'Series of tubes' senator convicted of corruption - CNET CNET 'Series of tubes' senator convicted of corruption 'Series of tubes' senator convicted of corruption Ted Stevens made Internet history with an inept invocation of a "series of tubes" during the Net neutrality debate. His newest debacle: a corruption conviction a week before the election. Up Next Governments suck at social media, but you deserve some blame Until Monday, Sen. Ted Stevens was best known in technology circles for his "series of tubes" analogy. Now he'll be known for his jury conviction on corruption charges. A federal jury in Washington, D.C., convicted the Alaska Republican of all seven charges of accepting gifts and home renovations from a wealthy oil contractor and then lying about them on official documents. Sen. Ted Stevens has been found guilty on all counts in a corruption case.Photo by U.S. Senate Stevens is running for re-election next week. Because it's too late for the Republican Party to remove his name from the ballot and because it's not terribly likely that Alaskans will vote for a convicted felon, Stevens' conviction will aid the Democrats in assembling a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

(They're also hoping to pick up seats in races in Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Minnesota.) The irony is that Stevens' famous analogy of a " series of tubes " was an entirely reasonable one. Electrical engineers have long used the analogy of pipes and tubes to explain voltage (water pressure) and current (gallons per second). The Unix operating system and its progeny use the term " pipes " to describe interprocess communications. Similarly, Internet engineers on discussion groups as august as Nanog regularly toss around terms like " fat long pipes ." And an Internet RFC from as long ago as 1989 refers to "filling the pipe" so "that the sender of data can always put data onto the network." The word "tubes" has been used in antispam discussions years before anyone outside of Washington, D.C., heard of Stevens. And Princeton computer science Professor Ed Felten, to his credit, noted that the anti-Stevens criticism "seems a bit unfair." What turned Stevens into an Internet laughingstock was twofold: 1. An especially inept invocation of the "pipes" or "tubes" analogy.

His additional "it's not a big truck" improvisation didn't help. 2. The fact that he dared to use the analogy to assail politically popular Net neutrality regulations. (If he had used it to call for such rules, you can be sure that the online chortling would have been muted or nonexistent.) But poking fun at the senator, who is also known for his tantrums over the "Bridge to Nowhere," misses the chance to critique actual legislative failings. Here are some of them:  Like vice presidential candidate Joe Biden , Stevens has been a fast friend of Hollywood's content industries. Stevens said at one hearing that a broadcast flag was necessary to curb Internet piracy of TV shows. "It is a subject that requires an act of Congress, in my opinion," he said.  Stevens co-sponsored, along with Democratic senator Ernest Hollings, what's probably the most ill-conceived technology bill in recent memory (and that's saying something). It was called the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act and would require practically any hardware or software to include embedded copy-protection technology.  Stevens used his position as chairman of the Senate committee that writes Internet regulations to call for a crackdown on perfectly legal online porn depicting consenting adults.

"My advice is you tell your clients they better do it soon, because we'll mandate it if they don't," Stevens informed a representative of the adult entertainment industry.  Stevens was no foe of Internet taxes. In 2006, he wanted to expand existing taxes on telephone systems to include all "communications" services, whatever that means. "I believe fax is a communication, I think e-mail is a communication, and I do believe they all should contribute," he said. Undaunted, Stevens suggested that idea again the following year.  In 2005, Stevens was the senator who seemed to call for resurrecting the justly reviled Communications Decency Act. "We ought to find some way to say, 'Here is a block of channels--whether it's delivered by broadband, by VoIP, by whatever it is--to a home that is clear of the stuff you don't want your children to see,'" he told reporters at the time, later saying he was referring to regulatory "tiers" like the movie "rating system."  Stevens also supported an ostensibly anti-phishing bill called the Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act.

Earlier this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation described it as "a bill that would expand trademark law, limit consumer access to information about competitive products, and eviscerate key protections for anonymous speech." As CNET's 2006 tech voter guide shows, Stevens voted for the Communications Decency Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Real ID Act--and against an effort to keep the Internet tax-free. He scored an unremarkable 53 percent overall on tech-friendly votes in Congress. Such stances cement Stevens' true technology legacy. Sadly, the "tubes" metaphor is one of the few ventures into Internet policy he got halfway right. Dance to senator saying 'Net is 'series of tubes' | InfoWorld Dance to senator saying 'Net is 'series of tubes' Ted Stevens remarks catalyze a flurry of parodies Senior Editor, IDG News Service | Jul 14, 2006 Email a friend Use commas to separate multiple email addresses From Your message has been sent. Sorry There was an error emailing this page. More like this Highlights from Interop 2015 Commentary is spreading across the Web after U.S.

Senator Ted Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes" during a debate on net neutrality June 28. Stevens, the chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, was speaking perhaps metaphorically during a rambling argument against a net neutrality amendment to a broadband bill. Stevens' apparent point: The Internet could be easily clogged with junk, and broadband providers should be able separate their own content from streaming video and huge personal e-mail files. In part, Stevens, an Alaska Republican, said: "The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes." [ Give yourself a technology career advantage with InfoWorld's Deep Dive technology reports and Computerworld's career trends reports . GET A 15% DISCOUNT through Jan. 15, 2017: Use code 8TIISZ4Z.

] Stevens continued: "And if you don't understand that those tubes can be filled, and if they're filled when you put your message in it, it gets in line, it's gonna be delayed by anyone who puts into that tube enormous amounts of material." Stevens went on to say that his staff sent him an "Internet" that was apparently delayed by 'Net congestion. (He may have meant that his staff sent him an e-mail.) On an 11-11 vote, the committee rejected the amendment, which would have prevented broadband providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from charging extra based on the type of content transmitted by Internet-based companies. Stevens' underlying point hasn't stopped a series of parodies from popping up on the Internet. Earlier this week, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart broadcast Stevens' remarks. Stevens, who is noted for making impassioned arguments in the Senate, is a frequent target of Stewart jokes, and Stewart suggested this week Stevens doesn't understand the Internet. Stewart's riff on net neutrality is on YouTube.com.

