How does info get on the internet

Gmail and Hotmail are cloud email services that have largely replaced desktop email clients such as Outlook. Dropbox is a cloud computing service that automatically synchronizes data between devices, saving people from having to carry files around on floppy disks. Cloud computing is having a big impact for businesses too. In the s, companies wanting to create a website needed to purchase and operate their own servers. But in , Amazon. That has lowered the barrier to entry for creating websites and made it much easier for sites to quickly expand capacity as they grow more popular.

A packet is the basic unit of information transmitted over the internet. A packet has two parts. The header contains information that helps the packet get to its destination, including the length of the packet, its source and destination, and a checksum value that helps the recipient detect if a packet was damaged in transit.

After the header comes the actual data. A packet can contain up to 64 kilobytes of data, which is roughly 20 pages of plain text. If internet routers experience congestion or other technical problems, they are allowed to deal with it by simply discarding packets.

The World Wide Web is a popular way to publish information on the internet. It offered a more powerful and user-friendly interface than other internet applications. The web supported hyperlinks, allowing users to browse from one document to another with a single click. Over time, the web became increasingly sophisticated, supporting images, audio, video, and interactive content.

In the mids, companies such as Yahoo and Amazon. In the s, full-featured web-based applications such as Yahoo Maps and Google Docs were created. In practice, the organizations with the most influence over the web are Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla, the companies that produce the leading web browsers.

Any technologies adopted by these four become de facto web standards. The web has become so popular that many people now regard it as synonymous with the internet itself. But technically, the web is just one of many internet applications. Other applications include email and BitTorrent. A web browser is a computer program that allows users to download and view websites. Web browsers are available for desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones. The first widely used browser was Mosaic , created by researchers at the University of Illinois.

The Mosaic team moved to California to found Netscape , which built the first commercially successful web browser in Apple released its Safari browser in , and Google released a browser called Chrome in By , Chrome had grown to be the most popular web browser with a market share around 50 percent. Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari also had significant market share. SSL, short for Secure Sockets Layer, is a family of encryption technologies that allows web users to protect the privacy of information they transmit over the internet.

When you visit a secure website such as Gmail. Here's what that looks like in Google's Chrome browser:. That lock is supposed to signal that third parties won't be able to read any information you send or receive. Under the hood, SSL accomplishes that by transforming your data into a coded message that only the recipient knows how to decipher. If a malicious party is listening to the conversation, it will only see a seemingly random string of characters, not the contents of your emails, Facebook posts, credit card numbers, or other private information.

SSL was introduced by Netscape in In its early years, it was only used on a few types of websites, such as online banking sites. More recently, there has been a movement toward making the use of SSL universal. In , Mozilla announced that future versions of the Firefox browser would treat the lack of SSL encryption as a security flaw, as a way to encourage all websites to upgrade. Google is considering taking the same step with Chrome. The system is hierarchical. For example, the.

Verisign assigns sub-domains like google. Owners of these second-level domains, in turn, can create sub-domains such as mail.

Because popular websites use domain names to identify themselves to the public, the security of DNS has become an increasing concern. Criminals and government spies alike have sought to compromise DNS in order to impersonate popular websites such as facebook. ICANN was founded in There are two types of domain names. The first is generic top-level domains gTLDs such as. Because the internet originated in the United States, these domains tend to be most popular there.

Authority over these domains is usually delegated to private organizations. There are also country-code top-level domains ccTLDs. Therefore the message must be translated from alphabetic text into electronic signals, transmitted over the Internet, then translated back into alphabetic text. How is this accomplished? Through the use of a protocol stack.

Every computer needs one to communicate on the Internet and it is usually built into the computer's operating system i. Windows, Unix, etc. Hardware Layer Converts binary packet data to network signals and back. If we were to follow the path that the message "Hello computer 5. If the message to be sent is long, each stack layer that the message passes through may break the message up into smaller chunks of data.

This is because data sent over the Internet and most computer networks are sent in manageable chunks. On the Internet, these chunks of data are known as packets. Each packet is assigned a port number. We need to know which program on the destination computer needs to receive the message because it will be listening on a specific port.

