"Tubes" - a journey to the center of the internet

We recently finished reading the book “Tubes” by Andrew Blum. This book talks about the internet and the things that make it work, the cover of the book even says that it’s “a journey to the center of the internet”. Most people, when asked how the internet works, would describe something to magic or just plainly say that it “just works”. This book is meant to show people what really happens on the internet that allows to do stuff such as search for cat videos or trade stocks without having to leave our home. This book fascinated me because I’m very interested in networking and the infrastructure that may be behind things like a Google search. In the past, I’ve been known to search for videos of data centers (such as This one showing a Google data center) so I would not be considered a beginner when it comes to knowledge of what the internet is and how it works. The most interesting thing I learned was when the author starts thinking in gigabytes and gigabits as individual bits, so one gigabyte is equal to about 1,000,000,000 bytes (if you use base-10 and not binary) or about 8,000,000,000 bits. If I had to pick a part of the book I didn’t like, it would most likely be several parts mainly because I knew the information already and was slightly bored with reading it and learning it again. Overall, there weren’t many terms that I didn’t know. Even when he was talking about the SFP+ cable/NIC, I was familiar with it because of my experience and the fact that I often frequent the /r/homelab subreddit, where people show off their home servers, datacenters, and networks. This book was very thorough and did not leave me with any questions after reading, and any questions could have been answered with a simple Google search. I would absolutely recommend this book to a friend, especially one that wants to know more about the internet and about how things like Google and Facebook can provide you with content from any place in the world. I think this book is significant mostly because it helps us computer science students realize that a lot of what computers do today is reliant on networking, and often networking through the internet. This book allows us to get an idea of what the internet is like without having to take a look at things like the OSI model and how the different networking equipment works with packets. This book was most likely chosen as a textbook because it gives us this general idea of how the internet works and let us get exposure to what some of us may end up working with as a career in the future. My interest in the internet and networks has probably stemmed from working with my home networking as well as being exposed to the makeup of a corporate network where I was an intern. At my internship, I got an idea of how the network was structured and where it came from, with its different subnetworks and physical locations. I was also exposed to networking and the internet through CyberPatriot, a national cyber defense competition. One of my roles my senior year was to be my teams networking specialist. We used Cisco’s “packet tracer” to build out virtual networks and troubleshoot problems in routers and switches while getting exposed to a real command line interface that was allowing us to make these changes in the scenario. Overall, this was a fun book to read, and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about how the internet works.

The Filter Bubble of the internet

The “filter bubble” is the internet phenomenon where people are stuck in their own bubble of like-minded thought on the internet because of specialized algorithms that are meant to target the user and serve up ads that that person may like. For this project, we were tasked with getting on a friend’s computer and surfing the internet to see what ads and suggestions they are served up. I spent some time on my roommate’s computer. Logan and I are very alike, but we still have some very sharp differences when it comes to what we like and enjoy on the web. I spent some time on Logan’s MacBook and was interested in the results of this experiment.

               Logan and I both like riding longboards, but I only recently started while he had been doing it for many years now. Logan also watches lots of skateboarding and longboarding videos on YouTube. Because of this, the suggested videos for Logan are almost primarily videos from his favorite channel or those similar to it. My YouTube recommendations usually have something to do with computers, drones, science, or guns. These differences show you what we usually watch online, and shows that YouTube remembers the videos we watch and uses them to recommend new videos to watch. The websites we use daily are not learning what we like and using it to target ads toward us. It’s similar to the computers described in chapter 8 of “The Pattern on the Stone” where the author writes about computer that learn and adapt. Computers are learning our patterns of thoughts and likes and are adapting the advertising to be more relevant to us. The algorithms are sometimes similar to those described in chapter 5 of “The Pattern on the Stone” where the author writes about what algorithms are and how they are used. These specific algorithms are being used to track out movement across the web and figure out what we like.