(Warning: Stewart uses a bit of off-color humor, as usual for him.) Dance to Senator Saying Net is 'Series of Tubes' | CIO Dance to Senator Saying Net is 'Series of Tubes' By CIO Staff CIO | Jul 14, 2006 8:00 AM PT Email a friend Use commas to separate multiple email addresses From Your message has been sent. Sorry There was an error emailing this page. More like this The Irari Report: Cybersecurity guidance for CISOs & the C-Suite Commentary is spreading across the Web after U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes" during a debate on net neutrality June 28. Stevens, the chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, was speaking perhaps metaphorically during a rambling argument against a net neutrality amendment to a broadband bill. Stevens’ apparent point: The Internet could be easily clogged with junk, and broadband providers should be able separate their own content from streaming video and huge personal e-mail files. In part, Stevens, an Alaska Republican, said: "The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck.

It’s a series of tubes." Stevens continued: "And if you don’t understand that those tubes can be filled, and if they’re filled when you put your message in it, it gets in line, it’s gonna be delayed by anyone who puts into that tube enormous amounts of material." Stevens went on to say that his staff sent him an "Internet" that was apparently delayed by Net congestion. (He may have meant that his staff sent him an e-mail.) On an 11-11 vote, the committee rejected the amendment, which would have prevented broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from charging extra based on the type of content transmitted by Internet-based companies. Stevens’ underlying point hasn’t stopped a series of parodies from popping up on the Internet. Earlier this week, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart broadcast Stevens’ remarks. Stevens, who is noted for making impassioned arguments in the Senate, is a frequent target of Stewart jokes, and Stewart suggested this week Stevens doesn’t understand the Internet. Stewart’s riff on net neutrality is on YouTube.com.

(Warning: Stewart uses a bit of off-color humor, as is usual for him.) Stevens is also parodied in a techno dance mix making the rounds on the Internet. The speech, set to music, is available here. A bit of controversy erupted this week when the blog and community website MySpace.com, owned by conservative businessman Rupert Murdoch, pulled another song parody, but the song was back on the site as of Thursday. That song, kind of a folk-music tribute to Stevens, is available here . If that’s not enough political parody for you, do a Google search on Ted Stevens and "series of tubes" and find out what the bloggers are saying. A Stevens spokesman didn’t have an immediate comment on the parodies. -Grant Gross, IDG News Service (Washington Bureau) Related Links: Dance to senator saying Net is 'series of tubes' | Computerworld Dance to senator saying Net is 'series of tubes' Remixers, Stewart have fun with Ted Stevens' misspeak Senior Editor, IDG News Service | Jul 14, 2006 1:00 AM PT Email a friend Use commas to separate multiple email addresses From Your message has been sent. Sorry There was an error emailing this page.

More like this 6 startups from CES to watch in 2017 Commentary and parodies are spreading across the Web after U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes" during a debate on net neutrality June 28. Stevens, the chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, was speaking perhaps metaphorically during a rambling argument against a net neutrality amendment to a broadband bill. Stevens' apparent point: The Internet could be easily clogged with junk, and broadband providers should be able to separate their own content from streaming video and huge personal e-mail files. In part, Stevens, an Alaska Republican, said, "The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes." Stevens continued: "And if you don't understand that those tubes can be filled, and if they're filled when you put your message in it, it gets in line, it's gonna be delayed by anyone who puts into that tube enormous amounts of material." Stevens went on to say that his staff sent him an "Internet" that was apparently delayed by Net congestion.

(He may have meant that his staff sent him an e-mail.) On an 11-11 vote, the committee rejected the amendment, which would have prevented broadband providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from charging extra based on the type of content transmitted by Internet-based companies. Stevens' underlying point hasn't stopped a series of parodies from popping up on the Internet. Earlier this week, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart broadcast Stevens' remarks. Stevens, who is noted for making impassioned arguments in the Senate, is a frequent target of Stewart jokes, and Stewart suggested this week that Stevens doesn't understand the Internet. Stewart's riff on net neutrality is currently on YouTube.com. (Warning: Stewart uses a bit of off-color humor, as usual for him.) Stevens is also parodied in a techno dance mix making the rounds on the Internet. A bit of controversy erupted this week when the blog and community Web site MySpace.com, owned by conservative businessman Rupert Murdoch, pulled another song parody , but the song was back on the site as of Thursday.

If that's not enough political parody for you, do a Google search on Ted Stevens and "series of tubes" or "send an Internet" and find out what the bloggers are saying. A Stevens spokesman didn't have an immediate comment on the parodies. Dance to senator saying Net is ‘series of tubes’ | KurzweilAI Home News Dance to senator saying Net is 'series of tubes' Dance to senator saying Net is ‘series of tubes’ July 16, 2006 | Source: Computerworld Commentary and parodies are spreading across the Web after U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, described the Internet as a “series of tubes” during a debate on net neutrality June 28. Stevens went on to say that his staff sent him an “Internet” that was apparently delayed by Net congestion. Topics: Internet/Cloud/Telecom A Remembrance and Defense of Ted Stevens' 'Series of Tubes' - Internet - Products Internet - Products A Remembrance and Defense of Ted Stevens' 'Series of Tubes' By Evan Dashevsky 5 Jun 2014, 4:54 p.m.

Even if you don't know its exact origin, you've certainly stumbled across the phrase "a series of tubes" at some point in the past eight years. It's a common Internet cute-ism that an out-of-touch person might use to describe the very Internet itself. It's also complete B.S. For those who have forgotten—or for those who never knew—the term was unwittingly coined by the late U.S. Senator Ted Stevens eight years ago this month during a committee hearing in which he argued against an amendment that would have prohibited ISPs from charging some companies higher fees according to the traffic they generated (the amendment in fact, did fail in a tie vote). The remark quickly metastasized into the lingual embodiment of not only all-things anti-net-neutral, but of all old people being confused by technology. It also just happened to coincide with the ascension of Twitter, and probably due to the meme's concise nature has managed to be one of that platform's most resilient memes, long after the original context has been lost: Plumbers are working on the building pipes. Also this morning, the Internet keeps going down—perhaps it's just a series of tubes after all?