This is where each packet receives it's destination address, 5. Now that our message packets have a port number and an IP address, they are ready to be sent over the Internet. The hardware layer takes care of turning our packets containing the alphabetic text of our message into electronic signals and transmitting them over the phone line.

On the other end of the phone line your ISP has a direct connection to the Internet. The ISPs router examines the destination address in each packet and determines where to send it. Often, the packet's next stop is another router. More on routers and Internet infrastructure later. Eventually, the packets reach computer 5. As the packets go upwards through the stack, all routing data that the sending computer's stack added such as IP address and port number is stripped from the packets.

When the data reaches the top of the stack, the packets have been re-assembled into their original form, "Hello computer 5. But what's in-between? What actually makes up the Internet? Let's look at another diagram: Diagram 3 Here we see Diagram 1 redrawn with more detail. The physical connection through the phone network to the Internet Service Provider might have been easy to guess, but beyond that might bear some explanation. The ISP maintains a pool of modems for their dial-in customers.

This is managed by some form of computer usually a dedicated one which controls data flow from the modem pool to a backbone or dedicated line router. This setup may be refered to as a port server, as it 'serves' access to the network. Billing and usage information is usually collected here as well.

From here the packets will usually journey through several routers and over several backbones, dedicated lines, and other networks until they find their destination, the computer with address 5. But wouldn't it would be nice if we knew the exact route our packets were taking over the Internet? As it turns out, there is a way This one is called traceroute and it shows the path your packets are taking to a given Internet destination.

Like ping, you must use traceroute from a command prompt. In Windows, use tracert www. From a Unix prompt, type traceroute www. Like ping, you may also enter IP addresses instead of domain names.

Traceroute will print out a list of all the routers, computers, and any other Internet entities that your packets must travel through to get to their destination. If you use traceroute, you'll notice that your packets must travel through many things to get to their destination. Most have long names such as sjc2-core1-h These are Internet routers that decide where to send your packets. Several routers are shown in Diagram 3, but only a few.

Diagram 3 is meant to show a simple network structure. The Internet is much more complex. Internet Infrastructure The Internet backbone is made up of many large networks which interconnect with each other. These networks peer with each other to exchange packet traffic.

NAPs were the original Internet interconnect points. Below is a picture showing this hierarchical infrastructure. Diagram 4 This is not a true representation of an actual piece of the Internet. None of the physical network components are shown in Diagram 4 as they are in Diagram 3.

This is because a single NSP's backbone infrastructure is a complex drawing by itself. Most NSPs publish maps of their network infrastructure on their web sites and can be found easily. To draw an actual map of the Internet would be nearly impossible due to it's size, complexity, and ever changing structure.

A very popular type of site on the internet is communities and forums. This is the type of websites that you are a member of and discuss topics with other members. Two very common types of websites that often comes up in the search result in Google is Quora and Reddit. Both Quora and Reddit are websites that essentially have no information at all from the companies. They just provide a platform. The content on the websites is from people like you and me. We go there to ask questions and answers others.

Thus, creating a huge library of questions and answers for others to find. Something that has been extremely popular during the s and the category that Networking Guides would be placed in is websites that are created by normal people. There are millions of blogs on the internet. Some of them discuss what the person ate for dinner or what they are wearing, while others discuss certain topics like internet and networking.

This is regular people that are behind these websites. A good example is me. Many websites have started out as small blogs and then growing to the websites they are today. But it started out as one. Michael Arrington created TechCrunch as his personal blog. Blogs are still very popular for regular people and they continue to grow to bigger websites.

But I would say, without any numbers to back it up, that blogs are the biggest part of the information on the internet. This question was the spark of this blog post. One day at work, during the afternoon break, we discussed the amount of information on the internet and if it could get too much. Is it information overload and what can it do to us as a society? But I generally believe that the more information that we have, the better.

No one should know everything, but everyone should know some. But there are also some risks involved, that you may or may not, take seriously.