Internet Daemons

A complete history and theory of internet daemons brings these little-known—but very consequential—programs into the spotlight We’re used to talking about how tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule the internet, but what about daemons? Ubiquitous programs that have colonized the Net’s infrastructure—as well as the devices we use to access it—daemons are little known. Fenwick McKelvey weaves together history, theory, and policy to give a full account of where daemons come from and how they influence our lives—including their role in hot-button issues like network neutrality. Going back to Victorian times and the popular thought experiment Maxwell’s Demon, McKelvey charts how daemons evolved from concept to reality, eventually blossoming into the pandaemonium of code-based creatures that today orchestrates our internet. Digging into real-life examples like sluggish connection speeds, Comcast’s efforts to control peer-to-peer networking, and Pirate Bay’s attempts to elude daemonic control (and skirt copyright), McKelvey shows how daemons have been central to the internet, greatly influencing everyday users. Internet Daemons asks important questions about how much control is being handed over to these automated, autonomous programs, and the consequences for transparency and oversight.

We're used to talking about how tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule the internet, but what about daemons? Ubiquitous programs that have colonized the Net's infrastructure-as well as the devices we use to access it-daemons are little known. Fenwick McKelvey weaves together history, theory, and policy to give a full account of where daemons come from and how they influence our lives-including their role in hot-button issues like network neutrality.

This book introduces the concepts and features of Linux and explains how to install and configure the system. It describes the features and services of the Internet which have been instrumental in the rapid development and wide distribution of Linux and focuses on its graphical interface, network capability, and its extended tools. This updated second edition also gives a helpful overview of the wide range of shareware applications available for this powerful system. Highlights include: - new chapter on Emacs configuration and use - new reference section which describes the most common Linux commands - completely updated and expanded chapter on networking/tcpip - explanation of Linux as a server for MS-Windows.

UNIX achieved its widespread propagation, its penetration of the UNIX history university domain, and its reach into research and industry due to its early dissemination by AT&T to all interested parties at almost no cost and as source code. UNIX's present functionality emanated not just from AT&T developers but also from external developers who used the product and contributed their own further developments, which they then put at AT&T's disposal. (Consider the contributions of the University of California at Berkeley, for example.) With the rising commercialization of UNIX by AT&T (now by Novell) since 1983, such creative and cooperative further development became increasingly restricted, and UNIX source code today has become unaffordably expensive and scarcely accessible. Linux provides interested computer scientists and us"ers with a system that revives the old UNIX tradition: Linux is available for free, and everyone is heartily invited (but not obliged) to free & participatory contribute to its further development. Since Linux runs on PC systems, it has begun to penetrate the workrooms of many computer science students and computer freaks.

The definitive book on UNIX security, this volume covers every aspect of computer security on UNIX machines and the Internet.

Although the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) are popular as tools for convenient exchange of information, it is not easy to utilise the Internet for time-critical applications such as on-line remote diagnosis in telemedicine. It is a wish of the United Nations to bring e-health to every corner of the world via the Internet. This is easier said than done because the sheer size of the Internet implies unpredictable faults of all kinds. These faults are physically translated into communication and computation delays. Since these faults and delays have many contributing factors that can change suddenly, it is impractical to monitor them all for the sake of fault tolerance. For this reason the new concept of interpreting the channel dynamics by gauging its end-to-end behaviour has emerged. The aim is to measure the changes of the average service roundtrip time (RTT) over time and interpret the possible signs of faults from these changes. If the length of the average service RTT is suddenly increased in an exponential manner, network congestion and widespread retransmission are indicated. Then, the Internet and/or the applications running on it should invoke fault tolerance measures to prevent system breakdown and partial failures. This concept of gauging the channel dynamics to prevent system failure is generally known as Internet End-to-End Performance Measurement (IEPM). The purpose of the book is to shed light on some of the novel practical fault tolerance techniques that can help shorten the end-to-end service roundtrip (RTT) time of a logical Internet channel. As a result the Internet can be harnessed for serious time-critical applications. Several practical cases are presented to demonstrate how the effective harnessing can be achieved.