— Garrett LeSage (@garrett) May 5, 2014 If the internet is a series of tubes - then check out this machine! — Pee-wee Herman (@peeweeherman) September 23, 2011 In its inception, the "series of tubes" comment was considered a particularly egregious error by neutrality advocates. It was a public display of the frighteningly limited technological comprehension of the influential Senate Committee chairman (and, as it would happen, neutrality foe). Why would a veteran politician like Stevens say such a dumb thing? Was he really that befuddled by technology? Did he really think the Internet was made of tubes? Was he having a senior moment? To use Stevens's own crotchety phrasing: No . And to be sure, Stevens's remarks are neither eloquent nor fleshed out. However, if you listen to a wider audio clip of the remarks, you clearly see what he was actually getting at. Though not specifically named, Stevens is describing the evolution of Netflix's business model.

Particularly, the company's transition from being solely a DVD subscription service for which the company pays for shipping to being a (then only-rumored , but soon-to-be introduced ) online-streaming service. For the record, here's audio the remarks in fuller context, "tubes" comes in around the 2:14 mark (the person who uploaded the audio added their own "Heh" at the very last moment): The evidently unprepared speech is occasionally meandering and generously peppered with false starts that trail off to nowhere (you know, like unprepared speeches sometimes are). At one point he mistakenly uses the word "Internet" in place of "email." And it's probably wasn't streaming video's fault why it took several days for the Senator's email to be delivered. Here's a rough transcription, cleaned up for clarity, with key points highlighted by me in bold. "There's one company now that you can sign up [with] and get a movie delivered to your house. Daily. By delivery service […] This service is now going to go through the Internet. And what you do now is go to a place and order your movie, and guess what?

You can order 10 of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free, right? "10 movies streaming across that Internet. And what happens to your own personal Internet? Just the other day an Internet was sent by my staff at 10:00 in the morning on Friday—I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. "And here we have this one situation where enormous entities want to use the Internet for their purpose to save money for doing what they're doing now. They use FedEx, they use deliver services, they use the mail. They deliver in other ways, but they want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. "And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on, it's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they're filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material." Was this an artful articulation? Hardly. But it's also far from some completely insane rambling divorced from reality as is its reputation.

A Google Trends report on the phrase "series of tubes" shows that searches for the phrase exploded in July after the Daily Show episode. "A series of tubes" soon after became a genuine meme with all the expected trappings of such. A Topsy search shows how after appearing on TDS, the term became an early part of the Twitter echo chamber : at twttr, we know that the internet is a series of tubes and that's why the logo looks the way it does — Biz Stone (@biz) July 14, 2006 And it is still reverberating today , long after the fact. There are very good arguments to be made on both sides of the net neutrality debate. You can read some of our analysis here , here , and here . But throw all that to the side for a moment. The tubes meme has been fueled by politics, by ageism, by regionalism, and by the fact that it's so easy to convey. But it's also boring. It's the "Al Gore invented the Internet" of the aughts. I have no reason or inclination to defend Stevens's reputation. In fact, the little I know about him, he seemed to be kind of a jerk.

I don't care about him or his lasting reputation. But I do care about facilitating debates based on what's there, not what we want to be there. / Originally published on May 31, 2012 1:08 pm Increasingly, Internet users are working "in the cloud" — creating and sending data that isn't stored on local hard drives. It's easy to imagine our emails and photos swirling around in cyberspace without a physical home — but that's not really how it works. Those files are still stored somewhere, but you can only find them if you know where to look. In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes on a journey inside the Internet's physical infrastructure to uncover the buildings and compounds where our data is stored and transmitted. Along the way, he documents the spaces where the Internet first started, and the people who've been working to make the Web what it is today. Blum tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the Internet can be thought of as three separate entities: data centers that store information, Internet exchange points where networks meet to exchange data with each other, and fiber-optic cables that connect all of the information traveling between cities and continents.

Blum calls these fiber-optic cables, many of which traverse the ocean bottom, the "most poetic places of the Internet." "They're about the thickness of a garden hose, and they're filled with a handful of strands of fiber-optic cable," he says. "And light goes in one end of the ocean and out the other end of the ocean. And that light is accelerated along its journey by repeaters that look like bluefin tuna underwater." The repeaters and the fiber-optic cables extend for thousands of miles below the ocean's surface, along the same routes where other telecommunication cables have been placed for decades. Blum, who watched one of the fiber-optic cables emerge from the sea in Lisbon, says the process hasn't changed much over the decades. "I saw pictures from [a telegraph] museum in England where the pictures from 100 years earlier looked exactly the same," he says. "The Englishmen in their hats were watching the laborers digging in the wet trench, pulling the cables up.

So the technology has changed but the culture hasn't changed, and the points being connected haven't changed much." In the States, many of the trans-Atlantic cables coming from Europe terminate in an art deco-style office building at 60 Hudson St. in New York City. More than 100 telecommunications companies have offices in the building, which contains more than 70 million feet of cable wire. "It's essentially a building-sized jumble of wires," says Blum. "It's been [a very important building] for the telephone as well. So there's this mix of very high-tech, high-capacity, brand-new machines, and then these old banks of copper wires and switches. ... And the contrast is incredible. It's amazing that we think of the Internet as a high-tech, sterile place, and this place is the complete opposite." In fact, Manhattan is full of buildings containing key parts of the Internet, says Blum. In 2010, Google acquired 111 8th Ave., a block-long building in Chelsea that sits almost directly on top of large bundles of fiber-optic cables. The building is designed to allow tenants to connect to these fiber-optic lines directly.

