Tubes

Product Description

Tubes" by Andrew Blum is the first & only book to expose what's really going on behind the scenes at the Internet & will appeal to fans of " The Social Network" & Michael Lewis' " 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 per cent 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 & 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 & introduces us to the remarkable clan of insiders & eccentrics who design & run it everyday. He explains where it is how it got there what it looks like how it works
- & 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 & 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" & " Slate". Blum was a lead media commentator during the internet blackout of the Egyptian revolution & his latest article on gizmodo.com got 100 000 hits in its first day."