Tubes Quotes

“There’s a certain amount of vulnerability involved with being a network on the Internet. When two networks connect, they have to trust each other—which also means trusting everyone the other one trusts. Internet networks are promiscuous, but their promiscuity is out in the open. It’s free love. Jon Postel, the longtime administrator of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, put this into a koan, a golden rule for network engineers: “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“We were waiting for a guard to escort us, and Nipper thought the security rigmarole was overkill. “It’s only a telecommunications hub,” he said. “Data going through here is transient, you see. It’s not like a disaster recovery center for a bank, where data is stored—that really has to be secure. Even if this completely fails, it will of course cause an impact on the Internet, but perhaps no email will be lost, just your browser will hang for a second or so, then everything is rerouted.”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“the networks that compose the Internet could be imagined as existing in three overlapping realms: logically, meaning the magical and (for most of us) opaque way the electronic signals travel; physically, meaning the machines and wires those signals run through; and geographically, meaning the places those signals reach. The”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“Multiple networks run through the same wires, even though they are owned and operated by independent organizations—perhaps a university and a telephone carrier, say, or a telephone carrier contracted to a university. The networks carry networks. One”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“taken. For all the breathless talk of the supreme placelessness of our new digital age, when you pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“The Internet has a seemingly infinite number of edges, but a shockingly small number of centers. At its surface, this book recounts my journey to those centers, to the Internet’s most important places. I”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“No sé por qué, pero sabía que el espacio eidético que se ocultaba tras todas las pantallas de computadora era un solo universo. WILLIAM GIBSON”
― Andrew Blum, Tubos: En busca de la geografía física de internet