Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet - Couverture souple

Blum, Andrew

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0670918989 ISBN 13 : 9780670918980

Editeur : Viking, 2012

Synopsis

[ TUBES BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE INTERNET BY BLUM, ANDREW](AUTHOR)PAPERBACK

A propos du livre

Quatrième de couverture :

When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go? Almost everything about our day-to-day lives—and the broader scheme of human culture—can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now.

In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It is a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, populated by a special caste of engineer who pieces together our networks by hand; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once again. From the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan where new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers—Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet's development, explains how it all works, and takes the first-ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments.

This is a book about real places on the map: their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. For all the talk of the "placelessness" of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in fact "a series of tubes" as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet's possibilities if we don't know its parts?

Like Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine or Tom Vanderbilt's recent bestseller Traffic, Tubes combines on-the-ground reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging, mind-bending narrative to help us understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Tubes by Andrew Blum is the first and only book to expose what's really going on behind the scenes at the Internet, and will appeal to fans of The Social Network and Michael Lewis's The Big Short. You write an email. You hit send. It appears ten thousand miles away. How did that happen? In April 2011, a seventy-five year old woman deprived Armenia of its internet access when she sliced through a buried cable with her garden spade. That January, Egyptian authorities simply switched off 70% of the country's internet connections in an attempt to quell a revolution. In 2009, a squirrel chewed through a wire in Andrew Blum's backyard, slowing his broadband to a trickle and catapulting him on a quest to find out what this so-called 'internet' actually is. This is the Internet as you've never seen it before. It's not a concept. It's not a culture. It's most certainly not a cloud. It's a bunch of tubes. But what tubes... Hundreds of thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable, criss-crossing the globe, pulsing with trillions of photons of light, linking us via anonymous exchanges in secretive locations with vast data-warehouses where our online selves are stored in banks of spinning hard-drives. In Tubes, Andrew Blum takes us behind the scenes of this hidden world and introduces us to the remarkable clan of insiders and eccentrics who design and run it everyday. He explains where it is, how it got there, what it looks like, how it works - and what happens when it breaks. 'Every web site, every email, every instant message travels through real junctions in a real network of real cables. It's all too awesome to behold. Andrew Blum's fascinating book demystifies the earthly geography of this most ethereal terra incognita' Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein 'Compelling and profound. You will never open an e-mail in quite the same way again' Tom Vanderbilt, author of the New York Times bestseller Traffic Andrew Blum is a correspondent at Wired magazine whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, The New York Times, Business Week and Slate. Blum was a lead media commentator during the internet blackout of the Egyptian revolution, and his latest article on gizmodo.com got 100,000 hits in its first day.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Viking
• Date d'édition: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0670918989
• ISBN 13: 9780670918980
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 304