HOW DOES THE INTERNET WORK?


The internet is a global network of millions of computers that can communicate with one another. Information can he sent and received across the network in the form of text, pictures, video and sound. Home computers often connect to the Internet using a normal phone line and a modem — a device that connects the computer to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Businesses and other large organizations may have their own network, known as a Local Area Network (LAN), which connects to an ISP with a high-speed link.



Everyone’s talking about the internet and whether, or how, it should be regulated. But not enough people know how the internet actually works—or what exactly the internet is.



You probably have your own “local area network” at home, and it’s made up of all the devices connected to your router, which connects to the internet. The word “internet” refers to a worldwide system of “interconnected computer networks”.



That’s all the internet really is—a large number of computer networks all over the world, connected together. Of course, there’s a lot of physical hardware—from the cables under your city streets to the massive cables on the ocean floors to satellites in orbit around the planet—that makes this communication possible. There’s also a lot of software at work in the background, allowing you to type in a website address like “google.com” and have your computer to send information to the physical location where that website is located in the fastest way possible.



Even when you’re just connecting to a single website, there’s a lot more going on under the hood. Your computer can’t directly send a piece of information, or “packet” of data, to the computer hosting the website. Instead, it passes a packet to your home router with information about where it’s going and where the web server should reply. Your router then sends it to the routers at your internet service provider (Comcast, Time Warner, or whoever else you use), where it’s sent to another router at another internet service provider, and so on, until it reaches its destination. Any packets sent back to your system from the remote server make the reverse journey.



To use an imperfect analogy, it’s a bit like sending a letter in the mail. Your local postal employee can’t just grab the letter and take it directly across the country or continent to its destination address. Instead, the letter goes to your local post office, where it’s sent to another post office, and then another one, and so on, until it gets to its destination. It takes longer for a letter to get to the other side of the world than the other side of the country because it has to make more stops, and that’s generally true for the internet as well. It will take a bit longer for packets to go longer distances with more transfers, or “hops”, as they’re called.



Unlike with physical mail, sending data packets is still very fast, though, and it happens many times a second. Each packet is very small, and large numbers of packets are sent back and forth when computers communicate—even if one is just loading a website from another one. A packet’s travel time is measured in milliseconds.





Picture Credit : Google



 




 



What are the interesting facts about the internet?



Are they the same?



Although the world wide web and the internet are used alternatively, the two are not the same. Internet is a network of networks that links computers together. The world wide web on the other hand is a collection of lined pages that are accessed using the Internet and a web browser.



WWW for free



The World Wide Web was made available to the public for free in 1993. Initially, it was meant only for physicists at the European organisation for nuclear research (CERN) to share data.



Biggest medium of communication



The WWW is the fastest growing communication medium of all time. Imagine, it took a WWW only four years to reach 50 million people. In contrast, it took the radio 38 years and television 13 years to reach the same number.



The Apple connection



Did you know that the entire world wide web stored on a NeXT computer when it was created? NeXT was the company started by Steve Jobs after he was ousted from Apple Inc.



What’s in a name?



Before the name World Wide Web was finalised, there were other options such as Mine of Information, Information Mine, and Mesh. These names don’t sound cooler than the World Wide Web, do they?



 



Picture Credit : Google


What is e-mail bankruptcy?



A person declares ‘email bankruptcy’ when he/she has decided to clear the inbox by deleting all the mails up to a particular date. Such a decision may be necessary if the person has been inundated with thousands of emails and has failed to respond on time. Such a backlog is generally attributed to information overload as many high-profile persons receive hundreds of emails everyday. A person may have also fallen behind in reading and answering emails during long vacations or illnesses.



While declaring bankruptcy, the person sends a mass email to senders informing them that their email is being detected and that they may send it once again if they expect a response.



Harvard professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig first coined the term in 2004 when he expressed inability to go through the email backlog and deleted them en masse.



 



Picture Credit : Google


What is the Slashdot Effect?


Many websites often give a brief synopsis of a story and work as springboards offering a link to another website which carries the whole story. Interested readers click on the link leading to them to the referenced site. When large masses of users flock to the site at the same time, it overloads the site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily close. This is called the Slashdot effect and the site is said to be Slashdotted.



The phenomenon has been named after Slashdot, an award-winning technology-related news website launched in 1997. The website’s readers submit stories with links, inviting comments to start threaded discussions among users. The trouble starts when an article on the front page attracts an unusually large number of hits and causes a temporary surge in traffic on the linked website.



Major news sites or corporate websites are designed to deal with such large number of hits and therefore do not normally experience this effect. Websites with small bandwidths, however, are ill equipped to deal with this kind of traffic jam. They are used to getting only a few thousand hits a day and when the Slashdot effect occurs, the numbers can range from several hundred to several thousand hits per minute!



 



Picture Credit : Google


What are the benefits and examples of Internet of things?



IoT offers several benefits for consumers and businesses. For a business, an IoT device can help it understand its consumers and their choices, as the device constantly tracks usage and sends them the data required to build things that are needed.



For the user, an IoT device can give him real-time data based on his requirements, making it easier for him to take quick decisions.



It can also help him become more productive due to automation of tasks, leaving him with more time to focus on important things.



Examples of IoT at home



Here’s a simple example to understand how IoT can help you at home.



You have to be in school by 8 a.m. so you up on time, but it is pouring outside, there is heavy traffic and your school metro train is delayed due to technical issues. Unfortunately, you do not know that. Hence, you end up late to school.



If you have an IoT-enabled alarm clock at home, it would have known about the delayed schedule of the metro train and the traffic on the way to the station as it is connected to several other devices on the IoT platform. So, it would have woken you up earlier to prepare you for the traffic and the delayed train. All this, without you having to do a thing!



 



Picture Credit : Google


What is the Internet of Things? How does it work?



The Internet of Things (IoT), as the phrase suggests, is an ecosystem where physical things (objects) are connected to a computer or other devices using the Internet.



Just as the Internet in our computer enables us to connect to other computers and send and receive data, it can also be used to connect other devices to the network to transmit data.



From smart speakers on your desktop that play songs on command, to self-driving cars with complex sensors that detect objects on its path, IoT devices come in all shapes and sizes with an on/off switch. Simply put, they are smart things which facilitate remote monitoring.



Smart devices and objects with built-in sensors are connected to an IoT platform. These devices are constantly collecting data about their use and transmitting it over the Internet. The IoT platform integrates data from several such devices and uses analytics to share the most valuables information with applications that help humans understand and comprehend the data.



 



Picture Credit : Google