There are many types of networks. People create social networks through using social media apps. A local area network, LAN, connects a number of computers together, for example, in an office.
If this is expanded to different locations, then it becomes a wide area network, or WAN. If you want to hide what you are doing from others, then you create a virtual private network or VPN. If you really want to make it secure, then you can encrypt it. The World Wide Web is, in fact, just a global network that we call the internet, which includes connections to the cloud accessed from your browser at home or work.
In places like Cuba, getting access to the internet is not an easy task, leading some enterprising citizens to set up their own SNet, or secret network, aka StreetNet.
The network is a series of cables strung up between houses mixed with disguised Wi-Fi antennas that link an estimated 9,000 computers together forming a large intranet. The government politely ignores it because it is self regulating and does not have or support porn or other illegal activities and lacks any real connectivity to the much larger internet. In Cuba, they are still on 2G for phones with limited coverage. Count yourself lucky that you live in a place like Thailand where, in general, you have excellent access to connectivity.
One of the experts at keeping its citizens from being connected is China which is why the country is often referred to as the Great Firewall. Recently the government has been trying to block unsanctioned VPN access. This has resulted in systems such as Live Chat failing. Officially the outages are the result of "upgrade work" to maintain "cyberspace sovereignty". It will be interesting to see if and how internal providers manage to work around the latest "upgrades".
On the subject of networks, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed down a couple of interesting decisions recently. The first was to ban the blocking of personal wireless hotspots by the likes of hotels and other commercial establishments, even fining the one Marriot hotel $600,000 (19.6 million baht) for the practice. The second was a fine against TracFone for advertising "unlimited" service then throttling customer connectivity after a predetermined, but non-notified, number of bytes downloaded.
This does highlight the general misunderstanding of communication capabilities and capacity, so it may be a good time for a refresher. Any communication system has limits on how much information it can send at what speed, typically summarised as bandwidth. If for simplicity's sake you have a communication pipe with the capability to send 100 megabits per second (mbps) then as long as the source end can provide it at that speed and the receiver can receive it at that speed, then, ignoring the processing or protocol loss, one person can receive 100mbps.
In the real world, however, the sender and receiver typically cannot support these speeds so the receiver will receive up to the maximum they can as provided by the sender. Then other people get onto the same connection and they start sharing the available bandwidth. It is not always divided up equally but to keep it simple, if 100 people are using the same link, then when all are using it that will bring the speed down to 1mbps each. So this means that early in network usage everyone has great speeds but these drop as more people join. I have a friend who was first connected to the NBN in one area and for a time enjoyed great download speeds. In contrast a TV signal will be received at the same bandwidth by everyone because there is no "pipe" as such.
It was amusing to realise that some people think of a browser like Internet Explorer as being the internet. Others think that Google or Yahoo is the internet, which is at least a little closer but like Facebook and others, these are all just a service on the construct that is the internet. Others think that the internet is broken when their broadband connection goes down. Short of a worldwide electromagnetic pulse I can't imagine the internet ever going down as such, and even then there are protected components of the system.
Sony is still suffering from the after effects of the massive hacking experience they faced a while back. Even their accounting applications are not fully back online, delaying the posting of financial results for the last quarter. Facebook went down for a short time last week but not due to a hacking attempt but rather after a software update that caused a fault.
Do as I say, not as I do. WikiLeaks are miffed that Google gave out user information on three of their associates to the FBI a while back. WikiLeaks says that Google should protect its users. It is not uncommon for social media users who advocate freedom of all information to suddenly change their tune when it is their own information on the line.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years’ standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com