Category Archives: howdoesitwork

Inner Internet workings

from http://mrunal.org/2012/12/diplomacy-wcit-conference-dubai-itu-why-failed-internet-censorship-icann-dns-explained.html

from http://mrunal.org/2012/12/diplomacy-wcit-conference-dubai-itu-why-failed-internet-censorship-icann-dns-explained.html

This week in The Internet Course we’ll be looking at how the internet works. The readings the class summarized cover a lot of different parts: infrastructure, IP addresses, DNS, TCP/IP, other protocols, email, browsers, ISPs. We could look at it as hardware and software, or internet and web. We’ll probably have to take pretty broad overview, because like anything, the closer you look the more complex it gets. But it’s important to be aware of those complexities. We’ll have to prioritize as well. Do we need to know about Apache? What do we need to make out of the alphabet soup of HTML, HTTP, JS, CSS, AJAX, XHTML, HTML5, XHR, etc.? And how are we going to present our findings?

I found some Google promotional material in the guise of a kid’s book that explains things on the user and web end pretty simply. If I were to break the Internet down into 20 things, I probably wouldn’t do it this way. But we all come at it from different perspectives and look at it through different lenses. Working together we can create some kind of shared understanding. It will be intense, of course, but life in the Internet Course is always intense.