the morning. Using a simple chat program—clickety-clack, as Kleinrock calls it—the two friends agreed to ship the razor home. Communicating in this way was, in the words of historians Cathy Hefner and Matthew Lyon, “like riding a hare on an aircraft carrier.”

Free love zone

Two things surprised me about all this. First, all IP addresses are, by definition, public information; If you're on the Internet, it means you want to be seen. Secondly, the announcement of each route is based entirely on trust. IANA issues prefixes, but anyone can "put a sign" to indicate the direction. Sometimes this causes annoying errors. For example, in February 2008, there was a high-profile case when the government of Pakistan demanded that all providers block YouTube because of a video posted on the portal, which the authorities considered offensive. A Pakistan Telecom engineer, having read the memo, configured the router incorrectly and, instead of deleting the advertised path to YouTube, declared it “to itself,” that is, it actually called itself YouTube. After two and a half minutes, the "captured" path was transmitted to routers across the Internet, causing users who wanted to access the YouTube website to be redirected to the Pakistan Telecom website. Naturally, they didn’t find any video there. For most of the planet, the YouTube service was unavailable for almost two hours, after which it was finally possible to restore order.

This may seem like just a case of stupid carelessness, but it gets to the heart of the Internet's fundamental openness. Any network on the Internet is more or less vulnerable. When two networks communicate with each other, they are simply forced to trust each other, and therefore, trust everyone whom the partner trusts. The Internet is promiscuous, and yet the promiscuity is not hidden at all. It's kind of like free love.

Geography is destiny. Even online

When I first went looking for the Internet, I expected to find a lot of loosely connected little fragments and thought that the Internet was a distributed phenomenon, amorphous and almost invisible. I certainly didn't expect to see anything as impressive and tangible as the big buzzing "boxes" that house the hubs of the Internet. It was too much like science fiction. Or a satirical cartoon. However, it was precisely these boxes that represented large points of traffic exchange, even if they were little known, invisible and located somehow strangely, ignoring some capitals and colonizing others. Their geography is very peculiar: why Frankfurt and not Paris? Why Tokyo and not Beijing? Do Germans spend more time on the Internet than the French? Or is it due to some other, unchangeable geographical characteristics? Maudlin says Spain is not a hub and never will be. “Because it’s a peninsula,” he explains. Geography is destiny, even on the Internet. Or, more accurately, especially on the Internet.

Who is scarier for the Internet: terrorists or a Georgian grandmother?

“Let me ask you,” he began. – Aren’t we, through your book, creating a real guide for terrorists? By indicating the location of “points of interest”, as you call them, we are taking a big risk. If they are damaged and destroyed, not only one building will fall, but the entire country. So is it wise to tell the whole world about this?

It was a scary question. Could it be that my search for the physical infrastructure of the Internet is truly unsafe? Probably the Internet is hidden from human eyes for some very good reason?

But I had no reason to worry. Every time I arrived at some inconspicuous, unsigned building that was critical to the functioning of the Internet, the same thing happened. The veil of secrecy was not completely removed, but it was still lifted. I wasn't groping for the network in the dark, not at all. Often it even seemed as if they were deliberately lighting my way, and the more my interlocutors knew about the physical infrastructure of the Internet, the less they worried about its security.

Over time, I realized that this openness is not just a politeness, but a philosophical position based in part on the legendary reliability of the Internet. Well-designed networks have a reserve of resilience in case a failure occurs at one point or another: in these cases, traffic quickly bypasses it, so that a conscientious engineer has nothing to worry about. More often than not, the biggest threat to the Internet is an errant excavator or, in one recent high-profile case, a seventy-five-year-old Georgian grandmother who cut through an underground fiber optic cable with a shovel, leaving Armenia without a network for several hours.

Where is your data actually located?

It has become a commonplace that the data storage industry adheres to the same strict rules of secrecy as the participants in secret fights in Fight Club: “The first rule of data centers is not to talk about data centers.” Why are data centers so secretive?

...More often, secrecy is not related to considerations of privacy or protection from theft, but to competition. Information about the size of a data center, how much electricity it consumes, and what exactly is stored in it is the same confidential information that technology companies do their best to keep secret. This is especially true for data centers built and operated by individual, relatively small companies, because in this case the buildings themselves and their “filling” can tell a lot about the products that these companies offer. Therefore, companies protect both the overall scope of work and specifics, such as which machines are inside, from the eyes of competitors. The details of a data center are like the Coca Cola formula: one of the most important corporate secrets.

As a result, it is often difficult for the average Internet user to answer the question of where his data “sleeps.” Large web companies especially seem to like to hide behind the cloud. They often avoid answering directly the question of where the data is stored, sometimes even pretending that they themselves do not really know. As one data storage expert explained to me, "Sometimes the question 'Where is my email stored?' can be answered in quantum terms rather than in Newtonian ones,” which in human language means: it is simultaneously in so many places that it is the same as if it is not anywhere at all.

However, this is hypocrisy. This is, so to speak, a quarter of the truth, and one that data center owners are pushing hard to divert attention away from where the data actually resides—due to competition, a desire to avoid talking about their environmental impact, or security concerns. But what makes me especially sad is that this fictional uncertainty is accompanied by a condescending, reassuring purr: “We’ll take care of it for you.” There is something of the slaughterhouse in this effort to become invisible, to make us forget about their existence.

Our data is always physically located somewhere, often in two places at the same time. Given that this is our data, I believe we should know where these storage locations are, how the data ends up there, and what it looks like. This seems to me to be a basic principle of today's Internet: if we trust big companies with so much of us, they should trust us to know where and in what form they store it all.

Kitchen where internet is prepared

Once the cable was stripped and exposed to its pinkish innards, Matt and Mark dragged it into the red tent to begin splicing the fibers. Matt placed a cup of tea on the workbench next to him and began wielding a corkscrew-like tool, stripping away the inner plastic insulation of the cable that surrounded the perfectly smooth tube of shining copper. Inside the tube was a bundle of black wires, each of which had another layer of colored rubber insulation, and inside it was the optical fiber itself. The work of removing each successive layer was increasingly delicate: first Matt worked like a butcher, then like a fisherman cutting up fish, then like a skilled chef and finally like a jeweler, holding each fiber in turn with pursed lips. When eight strands of optical fiber—each 125 microns thick—eventually glinted in the sun, Matt scooped a handful of baby powder into his palm and ran his hand along the end of each fiber, like a bow across strings, to clear the fibers of any possible debris.

Then he began welding the fibers together, the sea end to the land end, one by one. There were eight threads, each with its own special color. Matt first put the threads into a machine that looked like a hole punch. A small screen zoomed in and showed the position of the threads relative to each other, and Matt brought their ends together, like the finger of God and the hand of Adam in Michelangelo's fresco. Then he pressed a button, and the machine did its job, welding the threads, while Matt, holding his little finger aside, took a mug and sipped his tea. He then stretched a plastic protective sheath over the welded thread and secured it to an elegant stand, like a fishing rod. Modern technology allows each fiber to carry more than a terabyte of data per second, and underwater travel takes two-tenths of a second.

While I was watching all this, Carrillo approached the red tent. He also admired the fine work Matt did.

“Here it is, the fiber,” said Carrillo. - That's what brings in money!