Tech Q&A - The Internet

[Tiberius]

Since there are a number of tech people in this community, I thought it might be a good idea to start a series of Tech Q&A's, where regular members ask questions about a certain area of tech, and the OP answers them and builds up a detailed Q&A in the first post.

I know quite a lot about the Internet, so I thought that would be a good starting point. If people want to start other Q&A's based on their knowledge and interests, please do so.

For now, ask me any questions you have about the Internet, how it works, what powers "the Web", etc. I'll try to answer as many as possible.

[Napoléon]

What's the difference between the world wide web and the internet?

[Tiberius]

What's the difference between the world wide web and the internet?

The Internet is the "network of networks" which connects computers to each other all over the world. All sorts of services use the Internet to transmit data: email, instant messaging, etc. The "World Wide Web" is just one of these services, generally running on ports 80 and 443 of computer servers, which people access using web browsers.

Not all computers that are on the Internet are part of the World Wide Web; some are just email servers or personal computers for example. The web itself is actually quite abstract; it really only exists as an "entity" inside your web browser. Rather than being a network of servers connected to each other, it is a network of servers pointing to each other via hyperlinks in web pages.

[Darth]

Who invented the internet?

How much of it is porn?

... was that why it was invented?

[orogenicman]

I have a question for you, Tiberius. I have an AMD Phenom quad core processor on a Gigabyte MA780G-UD3H motherboard with 8 gigs of DDR2 ram, an ATI Radeon 4800 series graphics card with 1 gig of video ram with a RAID 10 array running Windows 7 64 bit ultimate. I have had a long-running issue with video on this machine. If I watch a streamed movie, such as a movie on Netflix using Microsoft silverlight, after the movie is over, if I try to watch a video on, for instance youtube (i.e., video that uses Adobe flash or some other renderer), but also elsewhere, the video will not run. The only way I've been able to remedy the problem is to reboot the computer. I do not have this problem after watching dvds or blueray or any video native to my computer. Only with streaming video do I have this problem. I have done a pretty extensive search on the internet and can find no other solution to this problem. I suspect it is simply an issue inherent with Windows x64, but I could be wrong. All of my drivers along with Silverlight and flash are updated. I also get this issue regardless of the browser I use (I have IE9, Chrome, and Opera). Have you seen this before, and if so, do you have any suggestions for resolving this issue.

[Tiberius]

Who invented the internet?

Al Gore. Actually, despite being ridiculed for saying he helped create it, he did pave the way for the development of infrastructure that supports the Internet. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_Bill

As for who actually invented the Internet, it was mainly academics and the US government. The predecessor of the Internet is ARPANET, which connected several university networks together way back in 1969. The global Internet was strung together in the late 80's by various teams of scientists (CERN played a major part in this). Really though, it's hard to pinpoint an actual starting point for "the Internet", since it's based on so many technologies that were used in previous systems. Unlike the invention of the World Wide Web, there isn't one single person who invented the Internet; it's far too complex.

How much of it is porn?

I presume you mean on the World Wide Web? Well, it depends on how you want to measure it. In terms of websites, only about 4% are sex-related, though 13% of searches are for pornography. If you are talking about actual content, then it's obviously a lot, but then again you can't really make good comparisons since a newspaper article may take up a few hundred kilobytes, but a short porn video will be several megabytes in size. The short answer: A lot.

...was that why it was invented?

Oh, I'm sure it crossed Berners-Lee's mind at some point. He originally created the World Wide Web to share academic articles though.

---

I have a question for you, Tiberius. I have an AMD Phenom quad core processor on a Gigabyte MA780G-UD3H motherboard with 8 gigs of DDR2 ram, an ATI Radeon 4800 series graphics card with 1 gig of video ram with a RAID 10 array running Windows 7 64 bit ultimate. I have had a long-running issue with video on this machine. If I watch a streamed movie, such as a movie on Netflix using Microsoft silverlight, after the movie is over, if I try to watch a video on, for instance youtube (i.e., video that uses Adobe flash or some other renderer), but also elsewhere, the video will not run. The only way I've been able to remedy the problem is to reboot the computer. I do not have this problem after watching dvds or blueray or any video native to my computer. Only with streaming video do I have this problem. I have done a pretty extensive search on the internet and can find no other solution to this problem. I suspect it is simply an issue inherent with Windows x64, but I could be wrong. All of my drivers along with Silverlight and flash are updated. I also get this issue regardless of the browser I use (I have IE9, Chrome, and Opera). Have you seen this before, and if so, do you have any suggestions for resolving this issue.

This doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet, and I can't see why it would. Have you tried restarting just your browser, or using another browser? Silverlight and Flash run inside web browsers, so you should only have to restart those and not your entire computer. I'd suggest asking this at a computer forum or going to a store and asking someone there.

[orogenicman]

This doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet, and I can't see why it would. Have you tried restarting just your browser, or using another browser? Silverlight and Flash run inside web browsers, so you should only have to restart those and not your entire computer. I'd suggest asking this at a computer forum or going to a store and asking someone there.

No, that doesn't work either. I've tried running the videos in different browsers, tried closing browsers and reopening them, all to no avail. For some reason, the only thing that resolves the problem is to reboot.

Thanks for trying, though. Appreciate it.

[popeyespappy]

What do tier 1 peering policies look like these days and what boxes are they using for it?

[Tiberius]

What do tier 1 peering policies look like these days and what boxes are they using for it?

You'd probably have to ask a major ISP. It's honestly not something I've really looked into.

[popeyespappy]

What do tier 1 peering policies look like these days and what boxes are they using for it?

You'd probably have to ask a major ISP. It's honestly not something I've really looked into.

Fair enough. It’s been more than a decade since I cared about peering myself. Once upon a time though I was a senior network engineer for NASA. Among other interesting projects I deployed the hardware we used for peering with the tier 1’s when we transitioned our voice network off the PSTN onto the Internet.

Settlement free peering is nice because it is free. But the Internet has changed a lot in the last 10 years, and I suspected that these days tier 1’s only participate in settlement free peering with their tier 1 peers. Makes since when you think about it. Turns out I was right.

AT&T’s settlement free peering requirements in the US are:

US Peering Requirements - AS7018
• A peer of AS7018 must operate a US-wide IP backbone whose links are primarily OC192 (10 Gbps) or greater.
• Peer must meet AT&T at a minimum of three mutually agreeable geographically diverse points in the US. The US interconnection points must include at least one city on the US east coast, one in the central region, and one on the US west coast, and must currently be chosen from AT&T peering points in the following list of metropolitan areas: New York City/Newark NJ, Washington DC/Ashburn VA, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco/San Jose, and Los Angeles.
• In addition a peer of AS7018 must interconnect in two mutual non-US peering locations on distinct continents where peer has a non-trivial backbone network. These non-US peerings will be with AT&T's regional AS only.
• Peer's traffic to/from AS 7018 must be on-net only and must amount to an average of at least 7 Gbps in the dominant direction to/from AT&T in the US during the busiest hour of the month.
• Interconnection bandwidth must be at least 10 Gbps at each US interconnection point.
• A network (ASN) that is a customer of AS 7018 for any dedicated IP services may not simultaneously be a settlement-free peer.
• Peer must have a professionally managed 24x7 NOC. Peer must agree to repair or otherwise remedy any problems within a reasonable timeframe. Peer must also agree to actively cooperate to resolve security incidents, denial of service attacks, and other operational problems.
• Peer must maintain a balanced traffic ratio between its network and AT&T. In particular, a new peer must have: a. No more than a 2.00:1 ratio of traffic into AT&T: out of AT&T, on average each month. b. A reasonably low peak-to-average ratio.
• Existing peers whose in: out ratio rises above 2.00:1 will be expected to work with AT&T to implement best-exit routing or to take other suitable actions to balance transport costs.
• Peer must abide by the following routing policy:
a. Peer must use the same peering AS at each US interconnection point and must announce a consistent set of routes at each point, unless otherwise mutually agreed.
b. No transit or third party routes are to be announced; all routes exchanged must be peer's and peer's customers' routes.
c. Peer must filter route announcements from its customers by prefix.
d. Neither party shall abuse the peering relationship by engaging in activities such as but not limited to: pointing a default route at the other or otherwise forwarding traffic for destinations not explicitly advertised, resetting next-hop, selling or giving next-hop to others.
• Peer must be financially stable.

Verizon's requirements are similar if a little more stringent. Their in/out ratio is set to 1.8 to 1.