               One of the other websites that I surfed while on Logan’s computer was Netflix. I was not surprised to see similar results as those on my recommendations, as we often watch the same shows together. One difference was that Netflix realized that I enjoyed documentaries specifically about topics related to science and computers. The algorithm that Netflix uses probably looks not only at what we watch, but how long we watch it. If we start a show but only watch a few minutes before turning it off, Netflix should assume that we did not like the show and should not give us recommendations similar to the show we did not like. The algorithm that Netflix uses was actually not created by them. There was a competition from 2006 to 2011 that challenged teams to create the algorithm that Netflix uses now, or at least is based off of. You can still see the website for the competition at http://www.netflixprize.com/.  Netflix awarded $1 Million to the grand prize winning team. Over one thousand teams entered and competed for the grand prize.

               The big questions about this type of targeted advertisement is privacy. How can a company like Facebook be so spot on with its advertisements? Facebook tracks us as we go onto nearly every page on the internet. If a webpage has a “like” button or a way to comment through Facebook, then they can see that you have visited that page. You could support a strong argument that some of these algorithms and websites know us better than we know ourselves, which seems to scare some people and not phase other people. Do you think we deserve more privacy from internet giants such as Facebook and Google?

Meaning of “Pattern on the Stone”

We recently finished reading the book “Pattern on the Stone” in my computer science class. Overall, during reading this book, I felt pretty engaged with the book. The topics engaged me and interested me. The most interesting I learned was how the author of the book built a tic-tac-toe machine using physical items such as sticks and strings. This helped me step back and realize that computers work through the same logic that sticks and strings can, and it’s not some sort of magic that happens that I will never understand. I also enjoyed when the book explained error correcting, as this is a vital part in error correcting memory that is used in servers, which I am very interested in, and own one myself. Would I recommend this book to a friend? Yes, I would, but only if that person already has a basic understanding of computers, as some of the topics covered in this book go more in depth and someone who doesn’t know anything about computers may get lost. I think this book was chosen as a textbook for this course because it helps introduce us to some of the basics of how computer work, the cover literally says “the simple ideas that make computers work”. This book helps expose us all to the concept of computer science and what basic concepts we will deal with throughout our studies and our careers. One of the chapters that I enjoyed reading was the chapter that dealt with machine learning and artificial intelligence, mostly because I believe this is one of the next big things in computer science. In the future, and even in some systems today, artificial intelligence and machine learning will play a hand in how our digital lives function. Today it might be as simple as being to recognize a car or face from one of your photos and group those pictures together, but in the future, machine learning and artificial intelligence will be relied upon for our everyday lives. Instead of Siri being just a thing you talk to, it will be a thing to have a conversation with, and it will know you as a person and how to make itself more useful to us, even if it’s just a piece of code sitting on our phones. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is already being tested and implemented in the military today. I recently went to a Landon Lecture where the president, CEO, and chairman of Northrop Grumman, the company behind the B-2 stealth bomber. He discussed how his company was actively using machine learning to teach its new test bomber how to land and take off from air carriers as well as coordinate mid-air refueling. Northrop Grumman has been able to successfully take off and land on an aircraft carrier completely autonomously. This is the type of stuff that we only dreamed about years ago, with movies like terminator, and now this is happening in the real world. “the Pattern on the Stone” was published about 18 years ago in 1998, the year I was born. The fact that the knowledge and the thought in this book is still relevant to this day proves that this book is a good choice of book for a textbook, and a good read for anyone wanting to know more about how computers work at the most basic level. Overall, there was no part of this book that I didn’t like if you don’t count the rare page where I became disinterested, and I would recommend reading the book “Pattern on the Stone” by W. Daniel Hillis.

RSA encryption

RSA Algorithm

The idea for a public-private key cryptosystem originally came from Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976, when they published the concept. The original algorithm they created used a shared key created from a number, modulo a prime number. Over the years, many people worked on trying to create a function that would be easy to do one way, but very hard to invert (do it the other way). The final algorithm was completed when, one night, Ron Rivest had a “good deal” of wine at a Passover dinner. Rivest then went home and spent the night finalizing the formula and had the paper to present it almost ready by the next day.

               How does it work? RSA uses a public key and a private key to encrypt data. The public key is meant to be public and to be spread and known by anyone wanting to send a message to the owner of the public key. The private key is mathematically linked to the public key and allows a message encrypted using the public key to be decrypted by using the private key that it is linked with. The keys for RSA encryption are created by using math on two distinct prime numbers to mathematically calculate the private and public keys.

