Internet Basics - ENG 360 Advanced Report and Proposal Writing: Spring 2012

If I asked you to draw a picture of the Internet, what would you put on the piece of paper?

You already have a mental model of what the Internet is and how it works, and much of that mental model is accurate. The purpose of this section of our course web is to confirm and extend what you know and have experienced online, that is, to help you have a more accurate mental model.

The ability to more quickly and accurately understand and adapt to change; that is, the ability to lead people into the future. Move leftwards on the adoption curve. Learn new technologies more quickly. Predict the future better, for example, make better investment decisions.

The ability to talk to the experts who are the architects, engineers, and carpenters of your online experience.

The market for night classes and online instruction in programming and Web construction, as well as for iPhone apps that teach, is booming. Those jumping on board say they are preparing for a future in which the Internet is the foundation for entertainment, education and nearly everything else. Knowing how the digital pieces fit together, they say, will be crucial to ensuring that they are not left in the dark ages.

Some in this crowd foster secret hopes of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg. But most have no plans to quit their day jobs — it is just that those jobs now require being able to customize a blog’s design or care for and feed an online database.

“Inasmuch as you need to know how to read English, you need to have some understanding of the code that builds the Web,” said Sarah Henry, 39, an investment manager who lives in Wayne, Pa. “It is fundamental to the way the world is organized and the way people think about things these days.”

Had you bought Google's stock or Amazon's stock when it was first issued, you would have made a good investment. But who knew? Knowing what the Internet is and how it works would increase the chances that it is you who will know.

When is the computer that you're using connected to other computers?
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When connected, what information is passing over that connection?
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Is that information protected from eavesdropping and alteration?
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What can you know about the other sites or persons you're connected to?
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What can they know about you?

What is the Internet?

It's stupid. In fact, it's so stupid that it's not even a thing. Let me repeat that: There is no such thing as the Internet. That's why it works so well.

The old-fashioned landline analog voice telephone network has all the intelligence inside the network -- the phone company's central switching offices. The telephone network is stupid at the edges; you couldn't do much with old-fashioned telephone unless you added on an answering machine that was not part of the network.

In contrast, the digital data network, aka the Internet, has all the intelligence at the edges, your PC or phone or tablet. It's stupid in the middle, just a bit conveyor. Millions of computers act as routers, moving packets of bits on to the next computer as the packets make their way to their destination. There is no center, no Internet, Inc. running everything.

Why the Intelligent Network was once a good idea, but isn't anymore. One telephone company nerd's odd perspective on the changing value proposition

The Internet is more a cluster of innovations that share three virtues. It is a not a single innovation or a definable thing.

World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else
by Doc Searls and David Weinberger

The Internet is not a thing. It's an agreement. ...

If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?

Could it be because the three Internet virtues are the antithesis of how governments and businesses view the world?

Nobody owns it: Businesses are defined by what they own, as governments are defined by what they control.

Everybody can use it: In business, selling goods means transferring exclusive rights of use from the vendor to the buyer; in government, making laws means imposing restrictions on people.

Anybody can improve it: Business and government cherish authorized roles. It's the job of only certain people to do certain things, to make the right changes.

Business and government by their natures are predisposed to misunderstand the Internet's nature.

They can own and control and legislate and get profit from a thing. It's hard to own and control let alone legislate a virtue.

I would add a fourth virtue: the Internet is constructed to route around damage. If a company or government tries to own the Internet, to keep people from using it and improving it, they just get ignored and the rest of us go about our business.

In technical terms, it runs on algorithms. In social terms, it's similar to the town commons, the plot of land set aside for everyone to use. The common wealth is a similar concept. I own a piece of land. Do I own the air above that land? Certainly as high as I can reach, as high as my rooftop. How far above?

At some point, it becomes public space again, and airplanes can fly over your house without asking permission.

This collaboration is also based on technical standards. In addition to the larger standards for electricity and electrical devices, which usually cost money, the Internet runs on protocols and computer languages that are free and shared by everyone, just as the grass and trees in the town commons are free or the alphabet is free. These protocols are overseen by a couple of self-appointed deliberative committees that have established processes for orderly change -- the antidote to anarchy and to the greed it could breed.

How Did the Internet Begin?

During the cold war in the 1950's, the U.S. military had a problem. What if the Russians bombed the center? As another example, the new interstate highway system was great, but there were only a couple of bridges over the Mississippi River. If the Russians bombed the bridge, the fancy highway system on either bank wasn't worth much.

The military relied on the telephone system to communicate. It uses the tin can model, you know, two tin cans with a string between. The farther away the tin cans, the louder you need to shout. Snip the string and the circuit is broken and the communication is over. It used to happen on Mother's Day, when "all circuits are busy. Please try your call again later." Faced with the Russian bomb, the U.S. military could not armor-plate, protect, or otherwise secure every telephone pole and wire in the country.