"It's that autonomy to connect — to do whatever they want and to make their own decisions about how they're connecting to other networks that allows the Internet to be both robust and cheap," says Blum. Even though there's some potential risk involved, Blum believes the locations of these data centers will never become secret. "The Internet is all about one network connecting to another network. It's the space in between that makes it come alive," he says. "And if you're secret — if you try to hide where you are — then you essentially can't function as a network on the Internet because nobody knows where you are. And if you're in the business of selling your connection, then you have no business at all if you won't tell anyone where it is." Interview Highlights On the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens saying the Internet is made up of "a series of tubes." "He's not wrong. The Internet is absolutely made of tubes. What else could it be made of? It's many other things — these protocols and languages and machines and a whole set of fantastically complex layers and layers of computing power that feeds the Internet every day.

But if you think of the world in physical terms, and you're trying to be as reductive as possible and try to understand what this is, there's no way around it — these are tubes. And from the very first moment, from the basement of a building in Milwaukee to Facebook's high-tech, brand-new data center, and along the ceiling and the walls, are these steel conduits. But I know a tube when I see one." On the makeup of the Internet "The Internet has parts and pieces. We think of it as this singular whole, and we use the word 'cloud' as a crutch to avoid thinking about the specific parts; but, in fact, it is as singular as anything else." On visiting Facebook's data center, located in central Oregon "It was an interesting place to be because I realized that this was a place that was connected to some of the most important moments of my friends' lives.

This was the place from which announcements of weddings and family members' deaths and new jobs and new babies came from, so there was a real disconnect between the sense of it being a building full of machines and the emotional importance that it had on my life." On replacing existing infrastructure "Because fiber-optics cables are essentially glass tubes, you can replace the flashlight on the end with a newer model, and that will transmit more data. So you can keep the same actual fiber, replace the equipment on either end, and suddenly you've increased the capacity by an order or even two orders of magnitude. So that's a start. That will get us a few years down the road. But then it's a constant gardening process. It's replacing the old ones and putting in new ones." On researching Google and Facebook "Out of all of the companies I spoke with, Google was the one that shared the least. Facebook, in contrast, was the opposite. They believed that this was your data. You, the public, had a right to understand where it was and what they did with it." Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit Transcript TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

You know what makes your wireless Internet connection possible? Wires, cables, zillions of them - underground cables, undersea cables, buildings that have layers and layers of wires, interconnecting networks. Your wireless connection and the cloud, they have a physical infrastructure; it's just out of our sight. And that physical infrastructure is the subject of the new book "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet" by my guest Andrew Blum. He's a correspondent for Wired. The title of the book "Tubes" is a reference to former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens' remark that the Internet was a series of tubes, a remark that was widely mocked, but Blum discovered the infrastructure of the Internet does have a lot of tubes. Andrew Blum, welcome to FRESH AIR. So before we get into a more detailed description of the physical structure of the Internet, just give us like an aerial view, you know, like an overview of what the Internet physically is.

ANDREW BLUM: Well, the Internet is a network of networks, and so those networks, some begin at your house, and they sort of travel across the country, and Facebook will run a global network, or Google will run a global network, and then those networks have to connect to each other. And where they often connect to each other are in places called Internet exchange points, where there's a refrigerator-sized router belonging to one network, and it's plugged into a refrigerator-sized router belonging to another network, usually through a yellow fiber-optic cable. GROSS: And then? BLUM: Essentially any time you do anything online, you're essentially asking, it's like a self-addressed, stamped envelope. You're saying: Please, send me this Web page, you know, from where it is. And oh, by the way, I'm over here. This is my address on the Internet. And that command goes off, passes almost decidedly through these very specific list of Internet exchange points, and then sends that sort of larger trove of data back to you. GROSS: So let me ask you about the cloud. We think of the cloud, you know, the image of it is like - a cloud.

It's something in space, you know, it's not physical, it's just like your data, instead of being on your hard drive, which could crash, or which your device could get stolen, you could lose it, it's like stored in this cloud in cyberspace someplace where it's going to be safe. But the cloud isn't really a cloud. It's like a lot of machines. When you store something on the, quote, "cloud," where is it really being stored? BLUM: Well, it depends whose cloud. It's interesting. I mean, the Internet is made of so many parts. I know my cloud happens to be stored in suburban Virginia. That's where the service that I use for backup has a data center not far from Dulles Airport. But your cloud might be in Oregon or in Minneapolis or anywhere else. And I think it's a really key point that the Internet has parts and pieces. We think of it this singular whole, and we use the word "cloud" as a crutch to kind of avoid thinking about the specific parts. But in fact, you know, it is as singular as anything else.

GROSS: So if you're storing your email or your data on your hard drive on a cloud, are you basically just storing it on somebody else's hard drive? BLUM: You are. I mean, that's really what it means. You're exchanging the hard drive on your desk for a much larger hard drive run by a company far away. And it's interesting, you can very rarely find out where your cloud is. If you look at these, you know, companies like Dropbox or SugarSync or even iTunes, it's not transparent at all. There's no sense that we want to know where this is. There's no sense that we should be allowed to know where it is, and we're increasingly disconnected from it, although disconnected is funny because obviously we're so connected to it. GROSS: How well are the cloud hard drives backed up? BLUM: Well, it depends again on sort of which cloud, right. So - but hopefully they're backed up at least twice, ideally in two different locations on different parts of the world or different parts of the country.

And, you know, hopefully the network engineers and the systems engineers who built your cloud did it well enough that there's very little chance that all of those would disappear at once. GROSS: Are they vulnerable to things like earthquakes, floods, terrorism, crashes? BLUM: To a certain extent. They're most vulnerable to mechanical failure. I mean, hard drives fail all the time, as some of us unfortunately know, and, you know, earthquakes and floods are - the cloud itself isn't as vulnerable to that. The cables that connect the Internet on a global scale are much more vulnerable, particularly to underwater earthquakes. And terrorism is a sort of different case. Most of the conversation about cybersecurity is about virtual hacking, it's about people sort of, you know, logging in through their keyboards to a computer and doing some harm to it. There's very little discussion about physical harm to the network. GROSS: Maybe there should be discussion of that. BLUM: I think there should be definitely. I think - I mean, most of these places are well-secured but not perfectly secured. And at the same time, though, it would be a strange terrorist attack. You would be going after a place that people don't realize exist.

