And what exactly is the World Wide Web, and to what extent is the stability of its functioning protected?
Internet, what a common word today. A whole generation has already grown up that does not know the times when the Internet did not exist. Many people come across it every day, someone uses it from time to time, but some spend, "entangled" in its web, all day long. Now this is a huge repository of various information, but what can I say, it is a huge knowledge base of modern mankind, there you can find everything, from a magnetogenerator patented by an enterprising German and quietly riveting (before his arrest) unparalleled units in his garage, ending with abstracts on any topic. It all depends on the taste and needs of an individual person.
So what exactly is the Internet and how does it work? And will he work in such a turbulent period of global cataclysms, which includes the current humanity? Let's try to analyze this issue together.
In simple terms, the Internet is a set of interconnected computer networks and, connected to these networks, users' computers.
The exchange of data between users in the network is carried out over previously laid physical networks belonging to several multinational corporations, namely IBM, Verizon, AT&T, UUNET, Level 3, Qwest, Sprint. These seven corporations are the main providers of the Internet, which means that anyone who wants to access the global network ends up doing business with them.
At the dawn of the formation of the "world wide web", long past 1961, the agency of the US Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for the armed forces, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), was tasked with creating a network between computers, through which it is possible to exchange data. After several years of work, the first prototype of the Internet, called ARPANET, was created, which was later used to exchange data between the UCLA Network Test Center, Stanford Research Institute, University of Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
Since 1973, the Internet began its triumphant march across the planet. The first countries to connect to the data exchange were England and Norway. After 2 years, ARPANET was named an "experimental network" and was taken over by DCA (Defense Communication Agency), which is now called DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency, renamed in 1991).
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The emblem speaks for itself, those who are familiar with the AllatRa book can also see the hidden symbolism in the subtext of this image.
In 1983, the US Department of Defense announced the completion of research and the TCP / IP communication protocol standard was introduced.
1984 was the year of the introduction of the so-called "domain names" - DNS.
Then the Internet grew, developed, transformed, new nodes and networks were added to it, and by 2001 the number of users exceeded 530 million, and by mid-2015 their number had reached 3.3 billion.
It turns out that now half of the world's inhabitants use the capabilities of the "World Wide Web", but here the question of the system's fault tolerance arises. In any system there are bottlenecks, excluding which the entire system will fail. So in the Internet system, as critical for its operation, special attention is paid to the so-called root (root) DNS servers. The question immediately arises - what kind of animals are these? DNS is a list of matching site names to their IP addresses. Root DNS servers contain information about top-level domains, are the main ones in the system and are labeled from A to M (from a.root-servers.net to m.root-servers.net) - there are exactly 13 (!) Servers. Physically, there can be more of them (at the moment there are about 200, but there are still 13 incoming addresses, no more, no less. It turns out such a circle of power. But officially, this number of servers is due to the previously introduced limitation of the UDP packet (which DNS servers communicate) of 512 bytes, so only 13 servers could be placed in the DNS response. Interestingly, the UDP protocol for exchanging data between DNS servers was developed back in 1980, even at the stage of testing the future Internet and has not yet changed.
Here is an interesting layout of the above root servers.
As of 2002 - 9 root servers were located in the United States:
A later figure could not be found. But according to information from the Internet (well, where else;)) in the USA there is one more root DNS server less. On April 4, 2012 it was announced that Ru-Center together with ICANN corporation, one of 13 L-Root DNS servers, was installed in Russia, Novosibirsk.
What a beast is ICANN - a supposedly non-profit corporation (funny, isn't it?) Created with the participation of the US government in 1998 to regulate issues related to domain data. A dark horse, on which a number of questions arise, and the most important one - for what funds it exists, since it is non-commercial, but the link to the participation of the US government in its creation, answers the question about the sources of funding. Indeed, from the very beginning, the Internet came out, in fact, from the depths of the defense department of this country. And, of course, it should come as no surprise that the US Department of Commerce, represented by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), historically the administrator of the DNS, in March 2014, with the assistance of ICANN and Verisign Corporation, essentially completed the last stage of privatization DNS,as indicated by the US government back in 1997 (for those who know English -
Well, at the end of the day, we will quote a functionary of ICANN corporation:
“One of ICANN's key missions is to keep the Internet running smoothly, reliably, securely and globally,” said Joe Ebley, director of the DNS team at ICANN. "The addition of an additional L-Root node is an important step towards achieving this goal." (https://www.nic.ru/news/2012/l_root.html)
It seems that root DNS servers are gradually moving from the American continent, I wonder what it would be?
Yuri Ignatov