Heterarchy -- a form of organization resembling a network or fishnet. Authority is determined by knowledge and function.

Hierarchy -- a form of organization resembling a pyramid. Authority is determined by position in the pyramid, each level subordinate to the one above it.

The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability.

All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages.

The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis. The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant. Only final results would count.

To remove a possible means of enemy spying, the network's nodes would retain no information about the traffic passing through. Sterling goes on to use Baran's hot-potato analogy:

Basically, the packet would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn't matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateralled wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This rather haphazard delivery system might be "inefficient" in the usual sense ... but it would be extremely rugged.

It took another twenty years for the widespread adoption of the rules, or the protocol, that made Baran's vision a reality. These rules are technical rules, not social or political or commercial rules. It turned out that the rules that avoided enemy spying in war time also work against their peace time equivalents: censorship and control. The powerful people at the top of social, political, and commercial organizations such as libraries, governments, and music distribution companies would like to maintain control. Note they always call it something else. Librarians call it access. Governments call it securing state secrets. Record labels call it copyrights. However, the genie is out of the bottle and it isn't going back in.

Who owns the Internet? No one does. Everyone does. As a packet-switched network, it started in the fall of 1969 with four computers linked together because academic researchers like Douglas Engelbart (above) at Stanford were curious about augmenting human intelligence, especially accurate memory. They cooperated for the common good. Engelbart not only envisioned and explained the internet back in 1968 before it existed, but he also did practical things like invent the mouse. That's the first one in the photo above - over forty years ago!

The ARPA Network

1969

Node 1 University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) August

Node 2 Stanford (California) Research Institute (SRI) October

Node 3 University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) November

Node 4 University of Utah December

from the original back-of-the-envelope sketch on the left

Nothing much has changed except the number of computers and the technical rules, called protocols, by which the information is exchanged.

What Trends Drive the Development of the Internet?

These are long-term trends. You can count on them continuing, which will help you place long-term bets -- like which investment of yourtime (your job) and money offers you the better future? moore's law

Increasingly, computers are becoming, in order of power of the trend, as I see it, most powerful first:

small, fast, cheap

Moore's Law: about every two years, computers double in power and halve in price.

On the left, we see this pattern demonstrated by the number of transistors on a given area or chip. Many other measures, such as pixels per dollar, show the same pattern because they are demonstrating the same "law". (It's really just a pattern that has continued for decades.)

Note that the x-axis is linear but the y-axis is logarithmic. Time on the x-axis increases a year at a time. However, number of transistors on the y-axis increases exponentially.

What you can do on your iPhone today (Why is it even called a "phone"?) took t

housands of dollars of hardware and a corner of a room just fifteen years ago. And you couldn't take it with you when you left the house. Soon your belt buckle will do more than Windows does now. For example, tou will be able to walk up to any flat screen and go to the personal web site of anyone you recently stood near.

For almost the last decade, the best a US household could buy was the telephone company's DSL downstream bandwidth of 3 Mbps. In South Korea, the current world-wide leader in bandwidth to the home, they get 12 Mbps.

update Dec 3 - The above info is outdated. Below are the OECD (Org of Economically Developed Countries) Broadband Portal's statistics for September 2010. Click to enlarge.

On the graph on the left, you can see that the U.S. companies aren't offering much bandwidth, on average, compared to companies in other countries. Well, perhaps in those other countries they pay a whole lot more.

On the graph in the center, you can see that Internet users in other developed countries pay about what Internet users in the U.S. pay for the low-bandwidth access that U.S. consumers can get. But most of the foreigner are choosing the high-bandwidth access, of course, so how much are they paying for that?

Using Japan as an example, you can see on the left-hand chart Japan's average advertised broadband download speed is about 80 Mbps and the U.S.'s 14 Mbps. On the center graph for connections below 2.5, which is what you are getting at home, as opposed to what Medaille gets coming onto campus for the whole campus, Japan $24 and U.S. $26, about the same. For the high-bandwidth connections, Japan $31, a little higher than the low-bandwidth. For the U.S., $122, about four times higher, and it's not offered to the home.

On December 4, 2011, I went to Verizon.com and inquired about bandwidth and prices to my home in Buffalo. I can't provide a direct URL because I had to fill out forms in pop-up windows, but I was offered "High Speed Internet Enhanced 1.1 to 3 Mbps $39.99 per month". That's the best I can get. In Japan, according to the OECC averages, I would pay a little more, $40 instead of $30, for a whole lot less, 3 Mbps instead of 80 Mbps.

South Korea is already ahead of the global technological curve but it is looking to forge even further ahead by boosting broadband speeds across the nation.