You would - most likely there would be a backup. So your impact would be negligible. The worst-case scenario is a sort of simultaneous destruction of these places at a scale that's almost impossible to imagine being pulled off. It's almost like saying, you know, we're going to take away all the airports in the U.S. They're just - they're too big, there are too many of them, they are as single pieces too broad. GROSS: Let's talk about the tubes under the sea, which is - the Internet has a huge physical presence under the sea. Tell us about what's there. BLUM: The undersea cables are the most - I feel are the most poetic pieces of the Internet. They're about - usually about the thickness of a garden hose, and they're filled with strands of fiber-optic cable. And light goes in one end and comes out the other, goes in one end of the ocean and comes out the other end of the ocean. And that light is accelerated along its very long journey, thousands of miles by these repeaters that look kind of like bluefin tuna, underwater.

And there's a system in there that essentially accelerates the photons, almost like a water wheel, sort of goosing them along on their journey across the ocean, not at the speed of light, at about two-thirds the speed of light. And what amazes me about them is that you can sort of - you can - when you look at one, you can conceive of it very easily. It's this - you know, it's two inches thick, it looks like a garden hose, it's easy to think about, and then you think about the other dimension. You think about the fact that this goes on for thousands of miles. You sort of think about looking out into the ocean and imagining that it crosses and goes all the way across, and that part is incredibly expansive and incredibly difficult to understand. But then you think of it - you think of the sort of ease with which we talk, you know, talk on the phone across, you know, across oceans, or we send an email to Europe or someplace, and you realize that we sort of touch these things constantly. GROSS: Maybe you can explain a little bit more about how fiber-optic lines work, because it just seems like magic to me.

Maybe it's too technically complex to explain, but how light can convey data through these tubes in the ocean and not get all the data scrambled, just all that. I can't begin to comprehend it. BLUM: It's difficult to comprehend, and I confess I can't comprehend it fully myself. There is a - I do understand the basics of it, and the most interesting part is that you have many frequencies of light passing through a single strand of fiber. Frequencies are colors of light. So in a single strand of fiber, you might have a 10-gigabit-per-second wave, a wave of light, that will transmit through pulses 10 gigabits per second of data, you know, essentially 1,000 times more than your home Internet connection might be, through a single wave of light. But then on top of that, through that same strand of fiber, there'll be dozens, if not a hundred, other wavelengths of light, other colors of light passing through that same fiber.

So you have incredible, incredible capacity through a single strand of fiber, and that's, particularly for the undersea cables across the ocean, that's what allows them to carry stupendous amounts of data through a single strand of fiber. Then the cables will have perhaps four strands of fiber going in each direction because each strand is - the light is only traveling one way across the ocean, and there's a matching pair, where the light is traveling the other way. GROSS: Even though these are really high-tech, you know, tubes or cables, whatever you want to call them, they still seem so old-fashioned in a way. I mean, I always think, oh, in the Internet era, everything is done through, like satellites and just, like, through the air, and that's not true. Can you just talk a little bit about the old-fashioned-ness of cables under the sea in a satellite era? BLUM: So with the cables, one of the most amazing things is that they still connect the places that have always been port cities: Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong, New York. And so that geography hasn't changed even though the technology has changed.

And the way that they're laid hasn't changed very much at all. There's still a ship that steams across the water laying, you know, laying one of these cables off its stern. What's inside the cable has changed: It's gone from copper to strands of fiber-optic cable. But the process of it is still the same. And even more remarkably, when it lands on the beach, it's exactly the same, and even culturally it's exactly the same. Almost always there's an English engineer ready to sort of receive it and directing the show, and almost always there are sort of local, often immigrant, laborers who are sort of doing the heavy lifting. And I watched one of these cables come up on the shore in Lisbon, and that was exactly what it was. And then I saw pictures in the archive of the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum in England, which is sort of the granddaddy of all cable landing sites, and the pictures from 100 years earlier looked exactly the same, these Englishmen in their hats, you know, watching these laborers sort of digging in the wet trench, you know, pulling the cable up.

GROSS: Are the cables laid basically in the same places that the copper wires were laid? BLUM: They are, they are. I mean, for the most part they definitely are. I mean across the Atlantic or around from Cornwall, from the sort of Land's End, the western tip of England, around to Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, through the Suez. You know, these are the sort of classic trade routes, and they haven't changed with the Internet. The Internet has only traced them. GROSS: So the fiber-optic cables that are at the bottom of the ocean, what are they susceptible to? Like, there's fish there, there's possible earthquakes. Like what are some of the problems cables could face? BLUM: I think the things that usually get them are anchors being dragged by ships and earthquakes. There's a famous case from 2006 in Lausanne, off the coast of Taiwan, wherein a very powerful earthquake essentially severed, you know, six out of the eight cables connecting, connecting essentially north Asia and south Asia, and the Internet stopped. You know, there was essentially no - you know, everything ground to a halt until they were able to sort of route around it.

And traditionally we think about that happening sort of automatically, but in that case it was a - you know, it was so dramatic that it was a matter of people unplugging the connections on one of the end of the cable into a different cable. And then of course the repair takes weeks because in order to repair these underwater cables, you have to go out of the ship, throw a grappling hook over the side, lift the cable off the ocean floor, find the other end of the cable, the broken side, stitch them back together and then drop them over. And that's a very physical, a very sort of hand process that took weeks in that case. GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Andrew Blum. He's the author of the new book "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet." And he writes for Wired and several other publications. Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Andrew Blum, and his new book is called "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet." One of the places that you visited in trying to understand the Internet, the physicality of the Internet, was a data center in Milwaukee that's the central data center for Milwaukee Internet communication. And it's in an office building built in 1901. It was the former home of the Milwaukee Athletic Club, and just one of those great paradoxes that, like, the high-tech Internet center in Milwaukee is in this, like, old building. What's in it? BLUM: Well, in the basement, the basement is filled with wires. You can't see the ceiling because there are so many wires attached to the ceiling. And those wires sort of attach to these steel boxes that sort of look like coffins, that are kind of up-up, you know, up in the corner, where the wires come in from underneath the street. And then they travel up to this variety of offices upstairs that these companies have colonized.