               What makes this special? RSA encryption allows us to encrypt data and ensure that only the user holding the private key can decrypt it. It also allows us to be able to spread around a public key so that someone that wants to send a message us able to encrypt it and ensure that it’s for our eyes only. The algorithm is also designed to be very easy to encrypt data, but trying to crack the encryption is very hard without the private key, giving the users greater security.

               Could we do this algorithm manually? Yes, you could do the math behind calculating the keys and encrypting/ decrypting manually, but the math would be very long and tedious. For the keys to be as secure as possible, you must select large prime numbers and this would be very difficult for a human to do the calculations, so they are almost exclusively done by computers.

               I’m currently very excited to read chapter 6 of “The Pattern on the Stone” because that chapter talks about “secret codes”. I’m hoping they cover a little about RSA type encryption because it’s very commonly used today. I had lunch with Eugene Vasserman, a professor at KSU about a year ago and when handing me his business card, he pointed out the PGP encryption public key on the back of the card. by using this PGP public key, I could encrypt a message that would be just for Prof. Vasserman, much like RSA.

               A video I would recommend watching to get more information about the math behind the RSA algorithm is Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXB-V_Keiu8. This video is from Khan Academy and helps to explain the math and reasoning behind the way it encrypts data and why we encrypt data using RSA instead of having a shared private key between two people so that they may share messages. The video uses the example of a bank sending messages, and if the bank had to have a specific key for each member, it would have too many keys to keep track of, but if it can have one key to decrypt all messages it receives, this allows the bank to communicate much more effectively. I would highly recommend checking out the video for a great explanation, and maybe searching YouTube for other videos to explain RSA encryption in more depth.

               

CIS 115 Personal Biography

My name is Josh Riess and I’m from Overland Park, Kansas. I’m currently a freshman at Kansas State University majoring in Computer Science. I chose to come to Kansas State because of the spectacular college of engineering as well as the location, close enough to drive back in a day, but not too close where my parents would be inclined to pop in on me. I am interested in computer science because of the security aspect of it, as well as the fact that I have always been fascinated with computers and how they work and what I can do with them. My hobbies include working on my home network and servers, Scouting, camping, and hiking. My favorite thing is to mess around with my home network and try to set up servers with different services that all work together. I have an older sister and a younger brother and a loving mother and father. I worked at CommunityAmerica Credit Union for the past 2 summers as well as after school for my senior year. I worked as a paid intern in the Solution Center, their help desk that also did so much more than a normal help desk. I spent my first months doing things such as moving computers around for employees moving locations, placing PCs for new employees, and pulling hardware for employees that left the credit union. We also had another company in our building named TruHome Solutions. TruHome contracted the Information Services department of CommunityAmerica to do their support and manage their infrastructure needs. In the final few months of my internship, I ended up taking phone calls from the solution center phone queue as well as taking tickets from the email ticket system. I would spend my entire 5 hours at work taking calls from employees and trying to fix them. I had at my disposal a program that allowed me to remotely connect to someone’s computer and take control of it, I even had the ability to lock their keyboard and mouse if need be. On other days, I would spend 5 hours in the back up position, watching the email ticket queue and taking calls if the on call person was swamped and needed my help. This internship gave me lots of good experience and also a fall back plan for if I can’t find a job later on in life, because I’m sure they’ll be happy to have me back and not have to train someone new from the ground up. After I graduate, I plan on finding a job related to Cyber Security. The actual job I will look for depends on if I decide to try to get the SFS scholarship for students planning on going into the cyber security field (link Here). If I succeed in getting the scholarship, I would be required to work in the government for 2-3 years, depending on how long I am on the scholarship. The textbook chapters that I am most looking forward to getting in to are chapters 6 and 8. Chapter 6 in “Memory: Information and Secret Codes” and chapter 8 is “Computers That Learn and Adapt”. For my news related to technology and computers, I usually go to Google News and look at the “Technology” tab. I also have tabs added for Hacking, Cyber Security, and Servers. For my information specifically about Cyber Security, I rely on an email that I get every day called “The Cyberwire”. I signed up for their emailing list a few months ago, and I receive information on the world of hacking/cyber security every day. In addition to just the facts, The Cyberwire also adds some explanation for the information.