It is not aiming at 100, 200 or even 500 megabits per second (Mbps). Instead it has devised a national plan for 1,000 Mbps connections to be commonplace by 2012.

1,000 Mbps? Forget that! The Internet2 backbone has bandwidth of 100 Gbps or 100,000 Mbps. That's over 30,000 times greater than what we can get at home now. The Internet2 network is up and running and thousands of people are using it every day, but not at home. convergence into TV?

Is Internet2 using a different physical network? No, they're using fiber that is already in the ground. Through Fiberco, they're using dark fiber from Level 3. Why aren't we getting that at home?

Do we really need that much bandwidth? What are we going to do with all that data?

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. ... The United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired. ...

Link these communicating sensors to computing intelligence and you see the rise of what is called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet.

World Economic Forum's Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development

visual

broadband multimedia; streaming media; two-way streaming media; interactive two-way video

networked

converged

You can browse the web, update your Facebook, and take and edit videos -- on your phone?

databases can interact with the voice systems - iPhone's Siri was introduced (right) in October 2011.

People (including high-priced sell-side Wall Street analysts) fail to see where the puck is going for Siri. ... I believe Siri’s launch this month spells a future crippling of Google’s business.

gone: "telephones", that is, landlines, the circuit-switched analog telephone system

embedded

You can't see them. Things that think. Invisible computers. Devices. A third of the price of a new car is the computer systems. rfid

Common objects have IP numbers and a full-fledged operating system. They'll be able to listen and speak. Paranoid, anyone?

E-commerce will leak into cell phones, TV remotes, dashboards, refrigerators, and pantries. Buy anything, anywhere, with hardly a second thought -- or no thought at all, using e-commerce agents.

Indeed, the tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) chips (greatly magnified on left) are already replacing bar codes. They are becoming attached to many objects that now have a bar code. You may remember the IBM TV commercial

from several years ago about the guy who appears to be a shoplifter. Everything he appears to be stealing by stuffing into his coat has an RFID chip, so checking out becomes superfluous. So does taking inventory, as you can see on the diagram of the warehouse (left). Every box, every location, and every slot has an RFID chip, aka "smart label".

In capsule form (on a fingertip, right) these chips can be implanted into living creatures. Add in global positioning systems (GPS), and there are going to be many services that bright young people like you can create to make lots of money.

Virtual and augmented reality

A virtual space where the player immerses himself into that exceed the bounds of physical reality. In the VR, time, physical laws and material properties no longer hold in contrast to real-world environment.

A live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

The yellow first-down stripe is an early example of augmented reality that most of us have experienced.

Augumented-reality apps uncover the hidden reality all around you. ... There are AR apps that show you where the hazards are on golf courses (Golfscape GPS Rangefinder), where you parked your car (Augmented Car Finder), who’s using Twitter in the buildings around you (Tweet360), what houses are for sale near you and for how much (ZipRealty Real Estate), how good and how expensive a restaurant is before you even go inside (Yelp), the names of the stars and constellations over your head (Star Walk, Star Chart), the names and details of the mountains in front of you (Panoramascope, Peaks), what crimes have recently been committed in the neighborhoods around you (SpotCrime), and dozens more.

Layar Vision allows the creation of layers and applications that recognize real world objects and display digital experiences on top of them. ...

Layar Vision uses computer vision techniques to augment objects in the physical world. It can tell which objects in the real world are augmented because the visual fingerprints of the objects are preloaded into the application based on the user’s layer selection.

universal

Everyone will have them. They're always on, everywhere, as pervasive as electricity.

Downlink speeds of more than 7.2 Mb/s
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WCDMA + WiFi dual network support
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full mobile broadband services

And here's the kicker: "... also doubles as a WiFi router for up to eight devices at a time."

That's a business model. A "router" in this case is aka a "hotspot". I take my phone to a place where people can't afford the monthly charge for mobile broadband services. For a very small fee, they can use my phone as a mobile hotspot.

Here's the web site the young university students below, all English speakers, will use as their textbook, no fees and no registration required.

a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

OCW is not an MIT education.
OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.

Those young Indian English speakers are willing to work a whole lot more cheaply than you are because there aren't enough jobs for them in India.

India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.

Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability ...

to communicate crisply in clear English
to work with teams and deliver presentations
to use search engines like Google
to tear apart theories rather than memorize them.

distributed

intelligent

iPhone's Siri -- Note the features on the image above right. You say into your iPhone, "Where's the closest Italian restaurant?" and the answer comes back immediately with a map. If the restaurant is smart, they'll add a coupon.

easy

adaptive: speech recognition (Siri), gesture recognition (iPhone, iPad), text-to-speech conversion, language translation, and sensory immersion

The Internet

ENG 360 Advanced Report and Proposal Writing

Medaille College - Spring 2012