And I was visiting with a guy who's an engineer for an ISP, an Internet service provider, called Netwurx, a sort of small one in southeastern Wisconsin. And this was the place that his 10,000 customers got their Internet from. And if you think of a company like Verizon or Comcast as having this huge breadth and complexity, this was the opposite. He had a single machine in his sort of dusty office with the windows thrown open to the Wisconsin winter to keep the machines cool. And coming out of the machine were primarily two yellow cables. And one cable went to Cogent, which is a wholesale Internet provider, a sort of global network that he gets his - that he connects his network to, and the other cable went to Time Warner, their business division. But you can think of it very simply as when - all of his customers connected to the Internet through these two cables. One went one way; one went the other. And I said: Then where does it go? And he said: It doesn't matter to me. Once Cogent's got it, they're going to worry about it on a global scale.

But it really revealed to me that at every single - every single moment we spend online is made of these forks in the road. And in aggregate, they're almost impossible to conceive, but when you look at them individually, they're incredibly simple: There's a yellow cable connecting one router to another router. GROSS: So there's another building I want to ask you to describe, and this is one that's in New York. It's a former Western Union building that opened in 1930 and once carried high-gauge copper wire for telegraphs. What's the building being used for now? BLUM: That building is 60 Hudson Street, downtown in Tribeca, and that is the building where the majority of transatlantic cables terminate. They land on the beach, usually in Long Island or New Jersey, but then they connect right back to 60 Hudson, and that's where they then connect to everybody else. So it's essentially, it's a big - you know, the building is a sort of building-size jumble of wires, you know, one network connecting to another network. GROSS: And you went there? BLUM: I did go there, yeah.

It's a - it's a - there's a lot of history, and it's been very important for the telephone, as well. And so there's this mix of these, you know, incredibly high-tech, brand new, very high-capacity machines and then these old sort of huge banks of copper wires and switches, you know, where - you know, that say like Deutsche Telecom, you know, that are - you know, that's the place where Deutsche Telecom connected all of its calls to the U.S. And the contrast is incredible. It's amazing that, you know, we think of it as this - the Internet, we expect it to be a sort of high-tech, sterile place and some of its places are, but this place is the complete opposite. It's this great sort of old art deco palace. GROSS: And how did it become an Internet center?

BLUM: The stories about how these places become what they are always seem to combine a sort of fact of geography - you know, Lower Manhattan is an important place for communications, it always has been - and then often a sort of charismatic salesman, you know, often somebody who convinced the first network or the first two networks to come in and say hey, you guys should both come, and when you get here, you should connect, and then other people will come, too, and they'll connect. And that was - you know, that was the case at 60 Hudson. The legend is that the, you know, the reason the - with the deregulation of the telecommunications industry, everybody needed to connect to AT&T, to Ma Bell. And Ma Bell is just two blocks away. But the - in order to connect, they had to get inside the building, and AT&T said no, we won't let you inside the building, we're not obligated to. And then an entrepreneur sort of realized that Western Union had maintained control of their quote-unquote "network," which actually meant the clay conduits underneath the street that connected the old AT&T building with the old Western Union building.

And he used that underground path, that, you know, that actual, you know, this physical space to connect - to essentially tether in 60 Hudson to 32 Avenue of the Americas. And that allowed all of these new upstart telecommunications companies to connect to the old AT&T, and over time, 60 Hudson, the upstarts, became bigger or at least more important for the Internet and for international telecommunications than the old AT&T building. GROSS: So you live in New York. Is any of your data routed through this 60 Hudson Street building? BLUM: Most certainly, yeah. No, I connect to the Internet through a cable company called Cablevision, and there's a certain amount that they'll tell you, and there's a certain amount you can see by sort of using different programs that analyze the path of the data, and that's always public. It has to be public because the bits have to know where to go. You know, so I know, I can sort of read the tea leaves that Cablevision connects to other networks at 60 Hudson Street, at another building a little bit farther uptown called 111 Eighth Avenue that happens to be owned, as of recently, by Google.

And I can sort of very clearly imagine that when I send an email to a colleague in London, that transmission is passing through 60 Hudson Street, going out to Long Island under the ocean, going through an equivalent building in London called Telehouse and arriving at his desk. GROSS: Now you mentioned Google recently bought a building in New York, and you say it's one of the most important buildings on the Internet: Why? BLUM: It is one of these buildings where more networks connect than anywhere else. It's a sort of - it's an absolute key hub for the networks of the Internet. And it also happened to be where Google began to put their New York employees. And then a couple years ago, they bought the building outright for $1.9 billion, the largest real estate transaction of the year in the U.S. And this raised some eyebrows in the networking community because it was sort of like American Airlines buying LaGuardia Airport. And - but the strange thing was that Google said, well, you know, we just need it for the office space. So I suppose it was sort of like American Airlines buying LaGuardia Airport and saying, you know, actually we just need a place to park our trucks.

But this is a key nodal point. This is a spot where networks need the sort of ability to connect without any interference. And it's that sort of autonomy to connect, that ability to do whatever they want, to sort of make their own decisions about how they're connecting to other networks, that allows the Internet to be both robust and to a certain extent cheap. GROSS: So what function does this building serve in terms of Internet traffic? BLUM: It's another one of this very short list of the most important places where networks meet. New York is rare that it has two or you might say three of a list of perhaps a dozen buildings around the world that are the most important meeting places for networks. GROSS: Andrew Blum will be back in the second half of the show. His new book is called "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Andrew Blum. His new book "Tubes" is about the physical infrastructure of the Internet - all the wires and cables that make wireless Internet and the cloud possible.

