# Jan 17 Reading Response

Every minute Google receives 3.8 million searches. Most people carry out these searches without a second thought about how they receive the results they are after. It is almost as if it just happens on its own, like magic, however, just a quick read of an article published by Mozilla will tell you it is anything but. There are, in fact, many things that have to happen in order for a user to receive the information that they require in a matter of seconds.

Mozilla describes how the web works in a way that anyone could understand. Through the use of a metaphor, Mozilla compares the way the web works to that of leaving your house, crossing the street and purchasing an item from a store. He explains that the user's personal device acts as the house and the store as the server, containing component files (like products). The internet connection is the street in between and the TCP/IP is the bike used to cross this street. The DNS acts as the address to the store that needs to be found and the HTTP is the language used between the client and the server to receive the product.

In a blog post, Hartley Brody goes into even more detail about what HTTPS is. He explains that it can be used to protect users from people who are potentially watching their connection. The practice of securing communications from these users is called crypotography. Cryptography requires a public key and a private key. The public key is available to both parties trying to access the connection and the private key is something that only one of the individuals knows. Through a math equation, formed by Diffie-Hellman, users are able to use these two keys to create a secure connection and communicate privately. To someone on the outside, these messages passing through the routes and stops will not make sense.

To the average person, trying to understand how the web works can seem like a complicated and impossible task. However, just through reading these two texts, one is already on the way to understanding how the web works at a basic level. Both of these readings explain their topics in a simple way that is easy for the average person to understand.

# Jan 24 Reading Response
## This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook - Buzzfeed News

Nothing quite showcases the potential impact fake news could have on people quite like the 2016 US presidential election. The spread of fake news about the campaigners in the nine months leading up to the election increased hugely and it begs the question of how is fake news allowed to be spread?

In this article, Craig Silverman, of Buzzfeed News, analyzes how fake news stories outperformed real news stories during the lead up to the 2016 US presidential election. This article primarily looks at Facebook and the top election stories from 19 major news outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. They found that in the last three months leading up to the election fake news stories went from generating three million engagements to 8.7 million and, in turn, real news went from 12 million engagements to 7.3 million. They also found that out of the top 20 best performing fake news articles, 17 of them were about Hillary Clinton.

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, was dismissive of the idea that these fake news stories had anything to do with the results of the election. However, as Brendan Nyhan says in the article it ‘is clear that bogus stories have an incredible reach on the network’. Whether that had an influence on the election results or not, it definitely would have had some sort of impact on the opinion of the user reading the article. I think it is the responsibility of the platform to manage the spread of fake news to its users. However, as platforms work towards this I also think that partial responsibility lies with the user, to monitor whether the information they are reading is valid or not.

# Feb 7 Reading Response
## Social Has A Shape: Why Networks Matter

This chapter covered a lot of different ideas, so I am just going to focus on a few of them.

The idea that all individuals are six people away from any person in the world, was popularised by John Guare in his 1990 Broadway play, Six Degrees of Separation. This means any individual is six people away from the President of the United States, six people away from any A-List celebrity or a barista on the other side of the planet. To test this theory, Milgram and Travers ran an experiment and they found that it took, on average, 5.5 people to get to that final person. From this, Milgram came up with the idea of small-world networks.

A small-world network is made up of 'a relatively small number of random distant links in a highly clustered network' (Rheingold, 2012, pg. 193). The people within these networks are referred to as nodes. Most nodes will only have a small number of connections (low-degree nodes), however, there are also a small number of nodes that will have a large number of connections, these are called supernodes. Supernodes can be compared to websites such as Google, who get a lot of visitors and also have a lot of links from the outside world. There are far more low-degree nodes than supernodes and this is due to the power law curve.

The power law curve is also known as the 80/20 rule. For small-world networks, this refers to how the number of low-degree nodes greatly outweighs the number of supernodes. These low-degree nodes end up in the long tail of the distribution. According to Anderson, even though these low-degree nodes don't have a lot of connections they do still hold value. He uses the example of Netflix when it was used to rent out films. They would provide a catalog of different films, not just the popular ones. Thus, drawing the attention of different niche groups. This is valuable because it builds a relationship with the consumer. And these low-degree consumers can share with other low-degree consumers who could eventually, potentially, spread the word to supernodes.

