"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.