Earlier in our interview, we talked about some of the buildings that housed the wires connecting networks to other networks, serving as central hubs for the Internet. And he described the location of some of these places. Are we giving away secrets here by naming, you know, buildings, giving out addresses that are central to the Internet? I mean, are they supposed to be secret so that they're not going to be disrupted, there won't be terrorist attacks on them, vandalism? BLUM: No. It's interesting. They can't be secret, because if they were secret, then the networks wouldn't know where to connect to each other. GROSS: So people who you spoke to who run or own some of these Internet centers, where the wires are, they were happy to give you information about their location and what they do and how they do it... BLUM: Yeah... GROSS: ...knowing that you were writing a book? BLUM: I mean, for the most part, that was because all of the networks and all of these buildings are privately owned. They're all for-profit companies. And so one that I focus in particular, called Equinix, has a competitor called TELEX.

And as soon as Equinix heard that I was talking to TELEX, and TELEX heard that I was talking to Equinix, they wanted to make sure that I knew and everybody knew that, in fact, their building was more important. And if you asked them, you know, what's the most important building on the Internet, they'll say oh, no. Our building is the most important building on the Internet. That's why you should come and connect your network to other networks inside our building. So, in some ways, it was the opposite. Everybody had something to sell. Everybody was eager to talk about, you know, how their place was the most important. GROSS: So the two companies that you just mentioned, Equinix and TELEX, who think that they're - that they each are the most important centers on the Internet, what they do is connect networks to each other? BLUM: What they do is, essentially, provide the space. They provide the building, the physical place where you can rent a little piece of real estate - usually a cage, actually a cage, like, you know, with steel walls - and they'll sell you some power. And they'll make sure the building is secure.

And then they'll charge you to run a cable from your cage to someone else's cage, called a cross-connect. So there will be a monthly rent on that cable. And that's, so they make the money on the connection, and then they make the money on the power. They make the money on the rent. And there's a real premium to be in these most important places. But if you're a network, you know, that premium might be worth it, because you want to be able to connect to as many people as easily as possible, as efficiently as possible, you know, by not having to lease a long-distance communications line, like we're talking on now, but just being able to string a single cable across the room or across the building. GROSS: So the Internet works, like, magically right now. I mean, it works like so well most of the time, assuming your cable company is in good shape. (LAUGHTER) BLUM: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: But, you know, I can't help but wonder: What happens in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years when these cables get old and maybe need to be replaced, or the technology gets improved and they need to be upgraded? There's just, like, so many wires around the world now, so many cables under the ocean. I mean, how do you deal with that? It seems like it's much more complex than, say, telephone connections used to be. BLUM: Yeah. Well, one of the amazing things about the fiber optic cables is that because they're essentially these glass tubes, you can replace the flashlight on the end with a newer model, and that will transmit more data. So you can keep the same actual fiber, replace the equipment on either end, and suddenly you've increased the capacity, you know, by an order or even two orders of magnitude. So that's a start. That will get us a few years down the road. But then it's a sort of constant gardening process. You know, it's constantly, you know, replacing the old ones and putting in new ones.

And these old buildings, you know, now that they've been active for a decade or so, one guy described it as being like an ice core. You know, if you drill down, you see, you know, networks from 10 years ago. The new ones are just layered on top. The new connections are on top, and the old ones are deep beneath, and there's no way to remove them. There's a joke that the building in London called Telehouse, that there's a fortune to be made in copper mining, you know, because if somebody could figure out how to get all these old copper cables out of this old building, then they would be rich. You know, there's all this detritus of the last generation of networks only, you know, 10-12 years ago. GROSS: So your book is called "Tubes," and it's about, like, the physical part of the Internet, the wires, the cables, the - and you use the word tubes a lot, you know, in the book. BLUM: Yeah. GROSS: For instance, the cables under the ocean, you describe as tubes.

So in 2006, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska described the Internet as a series of tubes, and he got mocked so badly for that. And it really seemed like, the way he described it, he had no idea what he was talking about. He had no idea what the Internet is. Would you go so far as to defend him? BLUM: I would. Absolutely. (LAUGHTER) BLUM: I mean we - it was a - he's certainly not wrong. You know, the Internet is absolutely made of tubes. You know, what else could it be made of? It's many other things. There's, you know, there's these protocols and, you know, languages and, you know, machines. You know, there's a whole sort of fantastically complex, you know, layers and layers and layers of computing power that obviously feeds the Internet every day. But if you think of the world in physical terms, you know, if you try to be as reductive as possible and trying to understand what, you know, what this is, there's no way around it. You know, these are, you know, these are tubes.

And from the very first moment, from the time that I, you know, from the basement in that building in Milwaukee, you know, through Facebook's sort of high-tech brand-new data center, you walk through these buildings, and in the ceilings and along the walls are these steel conduits. We call them conduits, but I know a tube when I see one. (LAUGHTER) GROSS: OK. Well, Andrew Blum, thank you so much for explaining a lot about the Internet. I appreciate it. BLUM: Thanks for having me. GROSS: Andrew Blum is the author of "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. Alaska Sen. Stevens called Internet 'series of tubes,' but was 'Uncle Ted' to constituents | Fox News Alaska Sen.

Stevens called Internet 'series of tubes,' but was 'Uncle Ted' to constituents Published August 10, 2010 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 livefyre Email Print ANCHORAGE, Alaska – To much of the nation, Ted Stevens was the crotchety senator who famously referred to the Internet as "a series of tubes" and fought to build the "Bridge to Nowhere." But to his constituents in Alaska, he was "Uncle Ted," the state's political patriarch who for four decades reliably delivered billions in federal dollars for the highways, pipelines and ports that helped move his sparsely populated state into the future. The wiry octogenarian was built like a birch sapling, but he liked to encourage comparisons with the Incredible Hulk — an analogy that seemed appropriate for his outsized place in Alaska history. "Though small of stature, Ted Stevens seemed larger than life, and anybody who knew him, knew him that way, for he built Alaska, and he stood for Alaska, and he fought for Alaskans," said Gov. Sean Parnell.