These small worlds and nodes can all be related to social media. People build these connections online just like they have in real life and they are able to reach people all around the world. Some Facebook pages, for example, have a lot of connections (supernodes) and some only have a niche following (low-degree nodes).

# Feb 11 Reading Response
## The Dark Net

Imagine a place where you could be anyone, find anything you wanted and no one would ever know. The dark net is a place where everyone and everything is anonymous. The dark net is used for a variety of different purposes which do sometimes include criminal activities such as the selling and buying of illegal drugs and weapons. However, the dark net was first invented for the purpose of privacy. Paul Syverson and his colleagues wanted 'a way to make online communications as secure as possible' (Kushner, 2015) for everyone. The way they were able to do this was through the Tor browser.

The Tor browser hides your location and your activity. It also hides the location of the server a website is hosted on. It does this by 'bouncing connections from your computer to destinations through a series of intermediate computers or relays' (Wright, 2015). These relays are mostly run through the Tor browser on around 6,000 computers around the world. The more relays the better, because there are more places your connection can bounce through to try and keep hidden. According to Wright (2015), on average your connection will go through three relays and each of these has a specific purpose.

The three relays are the entry relay, the middle relay and the exit relay. The entry relay is how the client gets into the Tor browser. These relays are ones that have been around for a while and have proven that they are reliable. The middle relay is what transports traffic between the entry and exit relay, the purpose of this is to stop them from finding each other. The exit relay is at the edge of the Tor network, its purpose is to get the client to where they want to be. Throughout these three stops the original data, that comes from the client, is encrypted multiple times in a way that can only be decrypted by each of the relays working together. The purpose of this is to make sure the data is safe.

It seems that the general consensus about the dark net is that the criminal activity that occurs on it is only a very small portion of the activity that goes on. I believe it was a platform that was created with good intentions and that it is still beneficial for people who want to keep their information private, whether that's the average citizen or government agencies. It is unfortunate that there is that minority who do want to use it with ill intentions, but isn't that expected?

# Feb 27 Reading Response
## How ads follow you around the internet

Cookies, according to Vox, are 'a string of letters and numbers that form a unique ID to help the site remember' you. Cookies were first invented by Lou Montulli in 1994. At this time, the way the web worked was that every time you went to a new part of a website, it was like you were a completely new user. This would be like if you were on Facebook and every time you clicked on a new section of Facebook you would have to log in again. His idea was to have a way for the web to remember your activity and this is where first-party cookies came from.

As you click through a website the site sees your unique ID and is able to retain information, like location, time spent on the page and email address. This means that visiting a webpage is a more enjoyable experience for the user. First party cookies are used by a brand and a platform/publisher. The brands have products to sell and they do this by displaying online ads to different consumers. The platforms/publishers are the webpages with the consumers to show the ads to, for example, Instagram. The idea of first-party cookies was that only the website you were on could place and retrieve cookies, therefore, your online habits were only known to this specific page. However, with the invention of cookies, it made way for what we call third party cookies.

A third-party cookie is a way for the web to track us across multiple sites. This is how different brands collaborate and share information about users habits. It is beneficial for companies to collaborate because they gather more information about the consumer. This collaboration means your behaviour can be tracked and this is why you will often see an ad on Instagram for a webpage you visited a few days ago.

On many web browsers, the option to block third party cookies is available. However, because there is a lot of money at stake for these brands to advertise their products, they have found a way around it. For example, Facebook has something called Facebook Pixel. Facebook will send a piece of code that looks like a first-party cookie to a site and in return, they send the data back to Facebook. Tracking the behaviour of users online for advertising purposes has become a high stakes game. It is no wonder these big companies with large audiences have figured out how to get around users blocking third-party cookies.