"Ted was a lion, who retreated before nothing." Stevens was killed Monday at 86 in a plane crash in a remote part of the state while on his way to a fishing trip. More than 30 years ago, he survived the crash of a private jet at Anchorage International Airport that killed his first wife, Ann. Four others also died in the crash Monday outside Dillingham, about 325 miles southwest of Anchorage. Alaskans loved him, even when the pork-barrel proposals he spearheaded became notorious. "Ted always said, 'To hell with politics. Do what is best for Alaska.' He never apologized for fighting for his state, and Alaska is better for it today." said Sen. Mary Landrieu , a Louisiana Democrat. Stevens began his career in the days before Alaska statehood and did not abandon politics until 2008, when he was convicted on corruption charges shortly before Election Day. But a federal judge threw out the verdict because of misconduct by federal prosecutors. He was appointed in December 1968 and became the longest-serving Republican in Senate history.

(The late Strom Thurmond was in the Senate longer than Stevens, but he spent a decade there as a Democrat before switching to the GOP.) Stevens was a legend in his home state, but his standing was hurt by allegations he accepted a bonanza of home renovations and fancy trimmings from VECO Corp., a powerful oil field services contractor, and then lied about it on congressional disclosure documents. Indicted on federal charges in July 2008, he asked for an unusually speedy trial, hoping to clear his name before Election Day. Instead, he was convicted in late October of all seven counts — and narrowly lost his Senate seat to Democrat Mark Begich in the election. Five months after the election, Attorney General Eric Holder dropped the indictment and declined to proceed with a new trial because of misconduct by federal prosecutors. Stevens never discussed the events publicly. When his party held a majority, Stevens was chairman of several Senate committees, including the powerful Rules and Appropriations panels. For three years, he was majority whip. When the Democrats took back control of the Senate in January 2007, he lost his chairmanships but remained ranking Republican member of the powerful Commerce Committee.

His skill in appropriating military and other federal money for Alaska earned him the reputation among many in Washington as a pork-barrel politician. "In the history of our country, no one man has done more for one state than Ted Stevens. His commitment to the people of Alaska and his nation spanned decades, and he left a lasting mark on both." said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky. He was named Alaskan of the Century in 1999 for having the greatest impact on the state in 100 years — he brought in "Stevens money" that helped keep the remote state solvent. The Anchorage airport is named in his honor. "The only special interest I care about is Alaska," he was fond of saying. A television reporter once quipped that Stevens could shoot Santa's reindeer and Alaskans would applaud. He helped shape landmark legislation on Alaska Native land claims, the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, fisheries management and public lands. The "Bridge to Nowhere" would have connected Ketchikan, Alaska, to an island with just 50 residents at a cost of $200 million to $400 million.

The proposal became a symbol of the waste associated with earmarks, which are items inserted into bills, often at the last minute. Congress scrubbed funding for the bridge in 2005. The following year, Stevens became the butt of jokes and satirical songs for describing the Internet as "a series of tubes" and for speaking of sending "an Internet" instead of an e-mail. Most of the wisecracks portrayed Stevens as an old man who did not understand the technology over which he wielded influence as chairman of the Commerce Committee. Stevens also was known for being easily angered both in private and on the Senate floor. Stevens saw his volatile temperament as a political tool. "I don't lose my temper," he told the Anchorage Daily News in 1994.

"I always know where it is." When critics called for his resignation after a Los Angeles Times story detailed how Stevens became a millionaire investing in companies he helped secure government contracts, he said: "If they think I am going to resign because of a story in a newspaper, they're crazy." Stevens also took flak for aiding groups that hired his son, former state Senate President Ben Stevens, as a consultant and for pushing a lease deal with Boeing after it hired his wife's law firm. In 2007, FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents raided Stevens' four-bedroom house south of Anchorage as part of the probe into his relationship with VECO. Former company chief Bill Allen, who pleaded guilty to bribing Alaska state legislators, testified that he oversaw extensive renovations at Stevens' home and sent VECO employees to work on it. During the trial, Stevens spent three days on the witness stand, vehemently denying any wrongdoing. He said his wife handled the business of the renovation and paid every bill they received. He said he paid $160,000 for the project and believed that covered everything. After entering politics, Stevens needed time to win over Alaska voters.

He was the Republican nominee for the Senate in 1962, but lost in the general election. Six years later, he lost his party's nod to an Anchorage banker. But when incumbent Democrat Bob Bartlett died in December 1968, Stevens was appointed to the vacancy by then-Gov. Walter J. Hickel, a Republican. Stevens won his first full term in 1972, and in subsequent elections was retained by wide margins. He won his sixth full term in 2002 with 78 percent of the vote. Theodore Fulton Stevens was born Nov. 18, 1923, in Indianapolis. His parents divorced when he was young and, in 1938, he moved to southern California to live with relatives. After graduating from high school in 1942, he attended college for a semester before joining the Army Air Corps. He flew cargo planes over "the hump" in the Himalayas during World War II and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, Stevens finished college at UCLA and in 1950 earned a law degree at Harvard.

Fresh out of law school, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work and, in 1953, he drove cross-country to the Territory of Alaska to take a job in Fairbanks. In 1954, Stevens was named U.S. attorney in Fairbanks and two years later returned to Washington to work on the statehood issue for Interior Secretary Fred Seaton, a statehood supporter. Eventually Stevens rose to become the Interior Department's top lawyer. He moved back to Alaska in 1961, opening a law practice in Anchorage. After losing the 1962 Senate race to incumbent Gruening, he won a seat in the Alaska House of Representatives. He was House majority leader when appointed to finish Bartlett's term. The crash that killed Stevens' first wife happened in 1978, shortly after he was elected to his second full term. Two years later, he married Catherine Chandler, a lawyer from a prominent Democratic family in Alaska. When Republicans took control of the Senate in 1981, Stevens became assistant majority leader. In 1984, he ran for majority leader, but lost by three votes to Kansas Sen. Bob Dole.

As the most senior Republican in the Senate, Stevens served as Senate president pro tempore and was third in the line of succession for the presidency until Democrats regained control of Congress in 2007. Advertisement

Question: What was once described by a U.S. senator as "a series of tubes"?
Answer: Internet